Release Wave 2 2021: Dynamics 365 Business Central

Add additional columns through personalisation in various pages

Based on previous feedback, additional fields and columns have been added to several pages across the application, allowing users to tailor the information shown.

Add non inventory items on requisition and planning worksheets

You can process non-inventory lines in much the same way as other types of items. This allows you to use the same procurement process for inventoriable and non-inventoriable items.

Bank and payment reconciliations

With this release wave, bank and payment reconciliation features have been made more efficient, assisting the user and giving more information during the process.

Couple records between Business Central and Dataverse in bulk

Bulk-coupling speeds up the process of coupling multiple records while letting you define rules to control how the couplings are made. When you couple the records for which you want to synchronize data in each application, you can filter and choose the data to synchronize.

Delegated admin can create job queue entries and request approval by a licensed user

The delegated admin role enables Microsoft partners to set up and manage certain aspects of Business Central on behalf of their customers. With this update, delegated admins are now able to create job queue entries and request approval from a licensed user.

List of trusted partner apps

With this release wave, partners can preload a list of apps into the customer’s system to help the customer choose apps that are relevant for their business, industry, and growth. By proxy of the partner, customers can safely install apps that have been preselected for them.

Locations for non-inventory items

You can now track statistics for non-inventory items by location, in the same way as inventoriable items or resources. This gives you better insight into, for example, the location for which a service was purchased.

More educational app tours for standard roles

Release wave 2 expands the built-in product tours to more business roles. This helps users understand important application concepts and business entities and will reduce friction in the learning and start-up phase.

New automation API to create user groups

The new API plays a part in the initial deployment of a customer environment together with the other Automation APIs that allow for a scripted creation of the environment, company, application of configuration packages, user permissions, and more.

Production BOMs and routes on stockkeeping units in planning scenarios

Microsoft has increased the number of business processes that take into account the values in the Production BOM and Production Routing fields defined on SKUs. By default, the Production BOM and Production Routing fields are available on SKUs.

Removing obsolete reports

Several reports have been removed in favour of newer versions. Enjoy modern report layouts that are easier to customize and faster to generate by using the reports that are based on layouts from Microsoft Word

Rounding for base unit of measure

You can specify a rounding precision for base units of measure to guide users on what to enter for a given business process and reduce rounding issues when using alternate units of measure.

When an item serves different purposes, you can set up alternate units of measure for it.

Tour of Business Central

After being introduced with release wave 1 2021, application tours have been expanded so they also can include teaching tips that are defined by the platform to call out system controls, such as the top navigation bar and sorting and filtering controls. The tour has been designed to allow the user to learn the basics of the Business Central user interface.

Use multiple units of measure when synchronising items and resources to Dynamics 365 Sales

Items and resources have a base unit of measure, but they’re often also sold in other measures, such as bundles and packages. You can now synchronize more units of measure for items and resources with Dynamics 365 Sales.

Enhancements to Microsoft Teams integration

• New sign-up experience for users who are installing the app but don’t have a Business Central subscription. Users will be redirected to a page where they can read about and sign up for a trial subscription.
• Improved search term capabilities, like multiple word search and special characters, for looking up contacts.

Centralised Deployment of Office add-ins

When getting started with Business Central, assisted setup wizards will guide administrators through the process of configuring the Business Central Office add-ins.

Enhancements to the Outlook add-in

Set up your business inbox in Outlook to respond faster to inquiries from your customers, vendors, and prospects.

Enhancements to working with Microsoft Excel

Business Central continues to mature Excel-related features for exporting to Excel and working with the Excel add-in.

• Downloading embedded lists to Excel
• Exporting reports to Excel
• Enhancements to the Excel add-in (Edit in Excel)

Share a record link to Microsoft Teams

The Business Central web client will include a new action to share to Microsoft Teams. This action allows users to type a message, choose recipients such as team members, groups or channels, and send their message with a link to the Business Central record.

AL API for sharing files in Microsoft 365

AL developers will be able to implement sharing of their reports or other files using standard Microsoft 365 capabilities for cloud-based file sharing.

Country and Regional – Argentina

Country and Regional – Bulgaria

Country and Regional – Chile

Country and Regional – Myanmar

Country and Regional – Puerto Rico

Country and Regional – Slovakia

Country and Regional – Ukraine

Manage access to environments using Azure Active Directory groups

In the Business Central admin center, you can associate an Azure AD group with an environment. Members of that Azure AD group will be synchronized to Business Central and granted access to that environment.

Copying environments of different types

With this release wave, support has been added for copying environments within and across different environment types:

• Production to Production
• Sandbox to Sandbox
• Sandbox to Production

Operations log enhancements

Administrators are now able to see the following new operations:

• Environment created
• Environment deleted
• Environment copied
• Environment properties updated

Restarting environments

With this update, the option to restart an environment in Business Central admin center has been added.

Show reports from named and shared Power BI workspaces in Business Central

With this feature, when selecting which Power BI reports to show in Business Central, Power BI returns the list of workspaces you have access to and the reports in the workspaces. You can then choose one of the reports and have it embedded in Business Central.

Unhindered data entry across rows

When you type data in any editable list, the Business Central web client no longer pauses while it processes the previously modified row.

Performance improvements to the Business Central web client

The 2021 release wave 2 includes various performance optimizations that benefit not only the Business Central web client, but other clients as well. These optimizations result in faster-opening pages, more efficient resource usage on client devices, and more.

Usability improvements to the Business Central web client

Addressing user feedback, the Business Central clients user interface has been optimised to improve usability.

Discovering reports and administration areas in Role Explorer

 The Role Explorer window features new, easy-to-discover actions that let you filter Role Explorer to show only reports or only administration areas.

Support for localised decimal separator on numeric keypads

The 2021 release wave 2 adds support for the localization of the decimal and thousands separator key (typically a period or comma character) when entering numeric values in fields.

OData read-only intent

Integrations that consume data from Business Central can indicate a read-only intent to use the read-only database replica. This will offload read-only queries from the primary database.

Protect the Business Central Server against excessive background sessions for an environment

The Business Central Server can process multiple background sessions simultaneously. Excess background sessions can be sent to a queue for processing when a time slot becomes available.