Consolidated Overview on Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Release Wave 2 Features
This article is dedicated to unveiling the 2023 Release Wave 2 Updates with new features in Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC).
Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) is a business management application designed for small and mid-sized companies. BC helps these organizations efficiently handle their financial tasks, supply chains, manufacturing processes, shipping operations, and project and service management within a well-organized and effective environment.
As we look forward to the 2023 Release Wave 2, you can expect a range of further updates and improvements to enhance BC’s functionality and user experience.
Enhancements in Supply Chain Management:
- Improved Supply Chain Capabilities: Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) is now better equipped to support efficient inventory and warehouse operations. Significant optimizations have been made in various areas, including the picking process, fulfillment suggestions, SKU management, and enhanced warehouse configuration options for manufacturing and job-related tasks.
- Availability Quantity Insights: BC now offers easy access to detailed information about inventory levels, location-specific data, processing stages, and other variables that influence available quantities. This empowers users to make more informed decisions.
- Independent Warehouse Handling: Users can now configure warehouse handling independently for inbound, outbound, and internal processes, allowing for greater customization and control over their operations.
- Streamlined Bin Assignment: BC now streamlines the process of suggesting the appropriate item bin in basic warehouse configurations, simplifying inventory management, and reducing errors.
- Excel Integration: Users can edit item journals and warehouse worksheets data directly in Excel, leveraging the familiarity and functionality of spreadsheet formats to increase efficiency and accuracy.
Elevating Data Analysis and Reporting:
- Empowering Power BI: Power BI gets a boost with new and improved reports, along with enhanced analysis mode capabilities that facilitate on-the-fly embedded data analysis. This means you don’t have to switch between applications to access the data you need, significantly increasing productivity and the accuracy of reporting.
- Advanced Reporting and Data Analysis: Explore enriched analysis capabilities, report enhancements, and a new reporting overview that allows you to delve into all Business Central reports at your disposal.
Streamlining Governance and Administration:
- Efficient Environment Management: Business Central administrators now have an arsenal of tools for managing environments, applications, and data migrations. These enhancements enable administrators to be self-sufficient, effectively resolve company issues, and tackle various administrative scenarios.
- Administrator Role Control: With increased granularity in administrator role assignments, you gain more control over the access provided to administrators or delegated to them.
Further Refinements:
- Smoother Minor Updates: We’ve improved the processes for minor update releases, boosting administrator productivity.
- BC and Power Platform Integration: The ability to seamlessly link BC and Power Platform environments allows for consistent integrations and the application of Power Platform environment settings within BC.
- Cloud Migration Control: You can now cancel Cloud Migration replication runs, offering more flexibility.
- Enhanced Onboarding Tooltips: Field tooltips now include “Learn More” links that provide better explanations of complex data, making onboarding more effective.
- Teams Collaboration: Collaborative business processes within Microsoft Teams are enhanced, allowing you to unfurl a card without the need to install the BC Teams application
- Enhanced Service and Platform: We continue to enhance the fundamentals of service, focusing on performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance.
- Expanding Device Options: Business Central offers a diverse user interface portfolio, enabling companies to work with their data from anywhere, on any device.
- Diverse User Interfaces: User interfaces encompass installable desktop, browser-based web, and mobile applications, providing a range of features for entering data quickly, updating entries, and analyzing relational data with ease.
- Efficient Data Selection and Viewing: Working with actions across selections in records lists and viewing summarized data is made more efficient, simplifying data entry correction.
- Revamped Developer Productivity: Transition to Visual Studio Code: BC has made a complete transition to Visual Studio Code, enhancing developer productivity and modernizing processes for testing dependent extensions. This means smoother testing for companies, VARs, and ISVs with dependencies.
- Production and Sandbox Access: Consultants and developers can now seamlessly open Visual Studio Code for both production and sandbox environments, streamlining troubleshooting and code investigation.
- Developer Empowerment: BC introduces namespace support for AL developers, simplifying application structuring and avoiding identifier clashes.
- Enhanced Data Protection: Developers can now hide specific variable data during debugging, safeguarding sensitive information.
- Data Analysis and Reporting Control: Developers gain more control over data analysis and reporting, including the ability to disable Analysis Mode on pages and specify how to embed content from Power BI.
- ISV Transactions and Previews: ISVs can now directly transact through AppSource via credit card purchases and organize previews for their AppSource applications to offer a controlled customer experience.
- DevOps Advancements: DevOps and professional development enhancements include support for Linux VSIX, AL syntax highlighting, ALDoc previews, Rich Text editor support, and the convenience of trying a preview version of the upcoming VSIX release directly in the VSCode extension management page.
- Enhancing Automate Workflows: The approval workflow experience in Business Central is getting a boost with new connector actions, support for external business events, and additional templates for automated flows using Teams.
- Improved Integration with BI: The experience of integrating BI tools has been enhanced, making it easier to seamlessly incorporate data analytics into your workflow.
- Seamless Integration with Business Central: Business Central’s integration with Business Central in the online realm has been enhanced, providing more flexibility and capabilities for users.
- Expanding Copilot’s Reach: Copilot within BC introduces intuitive AI tools to boost productivity for a broader range of SMB roles, going beyond marketing text suggestions.
Service and Platform Enhancements:
- Performance Improvements: Users can expect a smoother experience with fewer interruptions, particularly in web services and other scenarios.
- Stable Sign-in: Interactive users can enjoy a more stable sign-in experience, with fewer session interruptions. Language (AL) runtime optimizations improve performance, even with table extensions.
Legislation Updates:
- New Digital Reporting Formats: Support for new audit formats like SAF-T in Denmark and FAC for France, along with improved e-invoicing and local legislation compliance.
- Continuous Legislation Compliance: Updates ensure compliance with various government regulations, allowing companies to focus on their core business. Future plans include standardizing legislation features across supported countries and regions (where relevant).
Productivity with Microsoft 365:
- Seamless Integration: Business Central continues to integrate smoothly with Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook, Excel, Word, OneDrive, and Teams, facilitating the flow of data within your work processes.
- Enhanced Functionality: You can now attach quotes and invoices from Outlook, connect to Exchange for email tracking, and analyze Excel lists, exporting them to dynamic worksheets that can be refreshed, edited, and published back to BC.
Streamlined Onboarding:
- Sign-in and Role Setup: Partners can set initial roles for users during sign-up, providing a faster onboarding experience, especially when leveraging sign-up context and customer profiling features.
- Personalized Welcome: Create a welcoming experience with custom banner greetings, dynamically tailored to suit company or industry needs. For a comprehensive overview of all the capabilities in this release wave, please refer to the release plan for Dynamics 365 BC.
Information for Application Administrators
- Automatically Activated Features: Application administrators should take note of features that have a direct impact on users. This is vital for efficient release change management and the smooth integration of new functionalities. You can identify these features by looking for those tagged as “Users, automatically” in the release plan
Manual Activation Required:
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In this release wave, certain features need to be manually activated or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to make them accessible to users. To get a complete list of such features, search for those tagged as “Users by admins, makers, or analysts” in the release plan. To access specific details about these features, please consult the relevant release plan in the provided links or within the introduction section. Staying informed is key to successfully implementing these new capabilities.
Please feel free to contact us for more information on the advanced features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Release Wave 2 Features. Brightpoint Infotech is a global Microsoft Dynamics Solutions partner with strong expertise in Business Central, Finance & Supply Chain Management, SharePoint, and Power Platform.
