Dynamics 365 and industry clouds: 2021 release wave 2 plan
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 documentation. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
The Dynamics 365 and industry clouds release plan for the 2021 release wave 2 describes new features releasing from October 2021 through March 2022. You can either browse the release plan online or download the document as a PDF file. The PDF file also includes information about Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration, and data integration.
Download the 2021 release wave 2 PDF (final update May 6, 2022)
The Microsoft Power Platform features coming in the 2021 release wave 2 have been summarized in a separate release plan as well as a downloadable PDF.
2021 release wave 2 overview
The 2021 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 and industry clouds brings new innovations that provide you with significant capabilities to transform your business. The release contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Insights, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Business Central, Connected Spaces, Guides, Remote Assist, Customer Insights, Customer Voice, and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Financial Services, and Nonprofit.
Marketing
Dynamics 365 Marketing focuses on capabilities to create personalized journeys to engage with your customers across all touchpoints, in the moments that matter. It takes personalization to the next level, and helps you find inspiration with AI-based content ideas so you can deliver superior experiences to win more customers and earn their loyalty.
Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales focuses on realizing exciting new functionality as well as enhancements to the Microsoft Teams calling experience, LinkedIn integration enhancements for easy access to Sales Navigator, forecasting updates, and guided selling improvements with sales accelerator and launching deal manager that helps to manage your pipeline more effectively.
Service
Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivers rich knowledge-authoring enhancements with AI-suggested keywords and brief descriptions for knowledge articles. It also offers enhancements to agent experience and productivity to handle omnichannel support and investing in routing diagnostics for supervisors, machine learning-based rules for classification such as sentiment analysis, and effort estimation and improved historical analytics.
Dynamics 365 Field Service introduces a new customer portal that includes self-scheduling and appointment-management capabilities for providing better service and customer communication. In addition, a new work order is released with enhancements to provide better unified views and work order summary to increase productivity.
Finance and Operations
Dynamics 365 Finance is investing in data insights as part of general availability of Finance Insights, which is the intelligent cash flow offering that empowers users with out-of-the-box machine learning for financial operations. Through automation and modernizing the services that our customers use daily, this release wave brings enhanced usability and performance around fixed assets, year-end close, and financial dimensions. Globalization offering with additional localizations and the general availability of our Tax Calculation service are added to this release.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enables resilient supply chain with investments in key areas such as resource planning, manufacturing, asset management, planning and inventory management. New manufacturing execution scenarios are included to allow integration between Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, common manufacturing execution solutions (MES), and shop floor automation systems for our customers to be able to easily adopt and integrate new business models.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights connects data sources from a variety of apps to enable interactive analytics that enables you to gain valuable insights across your end-to-end supply chain. This includes the ability to connect to other organizations, share data, leverage out-of-the-box connectors, deep supply chain analytics, and advanced and AI-driven analytics.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams all in one application to win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability by delivering rich capabilities and enhancements to task scheduling and managing subcontracts with vendors.
Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities brings in Microsoft Power Platform governance features to enable new capabilities such as environment provisioning, authorization and authentication, run-time events, and developer tools. New capabilities in this release include providing enhanced data exchange experiences between Finance and Operations apps, Microsoft Dataverse, and Customer Engagement apps in Dynamics 365.
Human Resources
Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides enhancements to Benefits management capabilities that offer a simplified user experience. Our continued journey to bring capabilities that enable employee workflow includes managing their leave requests using the Teams app and providing organizations the ability to view analytics on leave balances that helps meet company policies.
Commerce
Dynamics 365 Commerce includes key investments for this wave in customer segmentation and using site builder with specific page layouts and content, integrating with Microsoft Clarity, creating a customer-specific catalog that provides a limited view to only see and order products that are configured for their organization and enhancements to the reordering experience and admin privileges.
Fraud Protection
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is expanding its experiences to offer deeper observability of fraud, enable merchants to try Fraud Protection directly from the web and enable payment service providers (PSPs) to integrate with Fraud Prevention to offer their merchants the capability to observe and combat fraud.
