By: Linda Rosencrance
The Microsoft Dynamics 365 team has announced that Relationship Insights for Dynamics 365 is now in preview.
Relationship Insights takes advantage of the data integration and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities built into Microsoft Azure to combine and analyze a company’s Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Outlook data, the team stated in a blog post.
It uses the insights derived from this analysis to offer features that help guide a user’s daily work, find critical opportunities, manage email communications, identify actionable email messages and propose the best way to continue work.
Because the features of Relationship Insights are context sensitive, the information they present and the suggestions they make are always most relevant to whatever you’re doing in real time, the team stated. The Relationship Insights suite currently includes the following features: the relationship assistant, email engagement and auto capture.
Microsoft announced Relationship Insights less than a month ago at the Dynamic Communities UG Summit 2016. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft executive vice president, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise, emphasized that Dynamics 365 – and all Dynamics product to come – will use AI in Cortana to provide the next level of insight.
Rich features, but not yet full-featured
Relationship Insights is currently in preview, meaning that it is considered stable but is still being developed. Microsoft makes preview features available to give customers early access to its products as well as an opportunity to provide feedback, according to the team.
“Preview features aren’t meant for production use and may have limited or restricted functionality,” the team stated. “The Relationship Insights preview is currently available only for North American sites that use US English (en-us).”
The Dynamics 365 online help section provides the necessary information to enable, set up and use the Relationship Insights preview.
The team offered some handy links:
- For a detailed overview of the various Relationship Insights features and their capabilities, see the Relationship Insights overview.
- For prerequisites and instructions on how to enable and configure the preview, see Configure Relationship Insights features.
- For details about the relationship assistant (pictured below), which helps salespeople and support staff organize their daily work and nurture vital business relationships, see the Relationship assistant topic. The relationship assistant uses data analytics and artificial intelligence to generate a collection of interactive action cards that are presented throughout the application to deliver important information, advice and action buttons related to your current ongoing activities, scheduled activities and whatever you’re doing in real time.
- See the Action cards reference for details about the different types of action cards that can be generated by the relationship assistant.
- For details about email engagement, which helps salespeople and support staff get more out of their email communications, see the Email engagement topic. These features include delivery scheduling, follow-up alerts and the ability to see when contacts open your messages and attachments. Email engagement features are available in both in the Dynamics 365 web interface and in the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.
- For details about auto capture, which finds email messages from a user’s Outlook mailbox that could be relevant to the record the user is currently viewing in Dynamics 365, see the Auto capture topic. Messages found by auto capture remain private to the user, but the user can choose to track any found message with a single click without having to open Outlook. Auto capture is only available in the web interface for Dynamics 365, although the user can also track messages manually using existing controls in Outlook.
Most Relationship Insights features require Dynamics 365 Online, and the Outlook integration features require Microsoft Outlook Online, according to the Dynamics 365 team. The only Relationship Insights feature available to on-premises installations is the relationship assistant, which provides just a subset of action