Dynamics 365 & Power Platform – 2022 release wave 2 plans

Today, Microsoft released the new plans for 2022 release wave 2. 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 2 plans and some of the highlights mentioned in these plans.

2022 release wave 2 plans

In the two release plans, Microsoft reveals a lot of new upcoming features. These features are planned to be released between October 2022 and March 2023. Again, a lot of new features announced 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/2022wave2/
Power Platform: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2022wave2/

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. 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/.

My main area of focus is on the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations features. Before jumping to some of the feature highlights in the release plan, I have other favorite upcoming innovations. Dynamics 365 Sales has multiple notes on Teams and Outlook collaboration. While working on a sales opportunity, you can collaborate with other team members and get Teams chats as a timeline activity. Next, you can use live business data in Teams chats and in emails.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Like the current active release plan, Microsoft will again put a lot of effort into Vendor invoice management, OCR, and Subscription Billing. Where OCR is delivered as a preview in the current release plan, there are now investments to make it publicly available in February and March 2023. There will also be an option to extend the length of vendor invoice numbers without impacting other data types.

For Subscription Billing, you will find for example a feature for split billing where multiple customers can be invoiced for the same contract.

You may get yourself also familiar with the Financial Tags feature where you can track used-defined fields on posted accounting entries. This will reduce the need for creating financial dimension values that are not re-usable. You can add tags for payment references or the purpose of ledger settlements.

Microsoft will also invest in the Globalization Studio to enhance and expand localizations with help of no-code / low-code configuration tools, for the purpose of tax calculation, electronic invoicing, and electronic reporting.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Let’s start with a general topic that drives the roadmap for SCM. In the past years, we had to learn to deal with shortages of raw materials and other disruptions. A keyword for this plan is the word ‘Resilience‘. How can you lower the risk for disruptions in your organization? Microsoft will invest in multiple options for sourcing your raw materials or products from different vendors. There will be more investments in Inventory Visibility, Inventory and Logistics, Manufacturing, Planning, Procurement, Product Information management, and Warehouse management.

Microsoft aims to take away the complexity of setting up warehouse management and comes with a new rapid implementation and configuration experience. This should reduce the implementation time. One of the examples would be having a simplified configuration of location directives and work templates.

There are various updates for SCM. One of them, I would like to give some special attention: Display product info in the user’s language. This was a suggestion on the Dynamics Ideas portal with a very high number of votes and comments. Finally, it made it on the roadmap.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

After all efforts Microsoft put in the infrastructure merge, they will now focus on improving and enriching the existing features. For Human Resources, there are two themes for this upcoming release plan: Improve efficiency and expand the HCM ecosystem. You can read the plan to learn more about the investments for Benefits management, Leave and Absence, Organization and personnel management, and Integrations and extensibility.

Cross app capabilities

Microsoft is working on a convergence story to bring the F&O apps closer to the Power Platform. In the release notes, you can read about One Dynamics One Platform. A lot of effort is done and will be done to improve features for development, administration, and user experiences. Investments are in the area of One transaction for developers to ensure consistency between F&O apps and Dataverse.

Some client features will be enabled by default or are mandatory. For example, the saved views and the new grid control are features that will be enabled mandatory along with some others.

You should also keep in mind the service protection limits that will be enabled as part of the 10.0.29 release. This is applicable for OData and custom integrations. When there will be too many requests, these will be throttled. You can read more on Microsoft Docs about the Service protection API limits.

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.

Usually, the April and October releases are the moments where Microsoft is cleaning up deprecated features and obsolete objects. Some DLLs might be deleted or updated to a more recent version. Ensure you will get hold of the preview releases in time to check if your customizations are still compatible or if you need to adjust them to ensure they will continue to work in the future.

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!