On July 12, Microsoft published the newest release wave 2 plans, describing the new features releasing from October 2022 through March 2023 for Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365. The second release wave of the year has a lot of new features and enhancements, demonstrating the continued investment in digital transformation for Microsoft’s customers and partners.

2022 release wave 2 features available for early access

Starting August 1, 2022, partners and company users will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. The features are going to cover a broad range of functional areas and include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during October 2022. Have in mind that Microsoft is continuously updating the release notes by changing, adding, and even removing functionality from the plan. In this blog post, we have summarized some of the features, and for more info, you can check out the release plan online on download it in pdf from here.

Here are some of the wave highlights for Power Platform:

Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is continually investing in enabling all teams, and organizations to encourage data-driven culture. With this update, the creation experience is improved by matching the experiences with Office and enabling users to create records on the web. By integrating the Power Query diagram view into PowerBI Desktop, users can leverage a no-code experience to perform ETL on their data. For teams, in this update, Microsoft brings improvements to metrics focused on business needs and integration with Viva Goals. It also enhances the big data experience with auto-aggregation, query scale-out, and privacy features with DLP, giving administrators better visibility into their activities.

Power Apps

Power Apps extends governance capabilities to enable, manage, and support the citizen developers throughout the organization. Makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive over Microsoft Dataverse in a unified studio, with modern experiences to build and manage data and logic, as well as infused intelligence to support development, enrich data, and optimize user experiences. In addition to ensuring the ability to take advantage of the reliability and a rich data experience, both creators and users will benefit from out-of-the-box collaboration capabilities that can increase the productivity of users while collaborating.

Power Pages and Power Automate

Power Pages continues to invest in bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code/no-code development and professional developers. While Power Automate is more accessible than ever with new experiences to help users of every skill level build out their cloud and desktop flows. With the increased usage of robotic process automation (RPA), Microsoft is adding features to make it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of the users and accounts.

Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Dataverse

Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with commenting, Power Pages integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams, and more. On the other side, Microsoft Dataverse is continuing its investment in Azure Synapse Link, enabling customers to unlock deeper insights from Dataverse data using the power of Azure Synapse.

For more info about the rest of the release wave plans, you can check out the Power Platform website.

Wave highlights for Dynamics 365:

Marketing and sales

Dynamics 365 Marketing brings real-time customer journey interpretation enabling B2B brands to hyper-personalize the experience across the entire buying journey and confidently grow their marketing and customer experience programs to target up to 300M messages or interactions per month and serve up to 100 million customers.

Dynamics 365 Sales continues to use data and AI to optimize the seller experience, allowing sellers to prioritize their work, and combine business and productivity tools to meet current sellers and all sellers. Facilitates an instant collaboration experience that allows you to interact with your colleagues and serve your customers. Efficiently regaining time and increasing productivity.

Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is focused on delivering the capabilities that help run contact centers optimally by providing enhancements in unified routing with features such as percentage-based routing, preferred agent routing, and longest idle routing. Customer support swarming in Microsoft Teams will help agents resolve complex cases through collaboration.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Dynamics 365 Finance is launching the general availability of vendor invoice optical character recognition (OCR) which automates the reading and recognition of vendor invoices and continues adding additional capabilities for subscription billing use cases. Microsoft will integrate tax calculation service with Dynamics 365 Project Operations and extend electronic invoicing service to support new upcoming e-invoice legislations for France, Poland, and Saudi Arabia.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Dynamics 365 supply chain management continues to invest in features that promote agility and resilience throughout the supply chain. New analytics and support for multiple vendors in planning optimization help organizations optimize their sourcing strategies. Inventory visibility allows companies to track real-time consumption within allocated quantities in support of promotions, special events, and new product launches. Guided warehouse implementation and configuration experiences enable rapid reconfiguration of supply chains and manufacturers in the process industry can use Planning Optimization for shortening their planning cycles.

For more info about the rest of the release wave plans, you can check out the Dynamics 365 website.

Key dates for the 2022 release wave 2

Here you can find more info about the key dates for the 2022 release wave 2.

If you are interested in optimizing and improving your business processes, making the experience while using the application a whole lot easier in the long run, having the data secured in the cloud at the same time, and in need for someone to upgrade your systems to new versions of Dynamics 365, we are open for future collaboration. Contact us here.

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