Dynamics 365 2021 release wave 1 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 release plan for the 2021 release wave 1 describes all new features releasing from April 2021 through September 2021. 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.
The Microsoft Power Platform features coming in the 2021 release wave 1 have been summarized in a separate release plan as well as a downloadable PDF.
Download the 2021 release wave 1 PDF (last updated October 25, 2021)
2021 release wave 1 overview
The 2021 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 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, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Business Central, Customer Insights, and Customer Voice.
Marketing
- Dynamics 365 Marketing focuses on delivering deeper personalization and more channels to engage and reach your customers with the right messages with built-in analytics dashboards and cross-journey insights to improve results and achieve your business goals.
Sales
- Dynamics 365 Sales focuses on adding productivity enhancements for sellers and providing more access to data-driven insights to help with decision making. Look for updates to automation and sequencing, conversation intelligence, and many exciting updates to the mobile app enhancing the mobile experience for sellers on the go.
Service
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service transforms the contact center by providing intelligent omnichannel routing across channels. The all-in-one contact center will ship with a logistic and integrated first-party voice and chat solution to enable customers to be up and running quickly.
- Dynamics 365 Field Service introduces a comprehensive experience for customers that will allow them to self-schedule service and rate technicians to ensure the maximum satisfaction. Other investments in 2021 release wave 1 include streamlined onboarding experience, comprehensive customer engagement capabilities, and broader resourcing options.
Finance and Operations
- Dynamics 365 Finance brings the intelligent cash flow offering to public preview with automation based on predictive results. Users experience out-of-the-box machine learning including when customers are predicted to pay, forecasting the budget and viewing forecasted cash positions based on actual accounts payable, accounts receivable and project transactions, and predicted outcomes.
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management expands on inventory and logistics scenarios providing a single, organization-wide source of truth for inventory quantity-on-hand with the Inventory Visibility Add-in. In Asset Management, customers will be able to bill for maintenance work. Manufacturing adds execution with scale units in the cloud to run mission-critical processes without interruption.
- Dynamics 365 Project Operations delivers rich new experiences with the ability to forecast, use, and invoice non-stocked materials on projects. Also included is the ability to set up contractual commitments like billing methods and chargeability rules by task or a work breakdown schedule. Customers using Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation will be able to upgrade to Project Operations.
- Dynamics 365 Guides is focusing on intelligent workflows. By taking further advantage of data captured with HoloLens as well as AI innovations, users can get to work and confirm their results faster and simpler than ever. In addition, new entities for completion time enable customers to build Power Automate flows that support their unique enterprise needs.
Human Resources
- Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to broaden the human capital management (HCM) ecosystem through integration APIs and strategic partnerships. The employee experience expands to support benefit notifications and a summary statement providing a consolidated view of benefits for employees.
Commerce
- Dynamics 365 Commerce brings to market an integrated B2B and B2C e-commerce offering in a single Commerce solution with unified merchandising and site management capabilities that enable a wide range of business models across industries and verticals. Commerce also expands the native integrations with Bing for Commerce search for product search, as well as Customer Service and Power Virtual Agents, to unify business processes across prepurchase and post-purchase scenarios.
Fraud Protection
- Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection adds behavioral and mobile fingerprinting, improving the accuracy of fraud management rules.
SMB
- Dynamics 365 Business Central delivers a set of new features designed to simplify and improve the way our partners administer tenants, and the way administrators manage licensing and permissions. Application enhancements expand the integration with Microsoft Teams, add country and regional expansions, and include moves to Visual Studio Code to provide modern development tools, further enhancing the productivity for developers.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
- Audience insights capabilities enable every organization to unify and understand their customer data to harness it for intelligent insights and actions. Audience insights is adding customization and extensibility capabilities of the customer view, additional connectors for data ingestion, better controls for AI-based unification, and capabilities to enable marketing, sales, and service professionals to drive personalized engagements across channels.
- Engagement insights capabilities enable individual and holistic interactive analytics over web, mobile, and connected products customer journey touchpoints.
Customer Voice
- Dynamics 365 Customer Voice expands the capabilities to collect feedback with prefilled answers, file upload support, drill-down question type, and customized survey headers. Additional capabilities designed to improve survey response rate include pause and resume survey to enable users to complete a survey on a different device, automated survey reminders for recipients who have not filled out the survey, and over-survey management. Creating a follow-up action workflow is made easier with Power Automate survey response trigger.
Industry accelerators
Industry accelerators are foundational components within Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 that enable ISVs and other solution providers to quickly build industry vertical solutions. The accelerators extend Common Data Model to include new entities to support a data schema for concepts within specific industries.
Key dates for the 2021 release wave 1
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 1.
| Milestone | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Release plans available | January 27, 2021 | Learn about the new capabilities coming in the 2021 release wave 1 (April 2021 – September 2021) across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. |
| Early access available | February 1, 2021 | Test and validate new features and capabilities that will be a part of the 2021 release wave 1, coming in April, before they get enabled automatically for your users. You can view the Dynamics 365 2021 release wave 1 early access features now. |
| Release plans available in 11 additional languages | February 23, 2021 | The Dynamics 365 and Power Platform release plans published in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. |
| General availability | April 1, 2021 | Production deployment for the 2021 release wave 1 begins. Regional deployments will start on April 2, 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 1.
Let us know your thoughts. Share your feedback in the Dynamics 365 community forums. We will use your feedback to make improvements.