A customer's thoughts on #msdyn365bc 2023 Release Wave 2

I skipped a two releases, but with a new website and a bit more energy spare for blogging I'm going to pull apart what is in the latest release announcement on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plan/2023wave2/smb/dynamics365-business-central - not just a rehash of content - but an analysis from the perspective of a power customer.

Blow by Blow

Power Platform

I first experimented with business events today, following someone's blog around vendor/customer payments. Took about 10m and I could get a simple notification. However, these events are only as powerful as the payload of data provided by developer of the event - and in the case of the payment event - simpler providing an id for the customer or vendor is quite subpar. However, they hold great promise - especially given the real-time editing / saving a field level which makes create/modify events so unreliable.

I am most excited though for expanded support for Power BI. Up to now it has been close to useless. A feature demo that has no practical use. From my perspective I've also just wanted to replicate the type of dashboard analytics you can get from NetSuite and the ability to drill-down to the transaction. Might not get everything we want on this one, but it sounds like it is finally a genuine area of investment. :-)

Application

There is a very ambiguous improvement around availability. It isn't clear how it is different current availability by event, location, lot, etc. The reality is that the actual business process for validating availability, visualising impact of a change to supply or demand on open documents and ensuring that changes flow through intelligently doesn't exist. Unfortunately, it does now in key competitors.

I hope they are also solving this although some of the content on suggest the next step for sales and production orders. However, it sounds incremental or 'sticky tape. I hope I'm wrong.

For example, our own in-company designed traffic light which has intelligent drill down behaviour depending on whether a line is a drop ship, special order, already reserved, requiring reservation and whether stock is available is a better visual indicator than what they have done.

There are quite a few other items in the application area - not which are a priority for me, but I can see if you are doing intercompany, timesheets and trying to scale the business across more employees they will come in handy.

Copilot and AI

So being brutally honest (I am sure everyone knows), the 2023 Release Wave 1 effort was slotted in for marketing purposes at best. I am not sure how many are using it in production, but it I can't imagine there were customers beating down the door of the product team requesting it.

I am pleased to see they are finally overhauling bank reconciliations (which I assume is also payment reconciliations) and the way matching works. Payment reconciliations today use a mix of subpar text recognition and value matching. Every modern competitor on the market has something better.

That said, it is a little ambiguous if they are using this on the payment reconciliation journal and extending it to identifying matching vendors, invoices and allowing some customisation and prioritisation or definition of rules.

One hopes that the platform team deliver the new UI components that dramatically improve the possibilities for payment and bank reconciliation. A review of what others are doing in field like Xero and MYOB might help.

Development

Unlike many customers we do a huge amount of development internally, so we are always eager to see what's new.

The opening Visual Studio Code from within the page seems intriguing, especially if there is an issue. More important for partners, but it reminds me of how the terrific ForNav extension allows us to open a report in context and open it in the designer tool - making life easy.

The ability to turn-off data analysis mode is terrific - including control at a user and page level. It was one of my first choices - although I desperately hope they also fix the terrible UX around the current toggle and find a better way of smoothly integrate this capability.

Finally, they have added a Rich Text control - although I would love if there wasn't a whole lot of development behind the scenes and introduced a new type of field - Rich Media and encapsulated all the complexity for everyone - whilst leaving Blob for its intended purpose - that way the team can optimise storage - text/blob/azure for us.

I also really hope they support intelligent width and ability to restrict formatting controls on this rich text component, to cover scenarios we have - such as when we capture a lot of different details on our non-conformance reports with layouts like that one below.

Legislation

Here in Australia, we of course do not feel the love. We are only 26m people and no doubt a limited number of installs. However, the lack of any development in how VAT (called GST) is handled is poor - especially given how advanced our government is in supporting direct integration.

That said I was interested to see this discussion of digital vouchers (how is that different to inbound documents) and e-documents - although the devil is in the detail, and I hope they provide a path to migrate from all the legacy and eventually get rid of it.

Reporting and data analysis

The new data analysis feature has added genuine value for me in simple everyday business tasks and the default behaviour to inherit the filtered context for data is incredibly powerful. For all its limits I must give the team a pat on the back.

