Here at Eagle360, we make no bones that we think Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the best business application solution for most businesses.
And with the latest release – 2021 wave 1 – now live, we’re pretty excited about the new capabilities that Microsoft has added. These include administration, banking and payments, collaboration, modern development tools, onboarding, service and various country-specific products. Here are some highlights:
Administration
Release Wave 1 includes features to simplify tenant administration as well as licensing and permission management:
- Improve database export reliability
- Improvements for Delegated Administrators
- Microsoft Support can reassign an environment from one Azure Active Directory organisation to another
Application
Microsoft has delivered some highly requested features and general improvements, including:
- Assisted setup to schedule Job Queue to run adjust cost in the background
- Automatic Lot and Serial No information creation
- Bank reconciliation improvements
- Changes in Contact and Customer synchronisation
- Default Dimensions settings
- Define lot sizes for different production stages
- Dimension corrections for G/L Entries
- Inventory documents
- Payment reconciliation journal improvements
- Simplified bank statements file import
Better with Microsoft 365
Improved efficiency for collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams. The Excel and Outlook add-ins have been hardened:
- Cloud printing using Microsoft Universal Print
- Look up Business Central contract from within Teams Users
- Word merge in Business Central
Country and regional
Release wave 1 makes Business Central 2021 generally available in India, Greece, Romania and Turkey, making it available in 52 countries globally.
Microsoft Power Platform
Power Platform includes Power Bi, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. It’s a comprehensive toolkit that’s now even better:
- Enable Power BI connector to work from within BC APIs (rather than from web services only)
- Synchronise item availability from BC to D365 Sales
- Virtual Tables for Microsoft Dataverse
Modern clients
Enhancements to make Dynamics 365 even more reliable include:
- Change assigned printer
- Client performance improvements
- Enable cloud printing from the mobile and Teams apps
- Report API can pass layouts for report execution
- Reports run in the background
- Web client usability improvements
Modern development tools
Microsoft has moved entirely to Visual Studio Code, enabling productivity-enhancing changes such as:
- Partners can add keys and indexes to base and extension tables
- Extension validation on upgrade
- Interface obsolete support (to obsolete interfaces like other AL objects)
- Report extensibility
- Return record link instead of name (when using lookups)
Onboarding
Efficient onboarding is critical for every operation and Business Central 2021 release wave 1 helps customers become more productive, faster:
- ‘Getting started’ checklist
- Improved ‘get started with Power BI’ experience
- Improved company setup experience3
- In-app contextual help improvements
However you look at it and whatever features you need, we think Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 1 release has you covered. Contact us today if you’d like to learn more.