[Podcast] An Overview of Cloud Business Central's April 2019 Release
Updated: Aug 17, 2021
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central first 2019 update will be released in April. This podcast points out some of the new functionality associated with this update.
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Show Notes
Business Central General Overview of Update
Performance, reliability, and scalability enhancements
Data and AI
Business Central - What’s new and what’s planned
Disclaimer: these features are set to be released between April and September 2019.
New Features Learn more here
Productivity enhancements for business users features.
Application enhancements
List views
Rich notes and links
Document focus mode
Work date indicator
Context or system indicator
Quick Entry
New keyboard shortcuts
Autosave indicator
Improvements to scrolling in lists
Improved contextual search experience
Improved all-product navigation
Personalization enhancements
Self-help and support
Simplified Help and Support Experience
Page inspection
Productivity enhancements for administrators
Hardening the integration between Business Central and Dynamics 365 for Sales
Enhancements for application lifecycle management
Enhancements to the intelligent cloud for Dynamics SMB and Dynamics 365 Business Central
Transcript
Welcome everyone to season 3 of Coffee Talk with Solution Systems. Today we’re going to discuss the upcoming April update release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. So here we go!
Coffee Talk with Solution Systems Intro
In October of 2018, Microsoft released a major update to Business Central that seemed to catch a lot of people off guard. Business Central users all over the United States were logging into their environment and seeing new and different functionality which caused a couple headaches. For instance, no longer did you have to hit the “x” to close out of a page and see your previous one, you now just used the new back arrow button. It sounds great and today it is, but at the time nobody was sure if this was going to save their information. Business Central users also wanted to know what else had been changed so they could avoid any other surprises—And these are the reasons I’m doing this podcast today. To help you avoid confusion when your Business Central tenant updates in the Spring.
These Business Central updates promise to push productivity to the next level. According to Microsoft, “among those many changes, we have enabled even more keyboard-centric scenarios around the important features of the product, keeping in mind speed of data entry and analysis, such as quick entry, list sorting, and data values. We have introduced several improvements to features related to the customer context, such as work date and the company indicator, plus added options enabling advanced users to be even more productive, such as focus mode, totals for lists, improved search, and the new page inspector. We have also addressed feedback related to filters in Excel export, common auto-save experience, and modern interface elements, such as the date picker, refreshed action bar, and all-product navigation. Additionally, Business Central becomes more intuitive thanks to an advanced personalization experience and better discoverability of new features—that includes refreshed action menus and groups across the product but also the ability to personalize those to suit the user's preference.”
Let’s talk Performance, reliability and scalability enhancements. Microsoft claims that Business Central will be much more responsive because of on-demand loading of page elements, server resources being optimized for fast user interaction, and the database has been adjusted to handle more data and load it faster.
Users will no longer be interrupted by maintenance during work hours and Microsoft has also matured service health practices to ensure maximum uptime. Users requiring assistance now have a single screen through which to find self-help material, share ideas with the community, and request support, which by the way, has also been streamlined. This is good because with the Oct 2019 update a lot of users experienced some sort of downtime and that can hurt business.
According to Microsoft, “The last major investment for the April release is starting our course into the Data and AI future. The only platform that will matter in the next decade is the data platform and the only cloud that will matter is the AI cloud. We need to ensure that we have data sanity, which means that we need to make investments into storing the product data into CDS. The first will be to strengthen and prepare integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales through CDS and ensure Business Central data contributes to intelligent insights (notes synching, late payment prediction) in Dynamics 365 AI for Sales apps and Business Central users get intelligent insights generated by Dynamics 365 AI for Sales (predictive opportunity scoring).”
So what are the new features you ask? Well, I’m going to give you a quick rundown of the ones set to be released and then I’ll pick a few that I like and talk about those afterward. If you don’t hear a feature talked about that you liked, don’t worry, I’ll include more detailed information and links within the show notes.
Ok, here’s the Productivity enhancements for business users features. You’ve got application enhancements, list views, rich notes and links, document focus mode, work date indicator, context or system indicator, quick entry, new keyboard shortcuts, autosave indicator, improvements to scrolling in lists, improved contextual search experience, improved all-product navigation, and personalization enhancements.
For the self-help and support new features you have simplified help and support experience and page inspection.
And for the productivity enhancements for administrators there’s Hardening the integration between Business Central and Dynamics 365 for Sales, enhancements for application lifecycle management, and enhancements to the intelligent cloud for Dynamics SMB and Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Alright, let’s pick a few of these new features and talk about them. How about we start with application enhancements. In this release of Business Central, you’re going to be able to enter up to 100 characters instead of the current 50 in all description and name fields, and be able to enter up to 50 characters instead of the current 10 in the Unit of Measure description field. You’re also going to be able to select multiple items to add to a sales or purchase document, use a sales quote validity policy to control when sales quotes expire, control item and customer creation from lookups on sales documents, copy customer dimensions to jobs created for the customer, copy templates used to create customers, vendors, and items, merge duplicate customer vendors, dynamically set shortcut dimension columns in lists, documents, and journal lines, bulk import item pictures, view payment information on customer and vendor statistics FactBoxes, look up SWIFT codes, ensure that approval users are set up to run approval workflows, configure reports for warehouse documents, view vendor invoice number on purchase invoice and credit memo lists, and view time information on registers.
Wow, that’s a lot of new things associated with just a single new feature coming to Business Central. You can absolutely make the judgment from this that Microsoft is pouring a lot of resources into making this product better with each individual update.
The second feature I’d like to talk about is the personalization enhancements. According to Microsoft, “We are giving our users the ability to personalize their workspaces even further. Business users can now personalize the Action Bar on every page, hiding or reordering actions to conveniently perform to the most common tasks. On top of that, users can personalize the Navigation Bar on Role Centers, which includes pinning any list.” So with this release you’re going to be able to optimize for data input with quick entry and be able to optimize readability by adjusting field importance.
The last feature I’d like to mention is simplified help and support experience. Users are now going to see links to self-help content and documentation, commonly requested troubleshooting information to self-diagnose or hand over to Support, seek advice from the community, or post new ideas. Don’t worry, it’s not one of those support centers that never offer up a support contact email and just keep giving you the run around looking through article after article trying to find some contact information. The new Business Central support page offers both.
What features would you like to see added to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central? Comment below. As always feel free to contact us for all your Business Central help.