Dynamics 365 & Power Platform – 2025 release wave 1 plans
End of last week, Microsoft released the new plans for 2025 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 2025 wave 1 plans and my personal highlights mentioned in these plans.
2025 release wave 1 plans
When looking at the new release plan documents, it will be no surprise that there is a lot focus on generative AI like the past two years. Relatively new to the Copilot investments is the agencification of features where autonomous agents can perform certain tasks on behalf of the user. Of course, the user is in control and can define under which conditions an agent can understand e.g. an email from a vendor and reply that a small delay in delivery can be accepted if there is no impact on the supply to customers.
The Copilot focus remains high. It should help every individual around the globe to achieve more. However, organizations should not focus on using all Copilot and Agents support added, but only those that will make an impact on their business. Don’t forget that a Copilot is there to assist you, but should not replace you or make decisions for you!
In the release plans, Microsoft reveals a lot of new upcoming features. These features are planned to be released between April 2025 and October 2025. Some features will be generally available in April, some others will be brought in via minor updates. The release plans shows when features will be available as preview or when it is ready for production environments. You can choose to read them online or download the PDF version. You can find the plans here:
Dynamics 365: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2025wave1/
Power Platform: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2024wave1/
Microsoft Cloud for Industry: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/release-plan/2024wave1/
New in the list of release plans is documentation about role-based Copilot offerings: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/release-plan/2025wave1/
This plan discusses new features related to Copilot offerings such as Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales and Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance.
Note that the plans are subject to change. New features might be added, and 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://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plan/2024wave2change-history/.
Additionally, you might have a look at the Release planning portal where you can add features to your own watchlist.
My main area of focus in this blog is the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations features. Some features stand out to me. I would like to highlight them in this blog. Of course there are many more interesting features. You can read the full release plans yourself.
New journal framework
Microsoft will work on a new journal framework with a focus on true multi-entity accounting and performance. The current architecture existed since the first version of Damgaard Axapta 1.0. For sure time to modernize the journal framework.
In a single journal users can enter or import transactions to be posted for various different legal entities. Of course this will respect the security settings to which legal entity you have access. The focus will be on a voucher level and you can post per voucher. The first milestone will be a journal for ledger to ledger only transactions. Other account types will be added in the future.
The new framework will be build upon new table series. As of this moment, the current framework will not be deprecated as the support for account types is not complete and Microsoft don’t want to disrupt current implementations.
User security and governance
Security is my area of interest. Microsoft acquired a solution from Executive Automats and will bring useful features into Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O in the area of security administration. There will be support for more easy creating roles using the task recorder. It will help versioning the security roles and there is new support to check license compliancy. A preview is available in version 10.0.43. You can expect some blogs from me on this topic soon.
Copilot
One of the Copilot related features announced in the plan is asking questions about your ERP data in natural language. Currently, I’m participating in a private preview, learning what is possible and providing feedback to Microsoft.
Offline support virtual entities
Microsoft will bring a feature to support offline capabilities when using Dynamics 365 F&O virtual tables in Power Apps. This will ensure that a mobile app will continue to work in case there is (temporarily) no internet connection available.
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, role-based Copilot features, and Microsoft Cloud for Industry.
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.
Also, note that quite some features in feature management will become mandatory or enabled by default. Ensure you read the release plan for these changes.
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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