D365 HR has had a tough time these past few years; going from being part of F&O, becoming a standalone app, a rebranding, and then re-integrating to the core F&O platform.

This has detracted somewhat from a product with tremendous potential, particularly when employed alongside its sister D365 products and the wider Microsoft ecosystem.

An abstract image representing the HR lifecycle of a business
An abstract image representing the HR lifecycle of a business

What’s in the box?

The core functionality is substantial and certainly covers the basics of most HR business functions. This includes:

  • Organisation administration and hierarchies
  • Talent requisition management
  • Onboarding checklists
  • Learning and development management
  • Performance management
  • Compensation and benefits
  • Employee record management (including movers and leavers)
  • Leave and absence
  • Employee relationship management (aka Case management)
  • Time and attendance
  • Position forecasting (arguably a Finance feature, but mentioned for good measure)
  • Employee and manager self-service dashboards
  • HR reports & analytics

But what’s missing?

Allow me to digress, just for a moment, but for good reason. It’s now quite evident, to even the most casual observer, that Microsoft is moving D365 F&O more in the direction of model-driven apps, built around a core database (Dataverse), rather than extending the primary platform every which way. This is starkly apparent on the Default dashboard, which as of version 10.0.38, includes two apps, namely (i) Business performance analytics and (ii) Invoice capture:

A screenshot of the default dashboard in D365 F&O, showing the two new apps that extend specific areas of functionality

And so back to the gaps in the core D365 HR platform – permit me to me address each one inline below:

  • Applicant sourcing, tracking, and screening
    • The first great news here is that a new applicant tracking system (ATS) model-driven app (see why I had to digress?!), first teased publicly in Microsoft’s Business Applications Summit back in October 2023, is now in the official Release Planner, meaning we can talk about it freely!
    • Features will include the ability to publish job postings, create interview templates, and read LinkedIn profile information (do I sense a new, native integration with LinkedIn Recruiter?!).
  • Employee experience
    • Microsoft have been pretty clear that Teams is where we’re expected to live and breathe whilst we’re at work. Outlook still has its place, for now at least, but the official unveiling of Microsoft Viva in 2021 heralded new features such as Viva Topics (an AI-driven, employee knowledge base) and Viva Insights (an organisational wellbeing tool1), embedded in the heart of Teams.
A desktop screenshot and an overlaid mobile screenshot of Viva Topics in Microsoft Teams, showing the inline glossary functionality that helps users to access unique sector or organisational terms at the point of need
  • Learning content delivery
    • There are some great ISVs in this space – we’ll no doubt dedicate future posts to this subject – dedicated to area of learning content delivery, i.e. being a purpose-built learning management system (LMS) that serves (and tracks) SCORM and xAPI content to individual learners.
    • This onlooker would speculate that Microsoft aren’t (currently) interested in entering the LMS market, but they have proudly launched Viva Learning, which operates as a learning aggregation tool, bringing together content from Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning, and dedicated LMS tools, into a single view in Teams – again, part of the concept of employee experience, with the ability to share and recommend courses with team members and colleagues.
  • Shift management
    • There’s two out of the box solutions here, depending on the complexity of an organisation’s requirements. First up is Shifts, a basic, but functional tool that resides happily inside Teams for whoever needs it to schedule their frontline workers, provision for shift swapping, and see everything graphically in one place.
    • The more advanced answer to this is D365 Field Service, with its powerful Resource Scheduling Optimisation feature, that automates team schedules, optimising resources and travel time. D365 Field Service also offers additional timesheet functionality.
  • Payroll
    • The only remaining high-level gap that stands out is payroll. Whilst functionality is present, it is essentially only of use to entities in the USA. There is, however, a native Payroll Integration API, which enables end-to-end integration between D365 HR and external payroll systems.
    • At the risk of upsetting any payroll managers reading this, the truth is that whilst payroll is business critical, it is application used by a limited number of people in an organisation. As long as it does the job accurately and reliably, it doesn’t require too much sweating. And this assumes you aren’t joining the growing trend of payroll outsourcing.

Anything else?

So, we’ve covered core functionality, new model-driven apps, Dataverse, Microsoft Viva providing the employee experience in Teams, learning content, and shift management. What else is there in the Microsoft HR toolkit?

First up, a quick point to settle the seasoned consultants that laughed at me when I cited Case management as core functionality. To be clear, we both know it is, but we also both know it’s not the best. Enter, stage right, D365 Customer Service. Integrating, via Dataverse, with the gold standard in case management, is the ideal solution for an organisation with exacting requirements in this regard.

Next up is Entra ID (still struggling not to write Azure Active Directory!). Until now, we’ve had to build some custom Power Automate flows to remove the manual steps of user provisioning from D365 HR. Now, on the roadmap, we know that a native Entra ID integration is coming, which will massively reduce the risk of errors and duplication of effort.

In the spirit of employee experience in Teams, there’s new D365 HR app functionality coming very soon, specifically in the realm of leave and absence. Again, the aim being to bring day-to-day tasks to the Teams interface as your workplace hub.

Copilot. You can’t mention Microsoft at the moment without talking about Copilot, whether you’re talking Bing, Office, Azure, or Dynamics, your “everyday AI companion” is increasingly there to help make your job easier – and it’s coming to D365 HR this year, starting with a focus on aiding the recruitment process.

And I can’t finish without quickly reeling off a few more modules from the Microsoft Viva toolset:

  • Viva Connections – bringing SharePoint landing pages into Teams,
  • Viva Goals – for goal setting and tracking,
  • Viva Engage – for employee networking (used to be Yammer),
  • Viva Amplify – for corporate communications,
  • Viva Pulse – for employee satisfaction and sentiment analysis, and
  • Viva Glint – for employee surveys, feedback, and action planning.

Conclusion

D365 HR sometimes gets a bad rap, but it needs to be viewed in the context of the wider Microsoft offering. And now that all D365 HR users are safely back in the F&O fold, following their December 2023 migration deadline, we can all look forward to the exciting new developments coming down the pipe.

Onward to better tools, streamlined processes, and fewer paper cuts!

A screenshot of the first tab of the employee self-service workspace in D365 F&O, showing sample data
  1. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that Viva Insights itself wasn’t new, per se. Rather, it was a Teams integration of Workplace Analytics, which had been GA since July 2017. ↩︎

Published by Mike Pearsall

Mike is a founding editor of AX7 - The D365 F&O Blog. He is a business and solution architect with experience of successfully implementing D365 F&O on both client and partner side, as well as strong knowledge of the wider D365 suite and Power Platform.

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