Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 2 – Plan and prepare!
Business Central 2021 Wave2 (release v.19) is expected to be launched in early October; I want to point out some features \ news of the product that I consider interesting (there are many …)
For all the news and features, I refer you to the links below which contain everything that will be released between October 2021 and March 2022 with the release dates.
All the news will be presented at Directions EMEA to be held in Milan, I recommend you to participate!
Docs link “Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2021 release wave 2”
BC 2021 WAVE 2 PILLARS
- Application
- Better with Microsoft 365
- Country and regional
- Development
- Governance and administration
- Microsoft Power Platform
- Modern Clients
- Service and platform
Some interesting news …
Business Central in More Countries
Business Central will be available in the following new countries:
- Argentina
- Bulgaria
- Chile
- Myanmar
- Puerto Rico
- Slovakia
- Ukraine
Personalization improved – More fields on different entities
Possibility of using multiple fields on different entities for the personalization of pages through personalization (functionality that can be managed directly by the end user, great thing! And finally I would say!)
Some examples of these improvements are:
ex: “Get Receipt Lines” page
You can add the Order No., Vendor Order No., Vendor Shipment No., Vendor Item No., and Item Reference No. columns to the Get Receipt Lines page.
ex: “Get Shipment Lines” page
You can add the Order No., External Document No., and Your Reference columns to the Get Shipment Lines page.
Plan not-inventory items from Worksheets
You will be able to use the inquiry and planning worksheets to enter plans for what you need to order and then create orders for both physical inventory items and non-inventory items (such as services) to have a unified process.
You can process non-inventory lines in the same way as other types of items. If you use planning requests and worksheets as a starting point for purchase orders in the procurement process, you can manually enter lines for non-inventory items in the worksheets.
Then, when you create your purchase orders, non-stock items will be included. This allows you to use the same procurement process for inventory and non-inventory items.
SKU Bills of Materials and Routes
Production processes like planning worksheets, order planning, capable-to-promise can now use information about bills of materials and routes defined in the stock-keeping units (SKU).
We have increased the number of business processes that take into account the values in the Production BOM and Production Routing fields defined on SKUs. These include the following processes:
- Capable-to-promise called from sales orders.
- Planning worksheet, including the Calculate Net Change Plan, Calculate Regenerative Plan, and Get Action Messages actions.
- Order planning.
By default, the Production BOM and Production Routing fields are available on SKUs.
Non-Inventory Items with locations
Non-inventory items now support locations and the location information will be copied to the item accounting, value, and job ledger entries records. In this way you will be able to perform localization statistics for services as well.
Rounding Precision on base unit of measure
You will be able to specify a rounding precision for the base unit of measures to avoid rounding problems when using alternative units.
Word Layout Reports!
The new release will also definitively remove the old sales documents reports (204..207) in favor of new sales document reports supporting Word Layout (1304..1307). You now have the choice of using the new layouts (recommended) or clone the old layout to a custom layout and then continue using the cloned custom layout.
In practice, Microsoft pushes for the management of document reports with Word Layout instead of RDLC (more useful for list reports)
Open in Excel – improved
Exporting data to Excel (Open in Excel feature) will be improved in the next version. You will be able to export lists to Excel that are embedded in part of a page, such as Sales Lines on the Sales Order page or lists in a fact box pane.
The Open in Excel action downloads a static copy of the list as an Excel file, applying the filters and sorting as shown on the screen.
Export the report data to Excel – Export Data Only
For reports, you can now choose to export only the report data to Excel on the request page. The Excel file will only include the data and not the report layout.
Dataverse Integration – improved
Dataverse integration has been improved. You can now use Integration Field Mapping to filter and choose the data to synchronize and how to couple records.
Web Client Integrated with Teams (by a new dedicated Action)
The Business Central web client will include a new action to share records to Microsoft Teams. This function will allow you to type a message, choose recipients (team members, groups, or channels), and then send a message with a link to the Business Central record.
Power BI Reports from all workspaces
If you use Power BI reports within Business Central, you can embed reports from any personal or shared Power BI workspace (not just the default workspace). More integration! Better for sharing!
Features for IT Administrators
Partner – Preselected Apps
As a partner, you will be able to preload a list of recommended apps into the customer’s system (apps relevant to their business). The customer can then safely install the preselected apps (and only your recommended ones ..)
Automation APIs
The administrator will have a new set of automation APIs (in addition to the existing ones) that will allow the creation of user groups. New APIs for file sharing in Microsoft 365 will also be available for AL developers.
AAD Groups Access to Environments
You will be able to use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) groups to grant access to environments on a tenant. You will be able to associate an Azure AD group with an environment and then the members of that Azure AD group will be synchronized with Dynamics 365 Business Central and will be granted access to that environment.
Very helpful.
More Differents Environments with “Copy to…”
In BC 2021 wave2 you will be able to copy environments within and between different types of environments, such as:
- Production to Production
- Sandbox to Sandbox
- Sandbox to Production
More signals
A lot of new signals related to the environment’s operations will be added to the Business Central operation logs.
Features for AL developers
Force-Sync per Tenant
There will be the possibility to perform a forced synchronization on the extensions per tenant (with the responsibility of the partner).
OData Performance – ROI (Read-Only Intent)
To improve performances of the NST, in the next release, if you’re using OData for integrations, you will be able to specify a read-only intent to use the read-only database replica (and then offloading the production database).
