Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 release wave 2

Be Prepared for Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2 – Are you Ready? 

The 2022 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 brings new innovations that provide you with significant capabilities to transform your business. The release contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Business Central and much more…  Below is a summary of some of the key areas:

Marketing – Dynamics 365 Marketing brings real-time customer journey orchestration to enable B2B brands to hyper-personalize experiences across the entire buying journey and confidently grow their marketing and customer experience programs to target up to 100M customers with up to 300M messages or interactions per month. Intuitive lead capture forms, leads nurturing hands-off automation, and a new analytics dashboard enable alignment between sales and marketing teams like never before. Organizations can reach new levels of marketing maturity with AI-powered next best content selection and increased support for business units.

Sales – Dynamics 365 Sales continues to optimize the seller experience using data and AI to help sellers prioritize their work, blending business and productivity tools to meet sellers where they are and driving in-the-moment collaboration experiences so that every seller can engage with their colleagues and customers efficiently, reclaiming their time and being more productive.

Service – Dynamics 365 Customer Service is focused on delivering the capabilities that help run contact centers optimally by providing enhancements in unified routing with features such as percentage-based routing, preferred agent routing, and longest idle routing. Customer support swarming in Microsoft Teams will help agents resolve complex cases through collaboration. Organizations can empower their customers with options to leave voicemail, call back, and dial agents directly in the voice channel. The agent experience is modernized with an enhanced conversation timeline, horizontal multisession navigation, and AI-powered conversation summary. Supervisors can view Power Virtual Agents analytics within their Omnichannel analytics dashboards.

Dynamics 365 Field Service brings new capabilities that enable organizations to better orchestrate service operations for workers. Organizations can now build and maintain location and assets for large facilities, keep their costs at bay by configuring “not to exceed” limits, and group similar incident types under “trade” for ease of management. We’re also bringing optimization improvements on booking lock constraints and introducing a myriad of user experience improvements to the mobile app to continue empowering frontline workers.

SMB – Dynamics 365 Business Central continues to improve the reporting capabilities for customers, including new report datasets for Excel and improvements to the Power BI reports that now will support dimensions. The Power Apps and Power Automate integration also continues to offer new capabilities for low-code development. The application will get several improvements like helping users do reverse entries in the payment reconciliation journal and several improvements to the supply chain functionality. We are taking steps forward in scaling productivity of our partners via more efficient and performant tooling for development and administration.

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business application solution designed and optimized for small and midsized organizations. In 2022 release wave 2, we help users get onboarded, whether they are new or existing customers of ours, by giving them easy access to the right apps to help them get started. We will improve tooltips to help new and existing users. We continue our geographic expansion, and we will improve performance and usability by making it easier to navigate menus. To help more users be more productive, we will enhance our automation story with Power Automate.

Additional updates in 2022 release wave 2 include:

• Seamless service: No matter the industry type of a small or midsized business (SMB), business users expect a dependable service and platform that they can run their business on.
• Administration: Business Central delivers a set of features for better and improved communication about the health of each environment.
• Application: We will continue to improve the application to support integration with Shopify. The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancements so that users can run their business processes more efficiently.
• Better with Microsoft 365: We improve the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams. Users can pin cards inside Teams, and delegated admins can now use the Excel add-in.
• Country and regional: In 2022 release wave 2, Business Central is generally available in more countries and regions.
• Onboarding: Organizations can get to productive usage faster because it’s easier to discover and install apps.
• Development tools: We have moved entirely to Visual Studio Code where we continue to invest in areas that enhance the productivity for developers.
• Power Platform: More efficient automation with Power Automate so that users can set up workflows for the specific needs of their organization.

Investment Areas:

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Onboarding:
When a company decides on a cloud solution such as Dynamics 365 Business Central online, they have certain expectations for how well connected the solution is to surrounding business productivity services, such as banking, payroll, and electronic invoicing providers. Cloud connectivity to operational productivity services is expected with a modern business solution in the cloud. Connectivity to these types of providers largely exists already, but is not easily discovered by customers of Business Central, who will have to manually search AppSource for the right solution for their business. Thus, customers of Business Central meet some friction when they want to realize the expectations of their investments into a cloud solution. By offering customers better discoverability, installation, and setup of these types of apps, unnecessary friction is removed, and their business can more quickly become productive and focus on the more complex areas of onboarding.

In 2022 release wave 2, we are adding an in-product experience that will make it easy for users to find relevant connectivity apps that are available in AppSource. We also make these apps easy to install and easy to set up. We start with the apps that offer online bank connectivity.

The apps that are shown in this in-product experience will have certain requirements imposed upon them, such as usage and quality criteria, as well as a minimum set of features and capabilities. More information about what is required for ISVs to get apps listed will be published at a later stage.

Foundational improvements to installation and setup of AppSource apps will be added in this release, to the benefit of all ISVs who have published apps to AppSource.

Application:
In 2022 release wave 2, we deliver updates based on the most popular requests for improvement.

