Release Wave 1 2022 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central brought in a host of new features that have been becoming available for users since April, including the native Shopify integration and many more. While most features are now generally available to use, there are a few changes still to be released in July & August, which are being presented in this blog post. Microsoft’s Power Platform has also been receiving updates, which are being covered after the Business Central updates.

Business Central

Release and reopen multiple documents

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: July 2022

The status of documents indicates whether they’re open, waiting to be approved, have been invoiced for prepayment, or have been released to the next stage of processing. When you finish working on a batch of documents, you can release all or some of them to the next stage in the process or reopen them for further processing, all in one go.

Feature Details

To make it easier to quickly identify documents that are open or released, especially when viewing a list of documents, the Open and Released statuses have different font colours.

Progress is shown during the process of releasing and reopening documents, and if there are errors, they are shown on the Errors Messages page.

Improved and extensible Adjust Exchange Rates batch job

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts

General Availability: August 2022

When companies operate in multiple countries or regions, it’s important that they can do business and run financial reports in more than one currency. Because exchange rates often change, businesses must periodically update the rates in Business Central. This feature update gives accountants additional control over how they adjust exchange rates. At the same time, it allows partners to extend and customize an exchange rate adjustment to meet the needs of specific industries or markets.

Feature Details

You can now preview the effect that an exchange rate adjustment will have on posting before you actually post by choosing Preview on the Adjust Exchange Rates report request page. You can select whether you want a detailed (per entry) or summarized (per currency) posting to general ledger by choosing Summarize Entries on the Adjust Exchange Rates report. You can also pick how Adjust Exchange Rates will handle dimensions for unrealized gains and losses postings by choosing one of the following options in the Transfer Dimension Values field:

• Source Entry: G/L entries for unrealized gains and losses will have dimensions values transferred from the entry being adjusted.
• By G/L Account: G/L entries for unrealized gains and losses will have dimensions values transferred from the unrealized gains and losses G/L account’s dimension settings source entry.
• No Transfer: G/L entries for unrealized gains and losses won’t have dimensions values.

Sync sales orders both ways in Business Central and Sales

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts

General Availability: August 2022

Keep your sellers informed about possible shipment delays, inventory shortages, or other changes to the sales quotes and orders that you synchronize between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales.

Feature Details

You can now synchronize sales orders between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales in both directions. For example, if a customer changes their mind about the product or quantity they ordered in Sales, you can automatically process the change to the order in Business Central by archiving the sales document and creating a new one. The same is true for changes in Business Central. For example, when prices, tax amounts, or expected shipment dates change, the changes are automatically synchronized to Sales. That helps keep your sellers up-to-date with the latest changes and the status of quotes and orders.

To enable synchronization of sales orders in both directions, choose the Enable Bidirections Sales Order Integration field on either the Dynamics 365 Connection Setup page or in the Set up a connection to Dynamics 365 Sales assisted setup guide.

When enabling bidirectional sales order integration in the assisted setup guide, Business Central will also automatically enable sales order archiving. If you use the Dynamics 365 Connection Setup page and you want to archive sales orders, choose Archive Orders on the Sales and Receivables page.

The Integration Table Mappings page contains new mappings for the sales order header and lines. When you set up the initial connection for Sales, you can synchronize active orders between Business Central and Sales by using the Full Synchronization or Match-based coupling actions.

A single tile to go to Business Central

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: July 2022

Users need a simple and familiar way to access the Business Central web application from across Office 365.

Feature details

Previously, customers operating both production and sandbox environments could use two separate Business Central tiles to access the Business Central web client from another Office application.

Later in this wave, the sandbox tile will be removed from both the app launcher and the Office home portal. Instead, both of these places will display only one tile as the means to access the Business Central web client.

For customers operating more than one environment, users accessing Business Central from the tile will be able to pick from production or sandbox environments before proceeding.

Receive notifications in the Microsoft 365 Message center

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically

General Availability: Aug 2022

We’re moving communications about Dynamics 365 Business Central to the Microsoft 365 Message center and Service Health dashboard. This way, you find information about Business Central in the same place as other Microsoft products. Message center and Service Health dashboard have better tools for you to manage how you’d like to receive and view communications, including a mobile app, availability in the Graph API, and multitenant views for partners.

