We’re delighted: Microsoft’s 2022 Wave 1 Update for Business Central 365 is upon us. As with every update, there are many changes and improvements. We’re particularly interested in some of the application enhancements. We think these will be a massive benefit to many businesses. Here’s the list:
- Blocking deletion of G/L accounts
- Payment reconciliation journal – Preview Posting enabled
- Allow the sell-to and bill-to customers to be different for jobs
- Bank Account Statement report
- Create bank deposits Users by admins, makers, or analysts
- Block VAT and General Posting Setups
- Change default company bank account on sales and service documents
- Check documents and journals in while you work
- Consolidate customer and vendor balances
- Finding documents and entries efficiently
- Fixed Quantity in product bills of materials
- Improved and extensible Adjust Exchange Rates batch job
- Map to Dataverse option sets such as payment terms, freight terms, and shipping agents without code
- More control over deferrals posting
- New UI for entering demand forecasts to add support for variant code and other improvements Users, automatically
- Report selection for projects
- Set default dimensions on locations
- Standardising the bank reconciliation process in North American versions Users, automatically
- Support inventory pick and warehouse pick operations for jobs
- Use different G/L accounts for payables and receivables transactions
- Sync sales orders both ways in Business Central and Sales
New app
Critically, Microsoft will list a new Progressive Web App-based desktop app in the Microsoft store. It will replace the legacy app (based on older UWP technology) for Business Central online. Microsoft will maintain the older app for supported on-premises Business Central versions.
Many users prefer a desktop app, and the behaviours, such as pinning to the Start menu or taskbar, allow. The new app will provide these features while maintaining the whole web client experience, including key features such as multitasking, personalisation and cloud printing.
That’s far from being the full story; here’s a quick run-down of the other key changes.
Better with Microsoft 365
- Enhancements to Microsoft Teams integration
- Outlook add-in: add email attachments to Business Central records
- Share a file through OneDrive
Development
- Isolated events
- New isolated event: OnCompanyOpenCompleted
- Auto-deploy dependent projects in workspace
- Demo tool and demo data for manufacturing scenarios
- In-client performance profiler
- AL-Go for GitHub: modern DevOps for partner
- Telemetry: company name as a custom dimension in AL LogMessage
- Users can export report datasets to XML
Governance and administration
- Allow security administrator to define default permission set assignments when user is signing up
- Updating only licensed users from Microsoft 365 runs faster and more efficiently
- Delegated admin’s job queue entries are run by user
- Permission set handling enhancements
Microsoft Power Platform
- Dataverse data change events
- Action group to run chosen instant Power Automate flow
- Improvements to the power Automate and Power Apps connector
Modern clients
- Copy link from Share menu
- New desktop app delivering full web client experience on desktop is listed in the Microsoft Store
- Usability improvements to the web client
Onboarding
- Context-aware links in the Help pane from Microsoft and partners
- Guided tour that helps users find settings and personalisation tools
- Support for rich text in teaching tips and tours
- Tour of the Role Explorer and how to filter it
Reporting
- New capabilities for financial reporting with account schedules
- Use Excel to design layouts for reports
Service and platform
- Performance: partners can get insights into database wait statistics
- Telemetry: error dialogs are logged to telemetry
- Telemetry: support engineers can now see user IDs in telemetry
- Telemetry: the action of enabling detailed telemetry is logged to telemetry
- Telemetry: when a database deadlock occurs, it is logged to telemetry
That’s a lot of improvements! Check out this document from Microsoft for full descriptions and links to more information.
And of course, get in touch with Eagle360 if you’ve got any questions or would like to explore some of these improvements in more detail.