The next april 2019 release is a major update (major updates will be done in October and April every year) and it’s coming with many interesting new capabilities across the different Dynamics 365 apps: Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, Portals, Project Service, Field Service, Power Platform(PowerBI, Power Apps, Flow), etc… So Microsoft keeps investing in AI capabilities and this next wave seems to bring some amazing features.

Let’s focus on Sales and Customer Service and Portals in this post where we have selected what we see as the top new features in each app.

Sales:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration is becoming easier and the two existing packages will be merged into one. Alerts when key contacts change companies will be available.
• Microsoft Teams integration including Relationship Assistant: This will make sales teams work together easier and automatically sync documents. Dynamics 365 records can be accessed in Teams within the new Dynamics 365 tab.
• Customer insights: More data providers in addition to InsideView and Versium to help salespeople get customer insights contextually during the sales process

Customer Service:

• SMS: This is a new channel introduced in Customer Service app. SMS Conversations with customers through SMS will be possible. Automated responses can also be set using this channel. An SMS subscription with Telesign is however needed.
• Live Chat Channel: this is nowadays a must have channel in a customer service app, luckily Microsoft is going to launch this feature in the this next wave. Rule-based scripts can be set to anticipate customers demands.
• Customers can bring their bots: The Omni-channel engagement hub allows customers to bring their own bot built on Microsoft Bot FrameWork and integrate it with Customer Service app.

Portals:

• Display External Data: Secured Client-side calls to external API will be possible within the portal. An endpoint is provided to give secure access tokens containing user identity information.
• Enhancements to portal diagnostics tool: Administrators are going to appreciate this new feature which will help identify incorrectly configured markers, performance impacting slow running queries.
• Maintenance mode for portals: Portal visitors will ne longer get that service unavailabaility error message when portal is under maintenanace and administrators can now activate maintenance mode and display a custom message in the portal to inform visitors that the website is under maintenance.

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/april19/