Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2022 release wave 1
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2022 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2022 to September 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Overview
Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business application solution that is designed and optimized for small and midsized organizations. In 2022 release wave 1, you will see further investments centering on helping users get to productive usage faster, whether they are new or existing customers of ours, by providing in-app improvements to help them get started. We expand on the capabilities of the Help pane and make it the go-to resource for helping both new and existing users. We continue our geographic expansion, and we will improve performance and usability by focusing on easier navigation in menus. To help users be productive, we enhance our reporting capabilities with Excel layouts.
Seamless service: No matter the industry type of a small or midsized business (SMB), business users expect a dependable service and platform that they can run their business on.
Administration: In 2022 release wave 1, Business Central delivers a set of features that are designed to simplify and improve the way our partners administer tenants, and the way administrators manage licensing and permissions.
Application: The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancement of the capabilities so that users can execute business processes more productively.
Better with Microsoft 365: In 2022 release wave 1, we improve the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams, and we harden the Excel and Outlook add-ins.
Country and regional: In 2022 release wave 1, Business Central is generally available in more countries and regions.
Onboarding: In 2022 release wave 1, customers can get to productive usage faster using the new modern Help pane.
Development tools: As we have moved entirely to Visual Studio Code, we continue to invest in areas that enhance productivity for developers. Additionally, we introduce GitHub Go for partners to set up CI/CD for their apps without any prior knowledge about pipelines, Docker, or PowerShell.
Power Platform: We improve our Power Automate capabilities, making it much easier to set up workflows for the specific needs of an organization.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 release wave 1
Tip
Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.
* Overview guide available in English version only
Investment areas
Better with Microsoft 365
In 2022 release wave 1, we invest in a stronger reporting story through better integration with Excel where we'll use the Excel layout capabilities. We also further improve the support for collaborative business processes in Teams so you can bring Business Central pages into a Teams channel. Finally, we also enrich the information from Business Central that we present in Teams.
Development
We continue to invest in a rich spectrum of extensibility tooling capabilities for developers, including making the AL language even stronger, providing developers with a great experience.
Microsoft Power Platform
In 2022 release wave 1, we improved the integration with Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform so that users can be more productive and self-sufficient when they use Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI with Business Central. For example, we made it simple and intuitive to trigger a Power Automate flow from a specific Business Central page. In another example, this update makes it possible to use data change events from Dataverse virtual tables in the Power Automate flows.
Application
In 2022 release wave 1, we deliver updates based on the most popular requests for improvement. We'll invest in better reporting, improve the control of deferral postings, improve the Dimensions capabilities by allowing default dimensions on locations, and we'll deliver several improvements to the supply chain area.
Country and regional
More countries are added, bringing Business Central to more than 70 countries and regions. Expansion to more countries and regions is achieved through partner-led localization. Our partners create the relevant localization apps and publish them to AppSource. In combination with the built-in language offerings, Business Central is available to serve customers in over 70 countries and regions worldwide.
Onboarding
Onboarding is a key focus in every release wave. The aim is to make the onboarding of new customers faster, but also the onboarding of new users. In the most recent release waves, we have removed some of the friction in the onboarding of new customers by empowering partners to deliver uniform onboarding experiences at scale. This way, our partners can deliver more valuable services to their customers. Partners can use a combination of in-product artifacts, such as the Get Started checklist, teaching tips, configuration packages, and assisted setups.
In 2022 release wave 1, onboarding to Dynamics 365 Business Central will be even easier because we will focus on people-centric experiences. Business Central becomes able to provide easy access to context-specific content. This way, we flatten the learning curve and unblock individual users in performing their business processes. Users will also be guided to understand how they can personalize Business Central to their needs.
The access to the context-specific content will be powered by a new and modern Help pane similar to that of other Microsoft offerings. The context-specific content that users get access to through the Help pane will include Microsoft-hosted content and partner-hosted content so that the Help pane is the go-to place to get unblocked.
Additionally, teaching tips will be able to include clickable links so that page- and control-level teaching tips can refer to documentation or other in-app pages.
Modern clients
In 2022 release wave 1, we make improvements to our extensive portfolio of clients with the focus on better usability, accessibility, performance, and stability.
Service and platform
No matter the industry type of a small or medium-sized business (SMB), business users expect a dependable service and platform that they can run their business on. In every release wave, we improve performance. In this release wave, we provide more insight by enabling an in-product performance advisor and in-client performance profiler. We also continue the effort of improving the client's rendering time and the performance of data entry.
Governance and administration
Business Central 2022 release wave 1 delivers a set of admin and governance capabilities to help admins and IT pros set up, secure, manage, govern, and monitor customer environments. Areas of investments include improving the error messages to include additional details and support information.
Reporting
Reporting is top-of-mind for many business users, as a way to get insight into new growth opportunities and also as a way to share data as a foundation for business planning discussions. We'll deliver a better experience with Excel layouts. We'll also provide improvements to the account schedules capability. Finally, we'll improve our Power BI analytics story by enabling more Power BI dashboards to be shown on the Home page of business users.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Business Central
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Business Central. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Business Central. |
| User community | Engage with Business Central experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Business Central. |