Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 1 Release

True to form, Microsoft will be including a plethora of new features and functions in the latest release of Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Release Wave 1 (due for general availability this spring). Areas of improvement include service, administration, banking/payments, collaboration, and onboarding, as well as new country specific products and modern development tools. Read on to learn about the ones that captured my attention. 

What’s new in Business Central 2021 Wave 1: Application

1. Assisted setup helps move the task of adjusting item costs to the background
   With this feature, Microsoft has added a new assisted setup to schedule Job Queue for running adjust cost in the background. This is one of the common features that customers requested in Dynamics NAV.
2. Automatic creation of Lot and Serial No information cards
3. Bank Reconciliation improvements
   With this improvement, users can cancel a bank reconciliation that was posted with mistakes.
4. Changes in synchronization between Contact and Customer
5. Define lot sizes for various stages of production
6. Dimension corrections (for G/L Entries)
   This is one of the features that everyone was waiting for. With this improvement on the General Ledger Entries page, the Correct Dimensions action lets you correct dimensions on posted entries by editing the dimension value, adding new dimensions, or removing them.
7. Inventory documents – new capability to adjust your inventory.
8. More control over settings for Default Dimensions
   With Code Mandatory as Value Posting set in the Default dimension, administrators can limit using Allowed Dimension Values instead of allowing users to pick any dimension value.
9. Payment Reconciliation Journal improvements
   The payment reconciliation journal will support applications against employee ledger entries, such as having preview posting enabled, separate number series, and user-defined document numbers.
10. Simplified bank statement file import
    With this improvement, users can configure the import of flat file and CSV format or semicolon-separated transaction formats

What’s New in Business Central 2021 Wave 1: Modern Development Tools

1. Partners can add keys (indexes) to base tables & Extension tables
   This is one of the common requests from the partner community to add keys (indexes) to base Microsoft tables for performance improvements.
2. Extension validation on upgrade
   Tenant upgrades to new versions can fail for a number of reasons, such as lack of application dependencies, compilation errors, and duplicate object IDs. With this feature, these validations will be triggered on scheduling of an upgrade.
3. Interface – obsolete support
   With this improvement, interfaces can be obsoleted like other AL object types.
4. Report Extensibility
   With this improvement, developers will have the ability to extend an existing report by making additive changes to the report dataset and request page. Report layouts will not have an extensibility model.
5. Return record link instead of name when using lookups
   With this improvement, when the user selects entries in lookup triggers, it will be possible in AL to retrieve the record link of the chosen entry, instead of just the name.

What’s New in Business Central 2021 Wave 1: Better with Microsoft 365

1. Look up Business Central contacts from within Teams Users
   With this improvement, users can look up Business Central contacts from the Microsoft Teams search box, or from the message compose area. Users can share contacts with teams and setup a call from Microsoft Teams.
2. Enablement of Word Merge in Business Central
   With this improvement, you can use the mail merge functionality in Word to use data from Business Central to add a personal touch to bulk communications.
3. Support cloud printing using Microsoft Universal Print 

What’s New in Business Central 2021 Wave 1: Onboarding

1. Getting started checklists for guided and faster initial setup
2. Improved the “get started with Power BI” experience
3. Improved company setup experience
4. In-app contextual help improvements

With all these enhancements with respect to Onboarding, customers will be able to get up and running with Dynamics 365 Business Central easier and faster.

What’s New in Business Central 2021 Wave 1: Modern Clients

1. The Report API allows passing the layout needed for report execution
   With this feature, from AL and in the Report Request Page, it is possible to set the report layout that should be used when generating the report.
2. Reports run in the background
   With this feature, users will not have to wait for report execution to end. They can keep working and look at the reports when they have time.
3. Client performance improvements
   After Factbox performance improvements in previous releases, with this version parts are loaded on demand from top to bottom in the Role Center Page.
4. Usability enhancements for the Web client
   Double click a record in list is back again which will activate a single record.
5. Enable cloud printing on mobile app (phone and tablet) and from Teams app
6. Users can change the assigned printer before printing a report
   With this feature, users can now change the assigned printer before printing a given report. This applies only to cloud-enabled printers available in Business Central.

What’s New in Business Central 2021 Wave 1: Microsoft Power Platform

1. Synchronize item availability from Business Central to Dynamics 365 Sales
2. Enable Power BI connector to work with Business Central APIs, instead of with web services only
3. Virtual Tables for Microsoft Dataverse

What’s New in Business Central 2021 Wave 1: Country and Regional

With 2021 release wave 1, we expand to India, Greece, Romania, and Turkey. With these releases, Business Central will now be available in 52 countries and regions around the world.

What’s New in Business Central 2021 Wave 1: Administration 

1. Improve the reliability of the database export operation for larger databases with more companies
2. Improvements for the Delegated Administrators
3. Reassign an environment from one Azure Active Directory organization to another (through Microsoft Support)

For a personalized demonstration of the latest release, contact the Business Central experts at ArcherPoint. This release will be generally available for production environments in April 2021.

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