What’s new to Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2021 Release Wave 2

The Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2 plan will begin roll out for general availability in October 2021, and Microsoft states that these updates center on helping users get into productive usage faster, whether they are new customers or have been using Dynamics 365 for a while.

We’ve already published a blog featuring key updates for all Dynamics 365 applications, and now it’s time to shift attention to Dynamics 365 Business Central, which has a full list of enhancements to dive into. Microsoft boasts better built-in tours, integrations with Teams, and a host of other new capabilities and features that will roll out to Business Central in the second wave of 2021. Here is a list of the highlights Release Wave 2 has to offer within Business Central.

Application updates

The application updates center on the most requested areas for improvement, including better reporting, management of dimensions, and the supply chain.

Bank and payment reconciliations will receive many capabilities for an easier experience. Bank ledger entries will filter for after statement end-date for a simpler overview. A cleaner and more straightforward test report layout will result where the statement date and bank account serve as filters. Auto-matching will be able to be overwritten for all or none of the already matched entries. Many-to-1 matching will be possible for bank statement lines against one bank ledger entry.

Couple records between BC and the Dataverse in bulk will allow users to choose what records will couple and which should not through defining rules. These rules will automatically match records between the Dataverse (and apps for Dataverse) and Business Central.

More Business Central tours, such as those for education in standard roles and the basics of Business Central, will aid someone onboarding in a role and allow them to refresh their knowledge later. Overall this should increase quality of learning and the first phase of using Business Central’s user interface.

Additional application updates:

• Add additional columns through personalization in various pages to gain more insight
• Add non-inventory items on requisition and planning worksheets
• List of trusted partner apps
• New automation API to create user groups
• Production BOMs and routes on stock keeping units in planning scenarios
• Use multiple units of measure when synchronizing items and resources in Sales

Modern web client

“Usability, accessibility, and stability” are the primary focus concentration of updates to the modern web client in Release Wave 2. Performance and usability improvements to the BC web client include pages that open more quickly, raised efficiency in resource usage on client devices, automatic header resizing as page size changes to allow more data to show on screen, and many other optimizations. User feedback regarding the interface will also be addressed, like data entry and navigation in lists, navigation bars, submenus, and more.

Additional updates to the modern web client:

• Unhindered data entry across rows
• Discovering reports and administration areas in Role Explorer
• Support for localized decimal separator on numeric keypads

Better with Microsoft 365

From stronger integrations with Excel to bringing Business Central pages straight into a Teams channel, the productivity and collaboration capabilities of Business Central working with other Microsoft 365 applications is a key focus in Release Wave 2.

Enhancements to the Teams integration include a new sign-up experience when installing the app without a Business Central subscription and improved search term capabilities allowing for use of multiple words and special characters in a search and for finding contacts.

Enhancements to working with Microsoft Excel include the ability to download embedded lists to Excel using the “Open in Excel” action, report datasets can be saved to Excel from the request page, and admins can utilize centralized deployments for the Excel add-in for users or groups in their organization.

Additional updates to Microsoft 365 integrations:

• Centralized deployment of Office add-ins
• Enhancements to Outlook add-ins
• Share a record link to Microsoft Teams
• AL API for sharing files in Microsoft 365

Governance and administration

Release Wave 2 also centers on aiding administration and IT with customer environment set up, security, management, and governance. An admin can grant access to Business Central environments in the admin center by Azure Active Directory groups. In addition, copying environments will be more flexible, allowing admin to copy to and from sandbox environments or production environments.

Additional governance and administration updates:

• Operating log enhancements
• Restarting environments

Power Platform

The Power Platform will receive one major update in this release wave, which will be improving integration between the Dataverse and Power Platform by allowing an employee to embed reports from any Power BI workspaces, personal or shared, into Business Central rather than just the workspaces Business Central provides.

Service and platform

To increase the stability and reliability of the Business Central Server and service, the server can process multiple background sessions at the same time and includes new configuration settings established each environment, including maximum background sessions able to be actively processed simultaneously and waiting in queue for processing, and the maximum time a background session will wait in the queue to be processed. This will protect stability for environments that start many sessions and other environments on the same server.

Additional update:

• OData read-only intent

This release wave will begin general availability in October 2021 through March 2022. For a more comprehensive and detailed list of the functionality changes and upgrades, you can head to Microsoft’s full release plan here.

These capabilities and functionalities are heightening the strong effect of Release Wave 1 from earlier this year. Check out our blog on 2021 Release Wave 1. They are exciting shifts to the way Business Central will serve its users, and how organizations will serve their customers.