2022 Wave 2 | What’s New for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Users
Microsoft’s 2022 Wave 2 version Business Central, arrived in early October, and the Microsoft community is excited about the new features and emphasis on the User Experience (UX). The overall theme for users is fewer clicks and optimizing Business Central design elements, with an overall emphasis on eliminating redundancy.
Two features receiving a lot of attention around UX and design are Switch Companies across Environments and the Modern Action Bar.
The ability to Switch Companies across Environments feature is getting a lot of praise due to its ability to reduce user clicks. Users can now reduce the number of clicks from approximately five to two when moving from their current company and switching to another company within the tenant, see image. Besides switching companies, the Microsoft community is also excited about the ability to switch between production and sandbox environments. Before, a user would have to open a new web page, enter the admin center and work from there.
To switch companies, visual cues are in the app bar to help identify which company or environment you’re working in, along with a company badge. The company badge now has color and a compact icon so users can identify it quickly. Besides the app bar, you can also use the keyboard shortcut ‘Cntrl + O” to view the available companies’ window pane
Make the Modern Action Bar Your Own
Many in the Microsoft partner community are touting the Modern Action Bar and how it can be optimized to produce a more user-friendly experience by removing redundancy and custom designing the menu bars. For example, users can personalize their Role Center landing page and reduce the number of menus needed for a specific action.
To do this, users can select Personalize Mode and drag-and-drop different actions to tailor their user interface for common tasks. Personalization can be done to an Action Group or Promoted Category. For users, a Promoted Category is primarily the most used actions, such as a sales order page, for example. This would be an ideal repeatable action, such as order, release, and posting options.
The Modern Action Bar also takes related actions and groups them together, such as Navigate and Customer, which were separated before 2022’s Release Wave 2. Customer is now its own menu — Microsoft has notified all customers about the changes to the Modern Action Bar, including personalizing pages. Additionally, Microsoft users will be quite familiar with the addition of split buttons in the action bar that combines a button and menu.
Also released as part of the Business Central 2022 Wave 2 Release was an increase in detailed “hover” information provided in the brick, as Microsoft refers to it. Also, option fields and lookup fields are visually aligned when at rest, along with updated field and column tooltips.
Shopify and Business Central 21
Shopify receives attention from Microsoft with UI improvements and changes to Shopify fields. The order of the fields has changed, and the location filter field is closer to the Disabled field; both are responsible for the synchronization of inventory.
Other Shopify changes include:
- The shop code is made mandatory
- The item synchronization tab is renamed to Item/Product Synchronization – for user awareness. And the Inventory Tracked and Default Inventory Policy fields fall under this tab
- Some fields are made editable only if certain conditions are met
- Blank option for the Image Sync field is renamed to Disabled
- And the Sync Orders and Sync Shipments actions have been added to the Sync Group
One issue with the Shopify connector is that it doesn’t work with any “embed” products, such as LS Retail, currently.
Going Forward | Deprecated or Redesigned Functionality for Major Releases
One thing to keep in mind as we head toward 2023 is deprecated code or functionality tied to major wave releases. Microsoft occasionally deprecates features in the application and platform of Dynamics 365 Business Central. In 2022, ERP partners and companies will have 90 days to recognize deprecated code in Business Central SaaS and fix it. However, this fix window will only last 30 days after the 2023 Wave 2 release.
Getting Your Customized Extensions Tested by ERP Partners
Major feature changes for Business Central are released twice a year and your customized code could become obsolete as Microsoft adds features to the code base. ArcherPoint’s experts are experienced in testing customized code and can help your company with uptime!