What’s New in Business Central in 2023 Release Wave 2
In this post we focus on 2023 release wave 2 changes and new functionality related to Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC).
This post is the third in our 2023 release wave 2 changes and functionality series.
In the initial post, we review 2023 release wave 2 changes and new functionality for Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management and Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities. Our second post reviews 2023 release wave 2 changes and new functionality for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Sales.
If you want to view these posts go to:
New in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Sales in 2023 Release Wave 2 | Velosio
In this post we focus on 2023 release wave 2 changes and new functionality related to Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC).
For additional details related to the topics reviewed in this post, or to view the applicable Release click here.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
Business Central (BC) is a business management application for small and mid-sized organizations. BC enables companies to effectively manage their finances, supply chain, manufacturing, shipping, projects and services in a controlled and efficient environment.
Additional updates in 2023 release wave 2 include:
Supply Chain
Supply chain capabilities in BC are improved with several optimizations and enhancements supporting more efficient inventory and warehouse processes. The picking process, fulfillment suggestion, SKU management, and added warehouse configuration granularity for manufacturing and jobs have been improved.
Availability Quantities Information
Easily access detailed availability information for inventory levels, locations, processing stages, and other factors that affect available quantities.
Independent Warehouse Handling
Independently configure the proper level of warehouse handling for inbound, outbound, and internal flows.
Bins
BC now suggests the appropriate item bin in basic warehouse configurations streamlining the bin assignment process.
Editing in Excel
The user can edit item journals and warehouse worksheets data in Excel, increasing efficiency by using familiar spreadsheet formats and excel functionality.
Order Handling
Receive suggestions about orders that are ready for handling. Suggestions help reduce partial shipments risk and ensure that production or assembly orders don’t get “stuck”, thereby improving customer satisfaction.
Financial Processing
Intercompany Accounting
Perform intercompany accounting tasks for multiple companies across multiple BC tenant environments, eliminating the need to manage files.
Consolidation
Consolidating financial data for companies in different BC environments without handling files increases productivity and improves data accuracy.
Approval Workflow
Use new approval workflow for intercompany general journals increasing control and eliminating errors.
Allocations
Make data entry more efficient and reduce errors by using custom allocation keys to automate the distribution of revenue or cost transactions across different accounts or dimensions.
Reporting and Data Analysis
Power BI
Power BI is enhanced with new and improved Power BI reports, as well as increased analysis mode capabilities supporting “on-the-fly” embedded data analysis. Not having to move between applications to get the information you need, increases productivity and reporting accuracy.
Reporting and Data Analysis
Increased capabilities in analysis mode, report enrichments, and a new reporting overview allowing you to explore all BC reports have been provisioned.
Governance and Administration
Environment Management
Business Central administrators now have more tools for managing environments, applications, and data migrations. These enhancements allow administrators to be self-sufficient, able to resolve company issues, and handle a wide variety of administrative scenarios.
Administrator Roles
Increased granularity of administrator role assignments provide more control over the access granted, or delegated to, administrators.
Other Enhancements
Minor updates
Improved processes for minor update releases increase administrator productivity.
BC and Power Platform Links
The ability to link BC and Power Platform environments to consistently set up integrations and to apply Power Platform environment settings to BC is now supported.
Cloud migration
The ability to cancel Cloud Migration replication runs is now available.
Onboarding Tooltips
Field tooltips provide improved ”Learn More” links explaining complex data more effectively.
Teams Collaboration
Improved collaborative business processes efficiency in Microsoft Teams by providing the capability to unfurl a card without installing the BC Teams application.
Service and Platform
Continued enhancement of service fundamentals focusing on performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance.
Increased Device Options
BC offers a broad user interface portfolio enabling companies to work with their data from anywhere, and on any device.
User Interfaces
User interfaces include installable desktop, browser-based web, and mobile applications. BC offers numerous easy to implement and powerful features to enter data at high speed, casually update entries, or analyze relational data more effectively.
Increased Data Selection and Viewing Efficiency
Efficiency is increased when working with actions across selections in records lists and viewing summarized data, supporting easier correction of data entry mistakes.
