Microsoft integrates Dynamics 365 and Teams, unveils security services

Microsoft today announced updates to its Microsoft 365 portfolio, which covers Microsoft Viva, Dynamics 365, Teams, and more. Starting this week, Dynamics 365 and Teams are more tightly integrated, and partner functionality with Viva debuts alongside security enhancements and app monetization changes.

Now Dynamics 365 users can invite anyone in an organization to collaborate on customer records in a chat or Teams channel feed. Additionally, they can add a Teams meeting to appointments and capture notes, or create a Teams meeting when adding an appointment. Users can also capture notes during a Teams call, which are saved in the timeline of a Dynamics 365 record, preventing those who don’t have the correct permissions from accessing the data.

The new notification options in Teams are designed to keep stakeholders informed of updates. Users can select specific discussions and channels through which notifications are sent, as well as set the frequency of notifications and decide whether adaptive cards accompany notifications. In a related development, new apps are coming to Microsoft Teams in partnership with independent software vendors (ISVs) like Atlassian, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday. Microsoft says independent software vendors will soon be able to sell their apps directly within Teams and offer private pricing, taking advantage of Microsoft’s newly reduced market fees.

Above: Dynamics 365 workflow and notifications integration with Teams.

Image Credit: Microsoft

Teams enhancements follow developer-focused updates in May 2021 designed to help developers create more unique scenarios, including the integration of shared scenes, new meeting event APIs, Together mode, and multimedia APIs with resource-specific content. The shared steps integration gives developers access to key meeting steps through configuration in their app manifest. The new Meeting Events APIs, on the other hand, enable the automation of Teams meeting workflows through events, such as the start and end of the meeting.

Above: Viewing and editing Dynamics 365 records in a Teams workflow.

Image Credit: Microsoft

“With 145 million daily active users – and growing – Teams is where people start their day and stay in the workflow,” Microsoft CVPs Jared Spataro and Alysa Taylor wrote in a blog post. . “Hybrid working requires a new class of apps that appear richly in all people’s workplaces – in chat, channels and meetings. These apps are based on collaboration, which is why we call them collaborative apps. “

Viva, Orland and security

On the Viva side, Microsoft today unveiled 21 new partner integrations, including Workday, Qualtrics, and ServiceNow, all of which will be available this fall. The company also introduced new tools to help developers extend their applications in Viva, including the Viva Connections APIs and an analytics dashboard called Connections. Coming soon to the Viva Learning APIs, which can be used to pull content from training providers, along with due dates and assigned content from training management systems in Teams, Office.com , SharePoint, and Microsoft Search in Bing.

Above: The new Viva Learning APIs.

Image Credit: Microsoft

Beyond Viva, Microsoft announced that Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is entering public preview. The product provides partners with a central location and standard security configuration templates to manage and secure customer data, users and devices against threats, abnormal connections, and device compliance alerts. The Project Orland add-on service is launched as a private preview in Partner Center, which aims to help partners grow their cloud business by providing recommendations such as customers with a trial conversion opportunity, customers who can need follow-up and customers ready for new workloads to deploy. from their existing client install base.

In related news, for Azure Active Directory (AD) B2C customers, Microsoft is extending the scope of protection to include fraudulent activity by integrating Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection with Azure AD B2C. A paid governance add-on to Microsoft Cloud App Security launches in public preview, allowing partners to monitor, protect, and govern Microsoft 365 apps and quickly identify, alert, and prevent risky behavior.

According to Microsoft, the new Cloud App Security add-in provides visibility into which applications access Microsoft 365 data. It enables IT teams to define and enforce appropriate application behavior with data, users, and other applications in accordance with Microsoft. to the security and compliance position of an organization for data access. And it detects abnormal behavior of applications with machine learning models, solving problems with automated and manual remedial actions.

Finally, the capacity for user groups in Insider Risk Management has grown to include fine-grained role-based access control, now in public preview, with permissions to priority user groups to further limit user access. alerts and cases to specific people rather than the whole group. New universal regulatory models for the non-Microsoft cloud in Compliance Manager are also available, making it easier for partners to manage the compliance position of customers across different clouds, machines, and applications.