Business Central 2020 Release Wave 1

Business Central April upgrade

With 2020 Release Wave 1, Business Central is further enhanced with key investments designed to optimize basic service and meet the demands and wishes of a rapidly growing customer base. These enhancements include improved user productivity, geographic expansion as well as the most requested features from users. In addition, the migration tools to move on-premise users of Business Central into the cloud are also being improved.

Service fundamentals improvements

It is fundamental for all companies that their business management system is reliable and performs properly. 2020 Release Wave 1 has a high degree of focus on service quality and availability. With the upcoming upgrade, we will also see the results of Microsoft's massive investments in Business Central service security.

A not insignificant component of the Business Central ecosystem is the partners who deliver the application to the end customer. With 2020 Release Wave 1, partners gain telemetric visibility through Azure Insights, which means they can monitor application performance through an APM (Application Performance Management) service. Due to partner network queries, Microsoft provides enhancements to the Common Data Service integration where you can safely store and manage the data used for business applications, which enhances the extensibility of integration with other Dynamics 365 applications. The launch and support functionality for managing the phasing out of the AL code language enables a non-disruptive future development of the service.

Productivity improvements

The ability of end users to work smoothly with the application is critical to creating effective workflows. With 2020 Release Wave 1, Microsoft continues to improve user productivity through enhancements to the modern client (web client), streamlined data entry as well as functionality requested by Business Central users, such as the automatic insertion of recurring sales and purchase order lines.

Geographic expansion

With the April upgrade, it will also be possible to install multi-language translations for each Business Central installation. In addition, the first release wave of the year adds locations for Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Latvia, Columbia and Peru. Localization for India and Brazil is added in a later release wave.

From on-premise to cloud

There is no doubt that it is Microsoft's ambition that all Business Central on-premise installations before long must be moved up into the cloud and licensed on a subscription basis according to the SaaS model. This is also reflected in 2020 Release Wave 1, where Microsoft is enhancing their migration tools designed to bring on-premise Business Central users to Business Central cloud.

To simplify the transition to Business Central online for existing Dynamics customers, Microsoft also adds support for migration from a much broader set of Dynamics NAV and Dynamics GP versions, enhances selective migration of Dynamics GP customers and providers, and enhances the Dynamics GP migration setup of the account plan.

Customer and user requested improvements

As always, Microsoft listens to the users of Business Central and has responded to the most requested customer improvement suggestions. In addition to several features selected from the product idea portal, they have also enhanced areas that have received significant feedback, such as functionality for bank reconciliation.