8 Key Areas In The New 2021 Release Wave 2 Dynamics 365FO & Core

The 2021 release wave 2 plan for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is out.The plan is a compilation of new capabilities that Microsoft is planning to release between October 2021 and March 2022. This is the second release wave of the year and offers hundreds of new features and enhancements.

1. Finance

The general availability of Finance Insights launches, focusing on on data-driven insights empowering customers with out-of-the-box machine learning for their financial operations. This includes the intelligent cash flow offering.

To ensure that financial activities close on time, Microsoft is enabling customers to increase productivity when it critically matters the most: enhanced usability and performance around fixed assets, year-end close, and financial dimensions. This is done through automation and modernizing the services used.

Microsoft also continues to enhance its globalization offering with additional localizations and the general availability of the Tax Calculation service.

Find out more about the new Finance features here.

2. Supply Chain Management

Invests in enabling a resilient supply chain with enhancements in key areas such as resource planning, manufacturing, asset management, inventory management, and warehousing.

Microsoft will enable businesses to optimize their usage of available material and capacity to avoid stockout situations and keep the business flowing.

New manufacturing execution scenarios are included to allow integration between Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, common manufacturing execution (MES) solutions, and shop floor automation systems for customers to be able to adopt and integrate new business models with ease.

Find out more about the new supply chain management features here

3. Project Operations

Delivers functionally rich experiences to create and manage subcontracts with vendors for projects, as well as task scheduling enhancements.

Find out more about the new project operations features here.

4. Finance & Operations cross-app capabilities

Brings in Microsoft Power Platform governance features to enable new capabilities such as environment provisioning, authorization and authentication, run-time events, and developer tools.

New capabilities in this release include providing enhanced data exchange experiences between Finance and Operations apps, Microsoft Dataverse, and Customer Engagement apps in Dynamics 365.

Find out more about the cross-app capabilities here

5. Human Resources

Continues to enhance Benefits management capabilities by investing in a simplified setup and configuration user experience.

Microsoft is continuing the journey to bring capabilities to employees in their flow of work and enhancing the current capability set as part of the Dynamics 365 Human Resources app for Microsoft Teams. Employees can submit, edit, and cancel their existing leave requests using the Teams app. Microsoft is also enhancing the manager’s ability to view more details about their direct reports’ leave balances and have better visibility of the team and company calendar.

Find out more about HR features here

6. Dynamics 365 Commerce

Prioritizes customer segmentation and targeting using a site builder to target customer segments with specific page layouts and content as well as an improved understanding for how end-users interact with pages across sites, including mouse-action recordings, heatmaps, and analytics by integrating with Microsoft Clarity.

Find out more about commerce features here

7. Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection

Will have multiple new features that enhance Payment Service Providers' (PSPs) ability to offer Fraud Protection as a value-added service to all their merchants. PSPs will be able to integrate Fraud Protection easily into their existing infrastructure to manage PSPs taxonomies that encompass many merchants and multiple hierarchies within each merchant entity.

Find out more about the fraud protection features here

8. Dynamics 365 Guides

Will be updated to further leverage the hand tracking capabilities available on HoloLens 2, making Dynamics 365 Guides an easier to use and more intuitive application.

While users will still be able to operate a guide with hands-free interactions, core application workflows will be simpler and faster with a touch-enabled holographic interface.

Find out more about guides features here.

We will be running webinars at the end of August covering The New Capabilities Coming To Dynamics 365 Finance and The Key New Features Coming To Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in more detail.