• In the financial area, we continue to improve bank reconciliation. In this release wave, we improve the test report, add a statement report with two sections for outstanding reconciliations, and provide better automation for check ledger entries.
• Users will be able to reverse the journal entries from posted payment reconciliation journals. This way, they can more efficiently recover the books from mistakes that may happen. Just like with other journal entries, the user must unapply the entries manually first.
• For businesses that use check payments, they will now have multiple remit addresses available for vendors.
• To make financial reporting more transparent for newcomers and experienced users alike, we’re renaming account schedules to financial reporting. We’re also changing the feature slightly to give a better overview of the available reports.
• A financial report is now defined as a combination of row and column definitions plus a few parameters. This means that variants of the same report can now be stored as separate reports.
• The core functionality is the same, but the name changes make it easier to grasp the concepts. New templates for row and column definitions will become available in updates over the next release waves, making it easier for business users to get started and get productive.

Country and regional:
More countries are added to bring Business Central to more than 100 countries. Expansion to more countries and regions is achieved through partner-led localization. Our partners create the relevant localization apps and publish them to AppSource. In combination with the built-in language offerings, Business Central is available to serve customers in more than 100 countries and regions worldwide.

Productive with Microsoft 365:
The 2022 release wave 2 gives more control to administrators to manage OneDrive and Excel, while business users benefit from enhancements to report layouts and how they can edit data in Excel.

Reporting:
The 2022 release wave 1 introduced Excel layouts for reports. In 2022 release wave 2, we’ll continue to improve this experience.

When a business user runs a report with an Excel layout, they can now choose the Excel layout in the report’s request page. For example, if a report has several Excel layouts, the user can choose the exact layout they want when they run the report.

In addition to the Excel layout capability, we’re creating an API for the finance area that can be consumed in both Excel and Power BI. This way, users can create their own more detailed analysis on data from the general ledger and G/L budgets with dimensions. We’ll provide a new template Power BI app that is based on the new API. The app will be published to the BCTech Samples GitHub repo for users who want to get started with reporting in Power BI. The Power BI app contains a set of standard financial reports and a dashboard with financial KPIs and aggregated general ledger info.

User experiences:
Information workers who connect to Business Central from the desktop app, browser, or their mobile device benefit from improved usability, accessibility, performance, and stability in 2022 release wave 2. Users looking to increase their efficiency can take advantage of powerful new capabilities when they work across companies.

Governance and administration:
In 2022 release wave 2, Business Central provides a set of admin and governance capabilities to help admins and IT pros set up, secure, manage, govern, and monitor customer environments. We add and improve several capabilities to make it easier to keep up with important service notifications, to automate and manage operations at scale, across many customers and environments, with service-to-service authentication to the Admin Center API. Admins will be able to recover any environments that were recently deleted, which keeps customer data safe.

Development:
Demand for developers is continuously rising worldwide, increasing the requirement for attracting and raising the productivity of Business Central AL developers. In this release wave, we continue the investment in our Visual Studio Code experience by adding visual abstractions on top of AL code. This way, we bring better and more efficient management of AL objects across projects and workspaces and respond to the requests from multiple productivity partners across the tools experience. We are also investing in building new AL constructs for writing more performant code, as well as defining a more flexible and more consistent action pane structure in our clients.

Microsoft Power Platform:
Building on top of the work delivered so far, we continue to improve the way that Business Central integrates with Power Platform: Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Logic Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Dataverse.

This includes improvements to the Power BI integration as well as the Power Automate connector and the Automate action—bridging Business Central and Power Automate with a modern toolset that empowers makers and citizen developers to easily extend and connect Business Central with other systems.

We also continue improvements for our Dataverse virtual tables data change events so that our partners can use Dataverse as a platform for more ambitious integrations.

Service and platform:
No matter the industry type of a small or medium-sized business (SMB), business users expect a dependable service and platform that they can run their business on.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central @ Check out the release plan

For application administrators:

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users, automatically” in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users by admins, makers, or analysts” in the release plan.

Get the most out of your Dynamics 365 Business Central Investment

 

Plan and Prepare for Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2

D365 Release Plans:

You can either browse the release plan online or download the document as a PDF file.

These release plans describe functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).

Just like the previous release waves, we continue to call out how each feature will be enabled in your environment:

• Users, automatically: These features include changes to the user experience for users and are enabled automatically.
• Admins, makers, or analysts, automatically: These features are meant to be used by administrators, makers, or business analysts and are enabled automatically.
• Users by admins, makers, or analysts: These features must be enabled or configured by the administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users.

You can get ready with confidence knowing which features will be enabled automatically.

Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 release wave 2

Simply Dynamics are looking forward to engaging with you as you put these new services and capabilities to work, and we’re eager to hear your feedback as you dig into the 2022 Dynamics 365 release wave  plan.

We look forward to sharing further updates about what is new and planned for Dynamics 365  – If you have any queries about Dynamics 365 ERP & CRM Solutions – Contact Us now, Our Dynamics 365 Solution Experts are here to help