Development
Developer Productivity
Visual Studio Code
BC has moved entirely to Visual Studio Code, enhancing developer productivity. Processes are modernized for testing dependent extensions by ensuring that AL GO can handle these tests for companies, VARs, and ISVs who manage dependencies. All required tests now run on the latest released versions of ISV applications without manual intervention.
Production and Sandbox Functionality
Consultants and developers can open Visual Studio Code for both the production and sandbox environments to investigate and understand objects across installed extensions, view code for owned extensions, and perform troubleshooting, all without having to set up Visual Studio Code manually.
Developer Enhancements
To empower AL developers and increase productivity, the foundation for introducing namespace support in the platform and application has been provisioned. Namespace support eases application structuring, creating better object names, and avoiding identifier clashes.
Data Protection
Developers can hide specific variable data preventing other parties from accessing it during debugging, thereby protecting internal data.
Data Analysis and Reporting
Developers have more control over data analysis and reporting. For example, Analysis Mode can be turned off on pages and the developer can specify how to embed content from Power BI.
ISVs
The ability for ISVs to directly transact via AppSource, using credit card purchases. Support for transacting ISV applications via a CSP channel enters the private preview phase.
Enhanced ISV AppSource Previews
This release enables ISVs to organize previews for their AppSource applications for a controlled customer audience.
Dev Ops Enhancements
DevOps and professional development enhancements include support for Linux VSIX, AL syntax highlighting for DevOps, ALDoc preview for partners to document their code, Rich Text editor support, and ability to easily obtain and try a preview version of the upcoming VSIX release directly in the VSCode extension management page.
Power Platform
Power Automate
To improve the user and decision maker Power Automate approval workflow experience, new connector actions have been added, support for external business events is available, and additional templates for automated flows using Teams have been provisioned.
The Power BI embed experience has also been enhanced. Finally, dynamic capabilities for integrating Power Platform with BC in the online world have been improved.
Copilot and AI
Copilot Expansion
With Copilot in BC, companies can empower their workers with intuitive AI tools to get more done with less effort. The initial Copilot capability (marketing text suggestions) has been expanded by boosting productivity for a broader set of SMB roles.
Service and Platform
Improved Performance
The service has been improved so that users should experience fewer interruptions. Additionally, BC should generally feel faster, especially in web services and other scenarios. Continued focus is being placed on service fundamentals, performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance.
Sign-in Enhancements
Increased Stability
Sign-in for interactive users is more stable and users will experience fewer interruptions during their sessions. Optimizing language (AL) runtime minimizes database locking and the effect of table extensions on performance.
Legislation
New Formats
New audit formats for digital reporting, such as SAF-T in Denmark and FAC for France, and better support for e-invoicing and local legislation have been provisioned.
Updates
Legislation automation and features that are compliant with the various regulations set by government agencies are being updated, allowing companies to focus on their primary business. In the future, standardizing legislation features will be delivered as standard capabilities, across all supported countries and regions (where relevant) will be provisioned.
Productive with Microsoft 365
BC Integration
Business Central seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 applications and services such as Outlook, Excel, Word, OneDrive, and Teams to bring data into the flow of work. This release wave focuses on security and reliability, especially when interacting with Excel.
Functionality Enhancements
Enhancements include functionality such as attaching quotes and invoices from Outlook, connecting to Exchange to automatically track email interactions or send outgoing mail from BC and analyzing a snapshot of any Excel list or export it to a dynamic worksheet that can be refreshed, edited, and published back to BC.
Onboarding
Sign-in and Role Set up
Partners can set an initial role for users when they sign up to provide a faster onboarding experience, especially when they’re also using the sign-up context and customer profiling features.
Welcoming Experience
Create a welcoming experience by displaying personalized greetings on the welcome banner. Dynamically customize the banner message to suit company or industry needs.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, review the release plan for Dynamics 365 BC.
Notes for Application Administrators
Features Enabled Automatically
Features impacting users should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities. 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.
You can find the applicable release plan in each of the links provided above, or in the introduction section.