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Earlier this week, Microsoft released the Spring 2019 release notes for Dynamics 365 Business Central. For those that may not know, Business Central is the new cloud ERP solution from Microsoft, released in 2018, for small to midsize businesses. The Spring 2019 update includes enhancements and new features across the range of Dynamics 365 products, but this blog post will summarize the major functionality changes and performance enhancements to Business Central included in the release. For an in-depth look at everything included in the upgrade, you can read the release notes in their entirety here.
Application enhancements
Microsoft has made it a clear priority to improve performance in areas of the product which are used the most, like entry of transactions, orders, and other data. This was accomplished with new tools and features like the ability to bookmark list views, the Quick Entry tool, Focus Mode, and other components that simplify everyday work. Additional improvements aimed at end users include the ability to add multiple items at once to a sales/purchase order, copy existing templates, import pictures in bulk, copy customer dimensions to a job, and other new capabilities.
List improvements
These list improvement ideas came directly from the community of Business Central users and was very highly requested. It’s a simple change, but users are no doubt going to love it. Users and organizations will now be able to save different sets of filters they use to view and break down long lists of data. Personal views can be saved such as “My Top Accounts” as well as company-wide filters like “Products with the Most Recurring Orders”, making it much easier for users to slice through data. In addition to this, load time when scrolling through lists will be much reduced, as the way that rows fetch and display data was rewritten to increase responsiveness.
Quick data entry
Repeatedly entering data into business systems is one of the most time-consuming processes any company has to deal with. In an attempt to optimize the data entry process, Business Central will include a Quick Data Entry feature in the April update. This tool gives users a new way of moving through the required fields in a record by changing the click behavior of the ‘Enter’ key. The key will now move users from one Quick Entry (required) field to another while skipping over the information fields deemed nonessential. In an effort to increase readability, Microsoft is introducing the ability to change the importance of any field within a record.
Improved integration with Dynamics 365 Sales
Another area of focus of this release is to strengthen the integration between Business Central and Dynamics 365 for Sales. This is a popular connection among Business Central users, but some have stated that they feel it could do more. Microsoft listened and put in the effort to improve synchronization between the two. Changes to transactions in Business Central will be almost instantaneously reflected in Sales, and vice versa, so that a lapse in communication is less likely.
Application & extension management
Yet another area of significant improvement in Business Central is tenant administration. The April 2019 update does a lot to improve visibility, increase control, and improve the process of updating for admins. Going forward, admins will be able to create multiple sandbox environments when testing their apps and extensions before deployment with detailed information about each sandbox environment. Admins can choose to receive notifications/updates about what’s going in their environments, newly available extensions, and other updates that they choose. Additionally, tenants will now be scheduled for upgrade on a predetermined date so admins and users alike can better prepare.
To help with upgrades, an automated service will be introduced that validates the various extensions on an environment against upcoming versions of the base application. The service will notifies admins of any incompatibilities between the two and alert them if a new version of the extension is available.
Designer enhancements
Although the main focus of these updates is on performance for end users, a significant amount of work was done in the Spring release to improve the developer experience in Business Central. Among these changes are the added support for Outline View in Visual Studio Code, letting developers get a fuller picture what’s currently active in the editor and find issues much quicker.
When is this all available?
A select number of the changes made in this release will be available for preview in sandbox environments starting February 1, with the full range of features and improvements becoming generally available for deployment on April 5th. To enable previews of the release, which is highly recommended, an admin will need to go to the Power Platform Admin Center > Settings > Previews and Updates then turn on the switch to try out the April ’19 release. The release notes will be updated on February 21st with any additional info about features and/or announcements regarding the release in April.
Get a demo
Despite the fact that these changes won’t be released for a while, they give us something to be excited about because of how much of an impact we expect they’ll have on daily work. Interested in cutting dependencies, reducing costs, and getting started with Business Central on the powerful Azure cloud? Click the button below to speak with a consultant and receive a free 30-day trial of Business Central risk-free.
