Microsoft have just released their plans for Release Wave 2 2021 for the Dynamics 365 suite and Power Platform. These new updates are set to be released between October 2021 and March 2022.
This blog post will be focusing on the upcoming changes to Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP .
Before getting to all the updates to Business Central, our Head Of Innovation, Snehanshu Mandal, has shared a few of his favourite upcoming features from release wave 2:
Dimension corrections (for G/L Entries)
You can now correct dimensions for general ledger (G/L) entries to ensure your financial reporting gives you accurate insights without having to make notes of temporary data entry mistakes.
Microsoft Teams Integration
With Microsoft Teams integration with Business Central, you can quickly share details across team members, look up contacts, and respond faster to inquiries
On-Boarding Experience
With new on-boarding experience, customers can easily learn how to use the product and get to productive usage faster. This will save costs on the customer side and free up your consultants’ time
Report Extension
With Report Extension, partners and ISVs can contribute to the same report easily and it will be cheaper for customers.
Application
Add additional columns through personalisation in various pages
Based on previous feedback, additional fields and columns have been added to several pages across the application, allowing users to tailor the information shown.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Add non inventory items on requisition and planning worksheets
You can process non-inventory lines in much the same way as other types of items. This allows you to use the same procurement process for inventoriable and non-inventoriable items.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Bank and payment reconciliations
With this release wave, bank and payment reconciliation features have been made more efficient, assisting the user and giving more information during the process.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Couple records between Business Central and Dataverse in bulk
Bulk-coupling speeds up the process of coupling multiple records while letting you define rules to control how the couplings are made. When you couple the records for which you want to synchronize data in each application, you can filter and choose the data to synchronize.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Delegated admin can create job queue entries and request approval by a licensed user
The delegated admin role enables Microsoft partners to set up and manage certain aspects of Business Central on behalf of their customers. With this update, delegated admins are now able to create job queue entries and request approval from a licensed user.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
With this release wave, partners can preload a list of apps into the customer’s system to help the customer choose apps that are relevant for their business, industry, and growth. By proxy of the partner, customers can safely install apps that have been preselected for them.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Locations for non-inventory items
You can now track statistics for non-inventory items by location, in the same way as inventoriable items or resources. This gives you better insight into, for example, the location for which a service was purchased.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
More educational app tours for standard roles
Release wave 2 expands the built-in product tours to more business roles. This helps users understand important application concepts and business entities and will reduce friction in the learning and start-up phase.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
New automation API to create user groups
The new API plays a part in the initial deployment of a customer environment together with the other Automation APIs that allow for a scripted creation of the environment, company, application of configuration packages, user permissions, and more.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Production BOMs and routes on stockkeeping units in planning scenarios
Microsoft has increased the number of business processes that take into account the values in the Production BOM and Production Routing fields defined on SKUs. By default, the Production BOM and Production Routing fields are available on SKUs.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Several reports have been removed in favour of newer versions. Enjoy modern report layouts that are easier to customize and faster to generate by using the reports that are based on layouts from Microsoft Word
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Rounding for base unit of measure
You can specify a rounding precision for base units of measure to guide users on what to enter for a given business process and reduce rounding issues when using alternate units of measure.
When an item serves different purposes, you can set up alternate units of measure for it.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
After being introduced with release wave 1 2021, application tours have been expanded so they also can include teaching tips that are defined by the platform to call out system controls, such as the top navigation bar and sorting and filtering controls. The tour has been designed to allow the user to learn the basics of the Business Central user interface.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Use multiple units of measure when synchronising items and resources to Dynamics 365 Sales
Items and resources have a base unit of measure, but they’re often also sold in other measures, such as bundles and packages. You can now synchronize more units of measure for items and resources with Dynamics 365 Sales.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Better with Microsoft 365
Enhancements to Microsoft Teams integration
- New sign-up experience for users who are installing the app but don’t have a Business Central subscription. Users will be redirected to a page where they can read about and sign up for a trial subscription.
- Improved search term capabilities, like multiple word search and special characters, for looking up contacts.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Centralised Deployment of Office add-ins
When getting started with Business Central, assisted setup wizards will guide administrators through the process of configuring the Business Central Office add-ins.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Enhancements to the Outlook add-in
Set up your business inbox in Outlook to respond faster to inquiries from your customers, vendors, and prospects.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Enhancements to working with Microsoft Excel
Business Central continues to mature Excel-related features for exporting to Excel and working with the Excel add-in.
- Downloading embedded lists to Excel
- Exporting reports to Excel
- Enhancements to the Excel add-in (Edit in Excel)
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Share a record link to Microsoft Teams
The Business Central web client will include a new action to share to Microsoft Teams. This action allows users to type a message, choose recipients such as team members, groups or channels, and send their message with a link to the Business Central record.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
AL API for sharing files in Microsoft 365
AL developers will be able to implement sharing of their reports or other files using standard Microsoft 365 capabilities for cloud-based file sharing.
Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Country and Regional
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Governance and administration
Manage access to environments using Azure Active Directory groups
In the Business Central admin center, you can associate an Azure AD group with an environment. Members of that Azure AD group will be synchronized to Business Central and granted access to that environment.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Copying environments of different types
With this release wave, support has been added for copying environments within and across different environment types:
- Production to Production
- Sandbox to Sandbox
- Sandbox to Production
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Administrators are now able to see the following new operations:
- Environment created
- Environment deleted
- Environment copied
- Environment properties updated
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
With this update, the option to restart an environment in Business Central admin center has been added.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Microsoft Power Platform
Show reports from named and shared Power BI workspaces in Business Central
With this feature, when selecting which Power BI reports to show in Business Central, Power BI returns the list of workspaces you have access to and the reports in the workspaces. You can then choose one of the reports and have it embedded in Business Central.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Modern Clients
Unhindered data entry across rows
When you type data in any editable list, the Business Central web client no longer pauses while it processes the previously modified row.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: —
Performance improvements to the Business Central web client
The 2021 release wave 2 includes various performance optimizations that benefit not only the Business Central web client, but other clients as well. These optimizations result in faster-opening pages, more efficient resource usage on client devices, and more.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Usability improvements to the Business Central web client
Addressing user feedback, the Business Central clients user interface has been optimised to improve usability.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Discovering reports and administration areas in Role Explorer
The Role Explorer window features new, easy-to-discover actions that let you filter Role Explorer to show only reports or only administration areas.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
Support for localised decimal separator on numeric keypads
The 2021 release wave 2 adds support for the localization of the decimal and thousands separator key (typically a period or comma character) when entering numeric values in fields.
Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Service & Platform
Integrations that consume data from Business Central can indicate a read-only intent to use the read-only database replica. This will offload read-only queries from the primary database.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts
General Availability: October 2021
Protect the Business Central Server against excessive background sessions for an environment
The Business Central Server can process multiple background sessions simultaneously. Excess background sessions can be sent to a queue for processing when a time slot becomes available.
Enabled for: Users
General Availability: October 2021
(Source: Microsoft )
Leave a comment and let us know what you think is the best feature of Release Wave 2 2021!
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