Feature details

For some years now, we’ve communicated Dynamics 365 Business Central service health status and service incidents through the Microsoft 365 Service Health dashboard. Separately, we’ve been sending email notifications about environment upgrades and compatibility of per-tenant extensions with upcoming updates to notification recipients that are defined in the Business Central administration center.

In this release wave, we replace the emails that are sent to notification recipients with communications sent to the Microsoft 365 Message center and Service Health dashboard. We also increase the number of events that we send communications for.

We replace our email notifications not only to align our primary communication channel with that of other Microsoft products. The change also gives you as an admin more flexibility in how you want to receive, view, and react to communications, both as an internal admin and as a delegated admin. Next to email notifications that you can opt in to from the Microsoft 365 admin center, Business Central communications will be shown in the Microsoft 365 Administration mobile app, the Graph API, the Business Central administration center, and the multitenant views in Microsoft 365 admin center for partners.

Updating only licensed users from Microsoft 365 runs faster and more efficiently

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically

General Availability: July 2022

Updating users from Microsoft 365 runs faster and more efficiently with this update.

Feature details

In large organizations with many users, Azure Active Directory often includes a large number of user accounts. With this update, only users who have a valid Business Central license will be queried and updated when the admin runs the Update users from Microsoft 365 process. As a result, the process runs faster.

Permission set handling enhancements

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically

General Availability: July 2022

Improve the administrator’s capabilities to create, customize, and manage permission sets to control user access to capabilities in Business Central.

Feature details

The new permission system in Business Central that became generally available in 2021 release wave 1 allows developers to establish a hierarchy of permission sets, include sets inside other permission sets, and extend permission sets. In 2022 release wave 1, admin users can leverage these permission sets and group them based on a tenant’s needs, visualize which permission sets are included in a given set, include others, and fine-tune them as needed.

We also deliver a new capability to subtract permissions with a permission set scope in this release wave. This capability lets the admin specify that an object can’t be accessed, unless access isn’t granted by another permission set.

Power Platform

Power Virtual Agents

We all know about Power virtual agents. Power virtual agents give us the privilege to build chatbots with low code experience. Now you can experience an evolution of Power virtual agents. Essentially from the low code point of view, you have now got a stack of more tools to work with make awesome chatbots.

• Introduce a new message card information. Now users can easily add an image and add a video and put more sort of like title and subtitle by using a message card.
• Now it’s super easy to create quick responses for someone who has no idea about code.

Power Apps Portal

The power app portal has become power pages, this is now the newest member of the power platform family. Now enhance and streamline the websites you create, design, and develop with advanced power page capabilities.

• Bring your pages to life by using customizable themes from the styling workspace and align them with your company’s brand.
• Power pages protect your websites against vulnerabilities.
• Connect your websites with a variety of identity providers, including Azure Active Directory B2C (Azure AD B2C), Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
• Preserve high levels of compliance, privacy, standards conformance, and regulatory compliance.
• Help ensure admin and operational ownership with the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence starter kit.
• Now you can discover how to build, customize and administer your website through tutorials, videos and documentation.

Power Apps Express Design

Express design is a new way to quickly get started with Power Apps by instantly transforming your visual design into an app.

• With express design, makers can quickly turn existing design artifacts—including paper forms, whiteboard sketches, or Figma files—directly into a working app.
• Express design help to handle the detailed adjustments required to generate pixel-perfect UI, or create a new data source and set the formulas to connect it to your app,
• Now you can develop and build your app with ease and confidence.
• The express design currently supports design artifacts in the form of an image or a Figma design file.
• If you’re looking to generate a pixel-perfect app with exact styles that match your designs, the express design will help you with that. The express design has Figma to app feature to convert your design file into app UI. From here, you can continue building in Power Apps Studio to add more advanced functionality.

These upcoming features are the final updates from Release Wave 1 2022 that are set to be released in the coming months, however, these are not the final updates for Business Central and the Power Platform that will be released this year. Release Wave 2 2022, which is set to release in October, will contain more new features and updates to Business Central.