By: Linda Rosencrance
A new feature of the just-released Microsoft Social Engagement Update 1.1 is the Social Selling Assistant, which the company says enables salespeople to sell more by taking advantage of social media.
This application provides sales reps with personalized and smart recommendations to share on their social networks, enabling them to “increase their social presence, gain trust from followers” and generate more leads, according to a post on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Team blog.
Users can access Social Selling Assistant from within Microsoft Social Engagement and install it from Microsoft AppSource into their Dynamics 365 for Sales application.
The app offers a new dashboard that salespeople can access from the Dynamics 365 web client, as well as from Dynamics 365 for tablets. Dynamics 365 for phones is currently not supported (see graphic).
This release allows users to add their personal LinkedIn accounts as social profiles as well as share any public posts in Microsoft Social Engagement to their professional networks on LinkedIn.
Users’ LinkedIn social profiles will be available for the post action “Post Link.”
“When you share to LinkedIn, you can choose between two visibility options: show the post to everyone on LinkedIn or to your network only,” according to the blog post. This post action is available across all Microsoft Social Engagement services, including the newly released Social Selling Assistant.
To start sharing, users go to Settings > Social Profiles, then click the Add Profile button, select LinkedIn Profile, and follow the steps.
Microsoft Social Engagement also introduces the user interface in the Japanese and Chinese (traditional) languages. Users can change the language of the user interface under Settings > Personal Settings > Your Preferences. The localization of the user interface also includes the respective calendars for Japanese and Chinese (traditional) languages.
Additionally, Update 1.1 addressed the following issues and improvements:
- Fixed an issue where RSS feeds based on a keyword search topic only acquired data when at least one full-feed custom source search topic was set up.
- Fixed an issue where Microsoft was unable to process a high number of RSS feeds added to Microsoft Social Engagement.
- Fixed an issue with the description of the Facebook User account type.
- Fixed an issue to improve readability of posts with multiple sentences and paragraphs.
- Fixed an issue where content from blogs was displayed in JSON format.
- Fixed an issue with truncated tool tips for domains and custom tag names in the Allowed Domains and Custom Tags settings pages. The full label is now shown in the corresponding tool tips.
- Fixed several issues to reduce execution errors and the resulting number of email notifications for Automation Rules.
- Data exported to Excel from the app will now use Excel’s date format; thus, users will see dates according to the localization settings of their operating system.
- Data exported from the widget “sources history” now labels all sources as expected.