In2018, Microsoft released the Continuous Update policy for Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management (D365 FSCM), which included seven service updates per year.
Last month Microsoft announced it reducing the number of service updates released per year to four. Here’s what to expect with these upcoming D365 FSCM release schedule changes.
NEW RELEASE SCHEDULE
Major releases, previously known as the Spring and Fall updates, will shift to January and July, with minor updates in April and October. The new naming convention will also be introduced at the same time.
Major releases will be denoted on version numbers with a “*”, e.g., “CY25Q2: 10.0.43*”.
The update name will consist of two segments.
The first will denote the year and quarter the update is scheduled to automatically be applied to production environments.
The second segment will be the update version. For example, “CY24Q1: 10.0.38” is version 10.0.38 that will be automatically applied to production from the first quarter of 2024 onwards.
You can only pause one consecutive update instead of three.
The total minimum number of updates you are required to take per year remains at two.
Proactive Quality Updates (PQUs) remain unchanged and will be pushed in between service updates, delivering periodic cumulative hotfixes.
The PQUs will follow the same “safe-deployment” model, which first delivers the PQUs to a single region that contains a small group of customers who have the highest tolerance for risk.
When no regressions are identified, the process continues through a broader group of customers, based on geographies (stations), until all customers are using the new version.
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Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.
Microsoft Graph is the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft 365. It provides a unified programmability model to access the tremendous amount of data in Microsoft 365, Windows, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. Use the wealth of data in Microsoft Graph to build apps for organizations and consumers that interact with millions of users. Custom applications can use the Microsoft Graph API to connect to data and use it in custom applications to enhance organizational productivity.
Microsoft Graph provides a single endpoint that the app can use to access the required data and to simplify the overall development process.
Organizations store vast amounts of data and intelligence across Microsoft cloud services, but how accessible is the data to users?
For example, a salesperson is setting up a meeting with a customer, wants to easily access files and previous meetings and notes but are those emails and chats between a salesperson and customer easy to find? What people within the organization can the customer contact for support?
Data and intelligence like the following types can be accessed through the Microsoft Graph REST APIs and client libraries:
Users and groups
Teams data
Tasks
Files
Mail
Meetings and calendars
Organizational charts
Copilot is an AI-powered tool that uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand users’ requests and provide personalized recommendations, tips, and assistance. Users can ask Copilot questions and get instant answers, guidance, and suggestions to help them work more efficiently.
Copilot is designed to be available across multiple Microsoft 365 applications, including :Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and Outlook, and is intended to be context-aware. It ‘understands’ the user’s specific needs and the task at hand. Some examples of this functionality are the ability to point copilot to a word document, and request to create a power point presentation based on the data in the document.
Copilot will also work with tools from the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 products. Copilot for Power Virtual Agents is already in preview.
Copilot enables marketers to create targeted customer experiences and interactions that are informed by data-driven decision making. With access to the natural language data discovery feature in Customer Insights, they can build confidence by validating and discovering customer insights for their marketing strategies. For example, a marketer can ask Copilot how many of their customers fit the profile of currently residing in Washington, DC, who are over the age of 25, who have also attended a promotional event in the last six months.
With just a few clicks, Copilot will present the results of their query, including the number of customers that match the attributes or behaviors, as well as other useful information such as the customer lifetime value, product preferences, or average purchase price.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights removes the barrier of needing to craft queries in SQL to get a deeper understanding of customers, enabling marketers to speed and scale the delivery of hyper-personalized experiences that customers expect.
Copilot in Viva Sales
Automatically generate contextual email replies and meeting summaries with Copilot in Viva Sales, available to Dynamics 365 Sales customers. Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales helps sellers dramatically reduce the time they spend on clerical tasks. AI helps write email responses to customers and can even create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. The meeting summary pulls in details from the seller’s CRM such as product and pricing information, as well as insights from the recorded Teams call. With sellers spending as much as 66% of their day checking and responding to emails, this presents a significant business upside to give the seller more time with their customers.
. For example, with Viva Sales, Copilot can learn how to connect to CRM systems of record to pull customer data — like interaction and order histories — into communications. As Copilot learns about new domains and processes, it will be able to perform even more sophisticated tasks and queries.
Copilot in Microsoft VivaGoalssimplifies goal setting by guiding leaders through the process of creating objectives and key results (OKRs) as well as simplifying goal management across the organization. Copilot can suggest draft OKR recommendations based on existing Word documents, such as an annual business plan or a product strategy paper. Once created, Copilot saves employees time by summarizing the status of OKRs, identifying blockers, and suggesting next steps. Lastly, Copilot can consolidate existing data to generate more comprehensive check-ins so teams can leverage a breadth of knowledge across different sources of truth.
