Get ready! Top Dynamics 365 Trends Coming your Way in 2021

Exciting and futuristic, Blockchain has been a buzzword for some years now. Most people associate it with cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin. As Blockchain use evolves into 2021, experts predict that it will become less about cryptocurrency and more about using it for a totally different purpose: prove a document’s authenticity.

When you use Blockchain technology distributed and security features to prove a document is untampered, that means you have trustworthy data to base your strategic business decisions on. That makes all the difference. 

Stefano Tempesta, two times MVP, Regional Director of Microsoft and advisor to Australia's National Blockchain Roadmap, believes that “With blockchain, you can imagine a world in which every agreement, every process, every task, and every payment would have a digital record and signature that could be identified, validated, stored, and shared. Intermediaries like lawyers, brokers, and institutions like notaries might no longer be necessary. Individuals, organizations, and machines would freely transact and interact with one another with little friction.”. In a recent article on the future of Blockchain, he discusses possible uses of a solution for SharePoint documents that is already out on the market and that can be easily integrated with Dynamics 365. We will certainly hear more about that in 2021.

Microsoft Teams has become ubiquitous, thanks in large part to need of remote work and remote events. Not even Microsoft would have guessed it would reach 115 million daily active users of Teams like it did back in October 2020.

This makes the integration with Microsoft Teams a plus for other products and also a way to help drive other products’ user adoption. All Microsoft 365 business fully links all Office apps with Teams and also SharePoint. The level of integration for Dynamics 365 is not yet the same, but the trend is for Dynamics 365 is more and more integrated with Teams. Currently, you have the Dynamics 365 app available for Teams. Besides the normal use of the app within Teams, you can “chat” to get the info that you need from Teams, and you can also access customer engagement app records by adding a Dynamics 365 tab into a Microsoft Teams channel. This way, you can collaborate with your team on one or multiple records (Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and many others).

If you have bespoke applications that are important in your daily routine, you can take this trend one step further and consider surfacing them in Teams. This new and evolved means of getting new users – and even perhaps existing users – to use the applications more.

Dynamics 365 offers businesses or organizations across industries the ability to know their customers as well as their own organizations. The idea is always to enable predictive insights and smarter decisions.

Next on our big rundown of Dynamics trends for 2021 is the trend to enable this in manufacturing and industrial settings with connection to shop floor information. By leveraging data from sensors and machines and getting it where it makes sense for the organization, in 2021, we will be evolving from reactive decisions to proactive analytics that can support the decision process.

Arguably the most industry-specific trend on the list, the fact is that for this industry, this trend is game-changer. By making these analytics and insights accessible throughout an organization through Dynamics, great things will happen.

There are many interesting use cases for combining IIoT with business software like Dynamics. You can go for remote monitoring and stay informed in real-time and view the information with the right detail level. You can go for predictive maintenance and avoid machine breakdowns before they occur by monitoring the condition and your machine’s performance during regular operation and spotting early signs of the problem. You can improve in terms of production planning because you have all the relevant information right where you need it, and you can finally make production planning more information-based and much more straightforward.

As you can see, IIoT meeting Dynamics covers a range of possibilities and concepts, giving it a variety of use cases. As such, it’s one of the 2021 trends you can’t afford to ignore.

The next trend in our rundown is security related. There is an increasing need to share data while maintaining privacy and security. It is not going to stop in 2021.

In our hyper-connected digital age, the trend for 2021 is to guarantee security when software integration is involved. Truth be told, it is easy to assume that, if you are already using two separate pieces of software, there is no danger in putting them together. The problem is, that assumption is wrong.

Let’s say you use Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft SharePoint. One day you discover that Microsoft provides an integration between the two. You can have the documents you previously had piled up in Dynamics neatly transferred to SharePoint but still easily accessible from Dynamics. It sounds like a great idea!

You could very easily overlook the fact that the privileges for the documents that you had carefully set up in Dynamics are not going to be transferred to SharePoint. Everyone can see everything from the SharePoint side! Unknowingly, you would have created a privacy and security threat.

Fortunately, the fact that there are more integrations than ever before also means the solutions for these integration security problems are showing up – and this trend will be stronger throughout 2021.

For example, for the Dynamics and SharePoint integration problem above you now have, not only a solution, but also an add-on to that solution that ensures that the documents on SharePoint are neatly organized.

The last in our essential rundown of Dynamics trends for 2021 is storage. Dynamics 365 admins often looked for alternative storage for documents and attachments to save on costs and increase performance. Alternative storage locations were frequently SharePoint or Azure Storage.

In 2021, we see security becoming one of the primary motivators for using alternative storage. Because of this trend, we are already seeing new providers emerging in a market that felt consolidated - up to now.  For example, in the German-speaking countries, Dracoon is getting strong and will release the possibility of integrating with Dynamics 365 in Q1 2021.

By embracing these powerful trends in 2021 and using them to your advantage, you will accelerate the growth of your business in a landscape that is ever-changing.

You can hit the ground running as a new year dawns!

Talk with our experts if you want help in putting these trends to practice in your organization. They will be more than happy to answer any questions you might have or show you on a quick call how all this can work.