Business Central 2020 Release Wave 2 - What's New?

Whether you are live on Business Central, in the throws of implementation or considering an upgrade from your legacy environment – NAV or otherwise – Microsoft is delivering an exciting bundle of updates with the shipment of Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 2. And it’s worth paying attention.

Interestingly, the main focus is on adapting the platform to support the demands of a rapidly growing customer base. Business Central has one of the fastest growing user bases of any Microsoft app which has caused some problems in the past. We are excited for the promise of improved performance! Other highlights include: handling of file storage, geographic expansion, top customer requested features, and deeper integration with Microsoft Teams.

Get Ready For:

• Seamless service: Performance, reliability, and supportability are all three essential to ensure that the service quality remains ahead of the growth in usage. Accessibility, already in a strong position, must be preserved, and better support for resizing pages is added. The Business Central 2020 release wave 2 also incorporates the results of a material top-to-bottom investment in Business Central service security enabling further telemetry visibility for partners through Azure Insights, and it brings improvements in conflict handling for synchronization with Common Data Service.
• Productivity: This release continues a commitment toward world-class productivity with enhancements to the modern clients, and requested features such as returning to the request page after previewing a report, and the ability to change the assigned printer before printing a report.
• Microsoft Power Platform integration: This release includes further investments in the integration with Microsoft Power Platform. Microsoft is investing in both existing connectors as well as enabling virtual entities. Cannot stress enough how important this is! As an experienced implementor, we recommend our clients save time, money and headaches by ditching custom coded apps where possible in favor of the Power Platform and Microsoft Flow to deliver required functionality that’s unique to your business.
• Better with Office 365: Integration with Microsoft Teams helps teams collaborate and make decisions faster by accessing their business data from Teams channels. When you try this out you will be amazed at how easy, and therefore useful, this can be.
• Geographic expansion: The 2020 release wave 2 lays the foundation for future onboarding of more countries and regions. Next up: Brazil, Ireland, and Lithuania.
• Customer-requested enhancements: Business Central continues to focus on responding to top customer enhancement requests. In addition to multiple features harvested from the product Ideas portal, top feedback areas such as email setup and use is enhanced.

Last, but certainly not least:

• Customer migration tools: To simplify the journey for existing Dynamics customers to Business Central online, support is added for migration from a broader set of Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV versions. Improvements are also made for selective migration of Dynamics GP customers and vendors along with enhanced migration of Dynamics GP Chart of Account setups.

Together, these enhancements are designed to empower the migration from various versions of Dynamics on-premises,improve service quality, supportability, end-user productivity, and provide better experiences for customers.