Today, Microsoft released the new plans for 2022 release wave 1. These plans will tell you about the short-term investments to be released by Microsoft for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. Microsoft is releasing these plans twice a year to indicate what they are working on. In this post, you will find the links to the 2022 wave 1 plans and some of the highlights mentioned in these plans.
2022 release wave 1 plans
In the two release plans, Microsoft reveals a lot of new upcoming features. These features are planned to be released between April and September 2022. In total just above 500 pages! (pdf download) with new exciting features to be released. You can choose to read them online or download the PDF version. You can find the plans here:
Dynamics 365: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave1/
Power Platform: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2022wave1/
Note that the plans are subject to change. New features might be added, dates may be changed, but also some topics might be pulled from the current plans. The changes will be trackable in the Change history. Currently, there are no changes yet. You might review the changes for the previous release plan as an example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2021wave2/change-history/.
In general, the overall themes which get attention in almost all solutions are: Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Collaboration. In the paragraphs below, I will mention some of the highlights which got my attention.
Dynamics 365 Finance
When browsing the table of contents, it is clear that Microsoft puts a lot of effort into Vendor invoice management and OCR. Microsoft invested in its own intelligent OCR technology using technologies such as Azure Form Recognizer, AI builder, and the Power Platform.
Another feature to mention is efforts on Subscription Billing. More and more products and services are offered with subscription models compared to the traditional physical sales. Microsoft acquired the solution from Binary Stream as can be read on the next page: Binary Stream enters licensing agreement with Microsoft. This Subscription Billing solution will meet global accounting standards such as ASC 606 and IFRS 15.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
When reading the plans for SCM, you can conclude that there is a lot of effort on componentization and scalability. Many updates are listed related to micro-services for performance and scalability. Investments for microservices are towards the next areas: Pricing, Inventory visibility, Inventory accounting, and Planning Optimization. The pricing and inventory visibility will be supported with RESTful API, so they can be called by other applications, like Dynamics 365 Sales, Intelligent order management or a Commerce website.
Dynamics 365 Human Resources
You might have learned that Dynamics 365 HR will be merged within the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations infrastructure. You can read more about this in the next post: Merging of HR offerings brings capabilities together for customers – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog
For this infrastructure merge, there will be efforts done to support existing customers to move to the new infrastructure. Scenarios will be covered for both customers running on a standalone HR and also customers who are using HR and Finance and Operations today.
Two other focus areas for 2022 wave 1 will be Improving business automation and Intelligent talent management.
Cross app capabilities
For quite some time, Microsoft is focussing on better options for reporting and analytics. In the release notes, you will read about more efforts on moving data to the Data Lake. You will get more control over what data will be synchronized to the Data Lake. In addition, Microsoft will invest in a single Azure Synapse workspace which you can use to connect multiple reporting tools such as Power BI and Spark.
Saved Views will also get expanded usability. There will be support for using saved views on dialogs and workspaces. Also for more types of pages, queries can be saved.
There is more…
In this post, I tried to just quickly summarize some feature highlights. With the links provided at the top of this post, you can read about all the details of the planned feature enhancements for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.
That’s all for now. Till next time!
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