An entirely new experience is Business Chat that works across he Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads.
You will be able to access Business Chat from Microsoft 365.com, from Bing when you’re signed in with your work account, or from Teams.
Copilot will fundamentally change how people work with AI and how AI works with people. As with any new pattern of work, there’s a learning curve — but those who embrace this new way of working will quickly gain an edge. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust.
I have only scratched the surface – Teams swept the business world during COVID now Co-Pilot and VIVA integrated across your favourite apps erps and crm systems – we often read about game changing software and paradigm shifts- but this times it’s for real and faster than we realise.
After almost 10 years, support for Windows 8.1 ended on January 10, 2023. Consequently support for Power BI Desktop on Windows 8.1 will stop on January 31, 2024.
After that, Power BI Desktop will only be supported on Windows 10 and newer.
The January 2024 release of Power BI Desktop for Report Server will be the last release to support Windows 8.1, and this version will only receive security updates until January 2025 per the Modern Lifecycle Policy.
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Asset Management is an advanced module for managing assets and maintenance jobs in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Asset Management integrates seamlessly with several other finance and operations apps.
The new mobile app is available for all commonly used mobile platforms, devices, and form factors.
The app enables maintenance workers to review their assigned jobs, mark tasks as complete, enter notes, and log the time and materials consumed. Other staff can use the app to quickly file maintenance requests by scanning a barcode, entering notes, and submitting photos.
The Asset Management mobile app is built as a Canvas app in PowerApps, and doesn’t require any additional licenses to use. The app leverages the security roles already established in Supply Chain Management to grant the appropriate users access to the maintenance request and/or job management functions as needed.
System requirements
To run the Asset Management mobile app, you must be running Supply Chain Management version 10.0.32 or higher.
The app is available for all commonly used mobile platforms, devices, and form factors.
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Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into Dynamics 365 technology and security, which has produced many great new features.
When you move to the cloud, everyone is maintained on the same version, and you will always be in lockstep with Microsoft updates. You can be proactive and flexible in promoting those upgrades into your production environment to enhance your user experience.
Your integrations will become extensions-based, rather than relying on over-layering. This will give you several benefits because Extensions make rolling updates much easier
Easier to apply new releases, updates, and hotfixes without affecting customization
ISVs provide new releases quicker
Reduce the cost and effort involved with an upgrade
– all of this without impacting the core code of your environment
We understand why some businesses are hesitant to move to the cloud, but from our view, the benefits outweigh the risk. Microsoft has invested heavily in Azure. It is built on the latest hardware, has 24-7 monitoring year-round, and is consistently updated.
With this move, you will have peace of mind not having to worry about the hardware, energy, labour costs and work associated with backup and disaster recovery. While many businesses feel they have control over their on-site servers, this can lead to a false sense of security. Cyber threats are prevalent and getting faster and more sophisticated. Whether a business has on-site servers with a backup plan or not, many simply aren’t prepared for the worst-case scenario unless they have a large internal IT team or pay for a costly third-party IT service.
Microsoft recognizes this and has over 3,500 Azure cybersecurity professionals working to protect its cloud and has invested in it to the tune of over $1 billion annually. Simply put, upgrading takes that load off your shoulders and puts it onto a specially trained Microsoft team.
Azure also has thousands of connectors, and a Dataverse ( Common data model) to integrate non-Microsoft systems with your Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations environment.
One of the greatest benefits of upgrading is you can create low/no-code applications using the Power Platform. Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate, and the Dataverse combine to form the Power Platform, a program that integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365 solutions.
It lets you compile, design, and publish your data very easily into visually appealing reports and dashboards that can be used internally and externally and published to workspaces or organizational/public-facing apps.
Create apps for your team to have the information they need to work from wherever they are, on whatever device they use..
One of the best features of the Power Platform is that data changes synchronise across your system. For example, go into a system to update a client’s contact information, and that change will update in all your connected systems.
Power BI is a cloud-based analytics tool that gives you a single visual view of your most critical business data. You can create reports on the health of your business, dashboards displaying critical numbers and figures that help your staff work, and rich and interactive visualizations. It is easy to use and integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365 technologies. There are out of the box embedded dashboards and Synergy has created many client specific dashboards.
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Most versions of Dynamics AX are off both Mainstream and Extended Support, which means they have no access to new features, and will not get fixes for either non-security or security issues, and cannot reach out to Microsoft for one-on-one support.
