This article outlines some of the new features in the October 2018 release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Originally published in H2 2018 BCUG/NAVUG Magazine
The October 2018 release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central brings new services and significant capabilities to drive the digital transformation of your business. This release brings improvements to the client experience, enabling on-premises deployments to take advantage of cloud services, expanding availability to additional markets, and a host of other features. In addition to these features, significant efforts have been put into hardening the service, providing improved resiliency, robustness, and performance across the application. Continue reading for highlights of Business Central’s October release.
Cloud, Hybrid, and On-Premises Availability
Business Central gets an on-premises deployment option that serves as a successor to Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This means that rather than a new version number for Dynamics NAV, Customers can get Business Central on-premises. The experience for Partners and Customers on-premises is no different from the familiar Dynamics NAV upgrades, except for the change in name. This is a convergence point for Dynamics SMB products. Going forward, they are all considered customers of Business Central in the cloud or on-premises, even if they are running differently branded products such as Microsoft Dynamics SL, Microsoft Dynamics GP, and older versions of Dynamics NAV.
The Intelligent Edge
Microsoft continues to invest heavily in the intelligent cloud, bringing business intelligence, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and numerous other cloud productivity and analytics tools to the marketplace. Customers using on-premises solutions haven’t been able to easily take advantage of these services.
With the October 2018 release of Business Central, we’re bringing the intelligent edge to several of our Dynamics SMB products. With the intelligent edge, you can seamlessly connect your on-premises solution to an instance of our intelligent cloud through Business Central. When the connection is made, we securely replicate your on-premises data to the intelligent cloud. You simply decide which companies you want to replicate, and then, within the main pages of your on-premises solution, we’ll deliver back actionable analysis and content. The intelligent cloud leverages solutions such as Power BI, Power Apps, Flow, and AI to provide insight and actionable messages, enabling your business to run even better.
High Productivity User Experience
Get more work done with productivity features such as filtering of lists and totals and copy and paste. With a host of new keyboard shortcuts to accelerate your business tasks, and improved keyboard navigation throughout, Business Central is ready to support the diverse needs of your workforce. Get to your data faster with improved search for pages, reports, and Help documentation.
Business Users get a fresh and modern experience in all main screens of Business Central. Whether you are accessing your data from the browser or the Windows 10 desktop app, you will experience a consistently smooth, intuitive, and modern interface as you transition across role centers, lists, worksheets, transaction documents, or details pages.
Tenant Administration
Business Central Partners manage the lifecycle of the tenant through the Dynamics 365 Business Central administration center. The administration center is the portal for VARs to engage with Customers and manage health, troubleshooting, notifications, and sandboxes of the Customer tenant.
The administration center provides a centralized view of the Customer’s tenant. The Partner will receive notifications of tenant events, such as upgrades, and can manage the notifications and upgrade settings from the administration center. The center also provides telemetry for the tenant, enabling the Partner to better troubleshoot issues.
Improved Visual Studio Code AL Experience
We continue to improve the customization experience for Business Central. Be more productive when developing and troubleshooting extensions with new and improved developer tools, such as sandbox environments with production data, improved breakpoint support, better online Help, ability to trace raised events in a given User scenario, support for .NET Interop for on-premises deployments, extension support for enums, report data set and field groups, and more. These improvements make it easier to customize your Business Central tenant.
Making Business Central Available in New Markets
Business Central has a combined localization strategy inclusive of both Microsoft-led and Partner-led models. We continue to respond to Partner-led scenarios and anticipate additional countries being delivered via localization app extensions in Microsoft AppSource. Additionally, Microsoft will also deliver a localized version of Business Central in Iceland, Norway, and Mexico in this release.