The 2023 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 brings new innovations that provide you with significant capabilities to transform your business. The release covers 100s of new features for Dynamics 365 Business Central, Power Platform and many more Microsoft solutions.  

Microsoft’s investment in Copilot is furthered by this release. Enabling people to use Copilot’s guidance to speed up their processes and finish tasks sooner. In this article, we cover a few highlighted features and improvements announced in this release. 

Dynamics 365 Business Central 

Small and midsize businesses can automate and streamline business processes with the help of Business Central. Giving organizations the flexibility and features they need to manage their finances, supply chains, manufacturing, shipping, projects, and more. Businesses can easily adapt the solution to support highly specialized industries by adding functionality that is critical to their area of operation. Business Central is quick to implement and easy to configure, and innovations in product development, design, implementation, and usability are driven by simplicity. 

Updates in 2023 release wave 2 for Business Central:

Country and regional

Business Central is now accessible to customers in more than 140 nations and regions worldwide thanks to the built-in language options. Additionally, Microsoft offers all regulatory feature updates in the nations where they are in charge of the localization.

Adapt faster with Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft’s efforts are centered on enhancing Business Central’s integration with Power Platform in two key areas. First and foremost, they are improving Power Automate’s approval workflows for users and decision-makers. This entails extending support for external business events, adding more actions to the connector, and offering more templates for automated flows using Teams. Second, there are improvements in Power BI’s embed experience. End users exploring the embedded BI functionalities in Business Central will have more control. And partners who provide in-context dashboards and reports will have enhanced features.

Application

With the new supply chain features included in this release, managing items in your warehouse will be more effective, flexible, and accurate. For inventory levels, locations, processing stages, and other elements that influence available quantities, you can access detailed availability information. Additionally, you can independently set the appropriate level of warehouse handling for external, internal, and inbound flows. In simple warehouse configurations, Business Central recommends the best bin for each item, and you can edit data for item journals and warehouse worksheets in Excel. Finally, you can get advice on orders that are prepared for handling. The recommendations assist in lowering the possibility of partial shipments, preventing orders for production or assembly from getting stuck, and raising customer satisfaction.

 

Intercompany transactions, financial data consolidations, approval workflows, and automatic general ledger allocations are among the new features. You can perform accounting operations for multiple businesses across various Business Central tenant environments, which eliminates the need to manage files for intercompany postings. Without handling files, you can also combine financial data for businesses across various Business Central environments. The new approval workflow for intercompany general journals also improves control and gets rid of mistakes. Finally, you can automate the distribution of revenue or cost transactions across various accounts or dimensions using custom allocation keys to improve data entry efficiency and lower errors.

Development

The stage has been set for adding namespace support to the platform and application so that AL developers will be more empowered and productive. It is easier to structure apps with namespace support, produce better object names, and prevent identifier conflicts. Additionally, to protect internal data, developers can hide specific variable data so that no one else can access it while debugging.

 

Without having to manually set up Visual Studio Code, consultants and developers can quickly open it for a production or sandbox environment to investigate and understand objects across installed extensions, view code for owned extensions, and carry out troubleshooting.

 

With this release, support for ISV app transactions via a CSP channel moves into the private preview stage, while ISVs’ ability to directly transact via AppSource using credit card purchases enters the general availability phase. In addition, ISVs can host controlled preview audiences for their AppSource apps for their clients.

Reporting and data analysis

You can quickly access insightful information about the operation of your business thanks to Microsoft’s investments in report discoverability. With more capabilities for Analysis mode, you can perform on-the-fly embedded analysis of their data, and the Power BI experience has new and improved Power BI reports. If you don’t have to open another app to find the information you require, you’ll be more productive.

Governance and Administration

Business Central administrators’ capabilities have been enhanced with additional tools for efficiently managing environments, apps, and data migrations. With the aim of enabling self-sufficiency in addressing customer requirements and handling diverse administrative scenarios. This includes the introduction of more granular administrator roles, offering greater control over delegated administrator access, streamlining processes for minor update releases. Enabling seamless integration between Business Central and Power Platform environments for consistent integration setup. And the application of Power Platform environment settings to Business Central. Additionally, administrators now have the ability to cancel Cloud Migration replication runs for enhanced flexibility and control.

Legislation

The 2023 release wave 2 delivers legislation updates based on the most popular requests for improvement in this area. So that you can concentrate on your main business, Microsoft offers features and automation for legislation that complies with the various rules established by governmental organizations. In order to deliver all of these improvements as standard capabilities across all supported countries and regions where they’re applicable, they intend to take a step toward standardizing functionality.

 

The legislative effort in this release wave is primarily focused on adding the ability to store digitally scanned vouchers and using the e-invoicing core as a foundation for local requirements.

Productive with Microsoft 365

People work smarter and teams perform better when business apps are combined with productivity apps. Business Central seamlessly integrates with best-in-class Microsoft 365 apps and services such as Outlook, Excel, Word, OneDrive, and Teams to bring data into the flow of work.

For more information for updates coming to Dynamics 365 Business follow this link.

Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform enables users and organizations to analyze, act on, and automate the data to digitally transform their businesses. Microsoft Power Platform today comprises four products: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. It also has two add-ins: AI Builder and Power Pages. The 2023 release wave 2 release contains hundreds of new features across Power Platform applications, as well as Microsoft Data-verse and Power Platform capabilities for governance and administration and pro development. 

Updates in 2023 release wave 2 for Power Platform:

Power BI 

By bringing more parity to the web, enhancing and aligning user experiences with Microsoft 365, and integrating the Power Query diagram view into Power BI Desktop, Power BI is enhancing the creation experience for individuals. For teams, this brings enhancements to meetings and multitasking. For organizations, Microsoft is enabling GIT and source control integration to help developers maintain and collaborate on their BI solutions. 

Power Apps

Power Apps is extending the use of Copilot to deliver AI-assisted experiences to boost developer productivity. Introduce natural language to all users, and provide admins with insights. By providing users with contemporary controls, rich collaborative experiences, and improved deployment and governance support, low code can be enabled throughout the entire organization. 

Power Pages 

Power Pages keeps improving the copilot maker experience to make it possible to build a website. Bringing functionality for user on-boarding and maker usage will be included in managed environments. For data, it is simple to connect to data wherever it is currently available. Low-code makers are able to communicate and recognize co-presence. 

Power Automate 

Power Automate will keep making it simpler to begin developing new flows by utilizing natural language for desktop and cloud flows. As well as enhancing process mining to hasten automation and authoring experiences. Additionally, by introducing a unified activity view and deeper notifications on capabilities across the product. Microsoft is making it easier to manage work at scale. 

Power Virtual Agents 

General Availability for Power Virtual Agents’ features such as Conversational Language Understanding Service integration, Standalone IVR and IVR integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Multi-Lingual Bot Support, and Generative Answers and Actions. Microsoft will also continue to improve their customer offering by introducing new Enterprise Trust capabilities. 

For more information for updates coming to Power Platform follow this link.

Summary 

This release wave introduces a range of enhancements and refinements, but also some interesting new innovations. It is clear that the work done on this release will help users work faster and be more productive. Most importantly this will help drive the digital transformation of business on their terms. We look forward to seeing and testing the new functionality when the preview and general releases are launched.   

For further information on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central & Power Platform. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with allonline365 at +27 (21) 205 3650, email us at info@allonline365.com or visit our website www.allonline365.com