AX 2012 R3 is on extended support, but that support cycle will end on January 10, 2023. Extended support means you still get security fixes. However, you have no access to new features, and need to pay an annual fee plus a per-incident charge for non-security fixes and access to support.
From January 2023, all Dynamics AX customers will be on their own for Microsoft core code and security threats, or for issues about compatibility with database or operating system changes. It’s essential to have a proven partner to support local builds and customisations and to help explain and manage the upgrade process.
That’s why if you have not already moved to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations then time has run out. Urgent action is advised. It takes time to review options, to understand the different licences, the many new features, the new technology platform, and to mobilise resources and to reimplement an enterprise company.
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This covers the new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2022 to March 2023.
Updates in 2022 release wave 2 include:
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: Business Central delivers a set of features for better and improved communication about the health of each environment.
Application: Improve integration with Shopify. The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancements so that users can run their business processes more efficiently.
Better with Microsoft 365: Improved the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams. Users can pin cards inside Teams, and delegated admins can now use the Excel add-in.
Country and regional: In 2022 release wave 2, Business Central is generally available in more countries and regions.
Onboarding: Organizations can get to productive usage faster because it’s easier to discover and install apps.
Development tools: Now entirely Visual Studio Code
Power Platform: More efficient automation with Power Automate so that users can set up workflows for the specific needs of their organization.
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.
Power BI innovation never stops. For several years in a row now, it is positioned as a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, furthest to the right for completeness of vision and furthest up in the ability to execute within the Leaders’ quadrant.
The gaps are widening with interactive reports, paginated reports, datasets, dataflows, deployment pipelines, scorecards, dashboards, metrics, data alerts, and much more, and recently announced in public preview, self-service datamarts. No wonder, customers are adopting Power BI at an accelerated pace. Boost Office 365 productivity with Power BI integrated into PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams, connect to data anywhere with hundreds of built-in connectors, leverage industry-leading AI, go quickly from insight to action with the Microsoft Power Platform, and provide best-in-class mobile experiences with Power BI Mobile.
Reports can be mobile friendly, they can be paginated, and you can link into Azure Analysis Services.
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Power BI continues to invest in empowering every individual, team, and organization to drive a data culture. Creation experience is improved by aligning our experiences with Office and enabling datasets authoring on the web.
By bringing power query diagram view into Power BI Desktop, creators can use a no code experience to perform extract transform load (ETL) on their data.
For teams, there are enhancements to metrics focused on enterprise needs and integration with Microsoft Viva Goals.
The big data experience is increased through:
automatic aggregations,
query scale out,
data protection capabilities via data loss prevention (DLP),
improved visibility into activity to admins.
Power Apps will expand governance capabilities to allow organizations to enable, manage, and support citizen development across the entire organization.
Makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive over Dataverse in a unified studio, with modern experiences to build and manage data and logic.
Infused intelligence will: support development, enrich data, and optimize end-user experiences.
In addition to ensuring trust and the ability to leverage rich data experiences, both makers and end-users will benefit from out-of-the-box collaboration capabilities to enable users to be more productive when working together.
Power Pages brings more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code/no-code development as well professional developers.
In this release makers have additional capabilities to work with forms and lists and to use the design studio to get started quickly with additional solution templates.
There are enhancements for professional developers to do more with the sites and to use both the Microsoft Power Platform command line interface (CLI) tool and visual studio (VS) Code
Administrators can also use those tools to better administer and govern their Power Pages sites.
Power Automate is more accessible with new experiences to help users of every skill level to build out their cloud and desktop flows.
Organizations can automate their deployments of Power Automate, with additional enhancements for application lifecycle management (ALM).
For increased usage of robotic process automation (RPA), new features will make it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of your users and accounts.
Power Virtual Agents bring improvements in:
the authoring experience with commenting,
Power Pages integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Teams, and more.
Creating a bot is typically a complex and time-intensive process, requiring long content update cycles and a team of experts.
Power Virtual Agents gives anyone in your organization the ability to create powerful custom bots using an easy, code-free graphical interface, without the need for AI experts, data scientists, or teams of developers.
A bot can interact with users, ask for clarifying information, and ultimately answer a user’s questions.
AI Builder continues to enable citizen developers to use and customize AI capabilities to build more intelligent apps and workflows. Lifecycle and governance of AI Builder models will be improved with enhanced versioning, deployment, and monitoring capabilities.
Makers will also benefit from new features for intelligent document and text processing like the ability to manage human in-the-loop validation, easier integration of large data sets for automated e-mail processing, and the ability to process contracts and multi-page tables in documents.
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