SMB
Dynamics 365 Business Central focuses on the application enhancements that expand the integration with Microsoft 365, adds country and regional expansions in 10 more markets, and adds capabilities that simplify tenant administration.
Connected Spaces
Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces brings together computer vision and AI to help transform the operational experience. By using data from video cameras, Connected Spaces delivers real-time actionable analytics that can make operations more efficient, improve customer experiences, and bridge the physical and digital divide by offering benefits that are traditionally available only in online spaces.
Guides
Dynamics 365 Guides helps authors to easily create guides without 3D or programming skills by leveraging the HoloLens app and PC app and providing an updated user experience leveraging HoloLens instinctual interactions.
Remote Assist
Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, as part of this release, will cascade Microsoft Teams meeting policies for Remote Assist users to simply configuration.
Customer Insights
Audience insights adds capabilities to eliminate data silos and build a unified customer profile to provide intelligent insights and action for their B2C and B2B customers. In the B2B area, in addition to churn predictions for individual customer records, audience insights will predict the likelihood of churn for accounts in the same straightforward guided experience. Data ingestion enhancements in Customer Insights include additional Power Query connectors and improvements to the data ingestion process.
Engagement insights connects data sources from a variety of apps to enable interactive analytics over web, mobile, connected products, and customer journey touchpoints. This includes out-of-the-box analytics, customer journey analytics, and advanced and AI-driven analytics and insights such as personalization and attribution modeling. Engagement insights expands to multichannel analytics over data from other channels for richer customer analytics, downstream actions, activations, and optimizations.
Customer Voice
Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is focused on helping survey owners to act on feedback based on insights and trends and use Power Automate to define and trigger custom workflows to engage the right contacts.
Microsoft Cloud for Industry Solutions
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps healthcare organizations to deliver exceptional patient care by enhancing patient experiences, coordinating patient care, and driving operational efficiency through tailored capabilities from Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Teams, and Azure. This update includes a unified patient profile and activity timeline for better patient insights, improved ingestion of healthcare data into Microsoft Dataverse, and expansion to more countries and regions.
Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services provides differentiating customer experiences and increases customer retention through a unified customer profile that helps relationship managers to gain 360-degree customer insights, predict customer churn, and facilitate cross and upsell. In addition, it provides transparent loan onboarding through process automation and integration with Microsoft Teams loan manager to reduce time from interest to closing.
Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit launches two volunteering applications in this release: a volunteer management model-driven app for nonprofit staff to manage engagement opportunities and a Power Apps portal that integrates with nonprofit sites to span the volunteer recruitment efforts.
Key dates for the 2021 release wave 2
This release plan describes functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).
Here are the key dates for the 2021 release wave 2.
| Milestone | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Release plans available | July 14, 2021 | Learn about the new capabilities coming in the 2021 release wave 2 (October 2021 – March 2022) across Dynamics 365 and industry clouds and Microsoft Power Platform. |
| Early access available | August 2, 2021 | Test and validate new features and capabilities that will be part of 2021 release wave 2, coming in October, before they are enabled automatically for your users. You can view the Dynamics 365 2021 release wave 2 early access features now. |
| Release plans available in 11 additional languages | August 13, 2021 | The Dynamics 365 and industry clouds and Microsoft Power Platform release plans published in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. |
| General availability | October 1, 2021 | Production deployment for the 2021 release wave 2 begins. Regional deployments will start on October 1, 2021. |
Just like the previous release waves, we continue to call out how each feature will be enabled in your environment:
- Users, automatically – These features include changes to the user experience for users and are enabled automatically.
- Admins, makers, or analysts, automatically – These features are meant to be used by administrators, makers, or business analysts and are enabled automatically.
- Users by admins, makers, or analysts – These features must be enabled or configured by the administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users.
You can get ready with confidence knowing which features will be enabled automatically.
We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. We’re looking forward to engaging with you as you put these new services and capabilities to work, and we’re eager to hear your feedback as you dig into the 2021 release wave 2 plan.
Let us know your thoughts. Share your feedback in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 community forums. We'll use your feedback to make improvements.