Release, Roadmap and New Features for Dynamics 365 Business Central (Day 1 Directions NA)

Directions North America has started it’s first day with a boom of news for the Dynamics 365 Business Central on-prem and cloud. Let’s see what we have so far:

Release date

Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise is released today, October 1st, 2018 and it’s available on Microsoft Dynamics PartnerSource from this link. You can download the classic DVD package or you have also the option to download it from Docker hub. Today is the big day and from now Dynamics Community will start forgetting the good and old name of Dynamics NAV (former Navision). But this will not happen fast.

 

New Features

“It’s all in the little details” – said Jannik Bausager, Microsoft Principal Group Program Manager while presenting the new features for Business Central. And he couldn’t be more right. You can now multi select lines, copy-paste them to excel and from excel, use shortcuts for search (F3) and our favorite function to copy the field from line above (F8). There’s also a handy search now available (Alt+Q) to not only search for pages but also for the actions in pages.

Some of the other features in an image below:

Roadmap

Major version releases for both Dynamics 365 Business Central Cloud and On-prem versions will be every half a year: one in spring and one in autumn. “It will work like a clockwork” – as reassured on stage by Marko Perisic, Microsoft General Manager.

What’s important on the feature roadmap? Web Client will be the only option from year 2020, that’s the goal, no windows client in the near future.

Intelligent Cloud

Remember intelligent cloud back from Inspire? Well, there’s a lot more to it, as shown today in the Keynote. In a couple of steps you can arrange it to automatically crawl data from your GP solution (NAV and C5 to come) and put it inside a read-only Business Central solution. It would allow a GP customer to preview his financial data in a cloud Dynamics 365 Business Central solution or his mobile Dynamics 365 Business Central phone app for free. That seems like a good move to help transition the GP customer base to Business Central, since this could make them accustomed to Dynamics 365 Business Central quickly. We’ll see if it’s really that easy in the near future.

What’s more?

Dynamics Learning Portal is now free for all partners, which you may have seen already earlier, it’s announced today officially.

It’s Day 1, so there’s 3 more days, stay tuned! Follow our news in our social channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook) and on our website. 

Read more on Simplanova previous blog post Transition from Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central: How to Start?