Plan and prepare for Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities in 2021 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new or changed in Finance and Operations apps home page. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities.
Overview
Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities apply to all Finance and Operations apps, including Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations.
To enable businesses everywhere to accelerate their digital transformation, we are continuously enhancing the platform and services that support Finance and Operations apps with new capabilities. As we add product enhancements at a rapid pace, we deliver frequent updates (eight updates per year) that help customers stay current in a consistent, predictable, and seamless manner.
The key driver for all of the new, core capabilities is to increase productivity and return on investment. The Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities in this release wave can be divided into the following categories:
Power Platform convergence features are capabilities that bring Finance and Operations apps closer to Microsoft Power Platform. Environment provisioning, authorization and authentication, run-time events, and developer tools are areas that will enable new capabilities that take convergence forward.
Cross-app features provide ease of use to all users of Finance and Operations apps.
Data and process integration features provide enhanced data exchange experiences between Finance and Operations apps, Microsoft Dataverse, and customer engagement apps in Dynamics 365.
Updates to Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities 2021 release wave 2
Investment areas
Near-zero downtime
Today, customer environments running Finance and Operations apps need sustained downtime for maintenance operations. These maintenance operations include updates to operating systems, security, apps, or infrastructure that are needed to modernize the platform. We are investing in features that will help to reduce these downtime requirements, creating a scenario where there is almost zero downtime for maintenance operations.
In 2021 release wave 2, we are greatly reducing the downtime that is required for maintenance updates. Some of the investments included in this initiative will allow batch jobs to be retried and updates to the operating system patching window to take effect without taking the entire system offline.
Data and process integration
Data and process integration features provide enhanced data exchange experiences between Finance and Operations apps, Microsoft Dataverse, and customer engagement apps in Dynamics 365 through dual-write functionality. The data and process integration features also focus on presenting Finance and Operations data in Azure Data Lake Storage.
From a process perspective, the dual-write functionality helps in building a unified user experience for Dynamics 365 customers whose business processes span across front office and back office applications. From an analytics perspective, data in Azure Data Lake adds tremendous value for advanced AI features such as predictions through aggregate measurements.
Cross-app features
Cross-app features provide ease of use to all users of Finance and Operations apps. These capabilities improve development, administration, and user experiences by addressing some of the key shortcomings we’ve heard about from our customers.
For example:
- Developers will benefit from Visual Studio support for X++ development.
- Administrators will benefit from the auto-update capability that is extended to all Microsoft-managed sandbox environments.
- Users will benefit from improved legal entity support for saved views.
Power Platform convergence
Microsoft Power Platform provides a suite of capabilities for Dynamics 365 applications via the Power Platform admin center. Today, Finance and Operations apps are not managed by the Power Platform admin center; however, over time more and more management capabilities will be migrated from Dynamics 365 Lifecycle Services to the admin center.
In the interim, customers will be able to unlock features, such as dual-write, virtual entities, add-ins, create/update/delete events, business events via Dataverse, and more via Microsoft Power Platform integration functionality in Lifecycle Services.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities 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.