That said the jarring UI discrepancies between the new data analysis feature and the existing product and my tendency to reach for features missing but existing in Excel or Power BI is ever present.

The ability to control visibility and access are welcome.

Queries allowing the use of data from multiple tables was the obvious next step. The traditional list page relies on page variables, page events and calculated fields to simulate an aggregation of tables - sometimes multiple joins deep. If the UI doesn't create confusion between these different areas, I see this as great progress adding analysis across queries - and sharing tabs is also a step forward.

Service and Platform

On a good day, I still marvel at just how much functionality runs and how fast the business central web client is when running in the same region as the data centre. It really is a marvel how far it has come. The single biggest limitation is the initial load which obviously has a detrimental impact on its use in Microsoft Teams, Outlook and when sharing links. So, any news that they are speeding up the opening of a new tab and pages in general is excellent incremental improvement.

User Experience

Adding existing fields is great - if it is just administrators and if the developer can offer suggestions or describe risks. Not all fields are designed to be visible and for me this is a two-edged sword. In general, it all sounds great. I hope they offer the ability to easily migrate a role personalisation to a tenant extension - because half the time you make the change in a role and then figure out - everyone could benefit.

I am tremendously excited that they have promoted company data search. I hope there are other UX improvements that they are not yet ready to show case.

Properly configured (which I have) this has provided dramatic productivity benefits in many scenarios for us - especially as you can include your PTE, AppSource records, and avoid noisy search results by limiting the records and fields included.

Here are my requests on what I think is an extremely important feature:

• Support configuration of tables and fields searched at a company, not user level

• Allow a user to extend what is searched for them if required, but not remove

• Introduce new UX component that is best practice - faceted search, show count of results by record would be the start. Check out SAP B1 Enterprise Search for ideas.

• Create concept of header/line and allow search results for a line to show related header record without listing each line as an option.

I am overly excited about the Peek view and mention of a peak control. The biggest UI confusion has been that peek is sometimes only available in view mode on documents and lists - sometimes I must stop and change out of editing mode. I have hoped for an exceptionally long time that they would copy SAP and implement a dedicated peek/drilldown control rather than relying on hyperlinks. I hope this is what is happening.

What is missing and round-up

Back when the 2022 Release Wave 1 was done - 18 months ago I had a rant. It was a long one about underinvestment, lack of long-term vision for where the product was heading and a tendency to do minimum viable press release features.

Clearly the team has done a lot since then, under the covers and in continual small feature improvement. However, you can still clearly feel the lack of investment and business focus vs SAP, Acumatica, Odoo and Netsuite.

Clearly as we head towards the end of 2023, Business Central today is a much better product than it was eighteen months ago. I and no doubt other customers want more though:

A small selection of what is top of mind for me:

• New grid controls - adding inline action that is field specific with icon

• Microsoft to invest in ForNav and give them money and resources to build a web-based report editor and give them every support they need.

• Implement Container Shipment record to complement a Purchase Order. A purchase order shouldn't be receipted overseas, transfer orders created and shipped/received. It creased a wealth of unnecessary ledger entries, confusion in traceability amongst other things. This includes supporting invoicing before receipt / shipment scenarios on both sales and purchasing without prepayments. Again, Netsuite, SAP B1 and Odoo all support this. This should not be in appsource.

On second thoughts just maybe just refer to my 2021 Wave 2 Release Notes - Are Microsoft treading water? (365bcpower.com) blog.

From what I can see only 10, 4, 3, 2 and 1 have been worked on.

But more broadly we all know that there is a bigger systemic issue. The community forum and especially the ideas contribution process need to be dramatically overhauled. There is too much duplication, and it feels like a messy desk that has become so overwhelming it hardly gets looked at anymore. A bit like appsource :-)

For me they should be integrated, AI needs to recognise and synthesise duplication and there needs to be more structured community process for reviewing, consolidating, and pushing the investment case for why some ideas should progress. This includes the Business Central team providing rationales for rejection and providing the ability to have dialog over whether those rationales are valid.