Dynamics 365: Business card scanner coming in October 2019

With Microsoft Dynamics 365, the US company offers a powerful CRM system that can be expanded to ERP level with various modules. The "Sales" module is one of the most common modules in which the entire lead and sales process can be mapped. Like the other modules, it is updated every six months by Microsoft updated with the latest functions and security updates. In doing so, the trend towards more and more Integrate functions with AI components into the systemto intelligently automate processes and provide support for important business decisions.

With the October 2019 updatewhich will be generally available from October 01, 2019, Microsoft is continuing the trend: the strong customer demand for a Business card scanner as a native component to integrate them:

With the new integration Business cards scanned on mobile devices (Dynamics 365 app) or on the Internet (regular Dynamics 365) become. Through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - a process that has been working well for a long time - the text in the image is recognized. The information found is then assigned to the fields of a contact in Dynamics 365 using an AI model that has already been trained. According to the Announcement users will also be able to customize the filling of the fields manually.

The new component solves the problem that contact information - for example on leads - could previously be lost if business cards were lost. Thanks to the native integration, a new contact can be quickly enriched with all the important information. Scanning business cards is therefore particularly useful at conferences, meetings or outside the office.

This announcement is particularly interesting after Microsoft's AI Builder for the Microsoft Power Platform has announced. This also includes a component for scanning business cards. The same AI model is presumably used here. So if you want to carry out further actions with the scanning of business cards and save the information in other applications, there are also Microsoft PowerApps (low-code platform) with the integration of Microsoft Flow (process automation) available.