Category: Business Central (Nav/Navision)

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The second of the new functionality in the Governance and Administration section is improved update release processes.

Improved update release processes ensure that updates run as close to the start of the update window as possible and that updates are made available globally more gradually.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

During 2023 release wave 2, Microsoft are improving their update release processes. Customers who don’t manually schedule their environment updates can expect updates to start quickly after the start of the environment update window.

To deploy updates more gradually to environments that don’t manually reschedule the update to a different date, update availability and default scheduling will vary per region.

My Opinion

I would encourage clients to keep an eye on release dates and schedule updates for when is going to be suitable for them rather than letting Microsoft control when updates happen. Clients need to get it installed in a sandbox and test everything first before rolling it into the production environment.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The first of the new functionality in the Governance and Administration section is assign more granular administration rights.

Administrators’ access rights can be better controlled by assigning roles that exclude access to other Microsoft products and apply extra restrictions on Business Central environments.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

A new Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) role gives customers more granular control over their delegated administrators’ access rights. The Dynamics 365 Business Central Administrator role lets you manage all aspects of all Business Central environments but doesn’t grant access to other Dynamics 365 products. Customer administrators can now grant access to individual environments to users from specified partner tenants via the Business Central admin center. This feature better supports scenarios where multiple partners are supporting different environments for the same customer.

This post is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

In the previous article of this series, I showed how bins can be made mandatory for a location. In this post, I am going to show how bins can be manually added to a location.

It is worth noting that if you are enabling bins for a location on a new company, or a new location in an existing company, you can make bins mandatory before creating the bins, but if you are enabling bins for a location which is being transacted in, then you may want to add the bins to the location before making them mandatory.

To add bins to a location, open the Location Card, by using Tell me what you want to do and searching for Locations and select the location from the list.

Click the Bins button on the action bar to open the Location » Bins page:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… Add Bins to a Location”

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The fourth of the new functionality in the Development section is use the built-in rich text editor to enter data.

Rich text editing capabilities improve the user experience by providing an intuitive and easy-to-use way to create and edit content in Business Central.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

Until now, you could only use rich text editing capabilities, such as the font and style formatting, in email scenarios. Now, Microsoft are bringing the power of their built-in rich text editor to all media fields in Business Central. Developers can also customize rich text capabilities for their extensions and applications.

At first iteration Microsoft will support multi-line text but not in full screen mode and have a rich content toolbar intended for multimedia scenarios that may include tables, pictures, and more.

This can increase productivity and efficiency by reducing the time and effort required to perform tasks. Additionally, the rich text editor can help to ensure consistency and accuracy in the formatting and presentation of information, which enhances the overall quality and professionalism of the content you enter in Business Central.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The third of the new functionality in the Development section is turn off indexes as a partner.

The last piece in the database performance tuning toolbox for partners is to be able to turn off existing indexes in Business Central.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

AL developers can get an overview of index cost and usage frequency. They can then turn off indexes that are infrequently used or that are too expensive to maintain. By doing this, the performance of database operations can be greatly improved.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The second of the new functionality in the Development section is turn off data analysis mode on pages and queries.

When first introduced, the data analysis mode was available on all list pages. However, for some list pages, using the data analysis mode doesn’t make much sense. In addition, in this release, it’s now also possible for users to analyze data that’s defined in query objects. With query objects, as with list pages, it doesn’t always make sense to use the data analysis mode. This is especially true with existing query objects, which were typically developed for a different purpose.

Therefore, Microsoft have made it possible for tenant admins and AL developers to turn off the analysis mode on list pages and query objects that aren’t suited for analytical usage.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

The data analysis mode was introduced as a public preview feature in 2023 release Wave 2 as a new way of interacting with data on list pages. Instead of running reports using different options and filters, you can simply add multiple tabs that represent different tasks or views on the data. Examples could be "My customers," "Follow-up items," "Recently added vendors," "Sales statistics," or any other view you want. For some list pages such as ‘Feature Management,’ this capability doesn’t make much sense.

Therefore, Microsoft make the following possible:

• AL developers can turn off the data analysis mode using page metadata.
• Tenant admins can override the developers choice in the client (by using a list page on a system table) on the tenant level.
• Tenant admin can turn off the data analysis mode for specific users (probably done using a specific permission).

For queries to show up in the Reports & Analysis view in the role explorer and whether it’s possible for an end user to use the data analysis mode, AL developers must specify whether the query is enabled for UI.
This is done through a new property called UIEnabled which can have the value true or false. If not set by the developer, the default is false so that Microsoft don’t expose existing queries to the new report explorer.

Also, the developer can add a description in metadata on the query. When set, this information can be consumed in the client and in the Power BI connector. The description is optional to define.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The first of the new functionality in the Development section is open Visual Studio Code from web client to investigate or troubleshoot extensions.

Recreating a locally installed Visual Studio Code workspace to investigate or troubleshoot a customer environment includes creating workspaces, projects, and launch configurations, and downloading symbols, all of which require knowledge as well as time to go through it.

To simplify and speed up this process, a new option to open a local Visual Studio Code instance for a given extension and environment will be added to the web client.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

As a developer or consultant, you can open a new Visual Studio Code session from within the web client for a specific customer production or sandbox environment. Different contexts will be supported—for example, for a page, page field, or extension from within the Page Inspector or from the Help and Support page. Depending on the context, Visual Studio Code will either open to allow inspecting objects and source, or to attach and debug the current web client session.

In this scenario, the following will happen:

• A new Visual Studio Code session begins.
• Projects for the chosen extensions will be created.
• Matching launch configuration will be created (depending on production or sandbox, but deployment is only possible on a sandbox).
• If invoked from a context to view extensions, symbols will be downloaded and the AL Explorer will open to easily allow browsing objects.
• If invoked to view source or attach and debug, the user will end in a debug AL (.dal) source file.
• In both cases, access to source will be gated by the resource exposure profile settings for each extension.

My Opinion

Happy for a developer to tell me otherwise, but this sounds like it could be a useful enhancement.

This post is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

In a previous article, I covered basic inventory with bins and why you might use bins to keep track of where stock is within a warehouse. Whereas locations can be used without locations being mandatory (although I don’t recommend it), bins must be made mandatory before bins can be used.

If you try to process stock into a bin at a site where bins are not mandatory then you will receive an error:

Bins are enabled per location, meaning you can operate bins in some warehouses and not others. For some of the clients I have worked with, this would be useful as they may track stock in bins at the warehouse location, but not at branch or other locations (I’ve worked with more than one client who held stock in vans which were all created as a site).

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… Enable Processing of Inventory Using Bins”

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The tenth of the new functionality in the Country and regional section is supporting more countries and regions.

More countries and regions are added to bring Business Central to approximately 150 countries and regions.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Nov 2023
General Availability: Dec 2023

Feature Details

Microsoft are expanding Business Central to more countries and regions through partner-led localization. Their partners create the relevant localization apps and publish them to AppSource. In combination with the built-in language offerings, Microsoft are making Business Central online available to serve customers in 150-plus countries and regions worldwide. In this release, Microsoft plan to expand to the following countries and regions:

• American Samoa
• Anguilla
• Aruba
• Brunei
• Chad
• Côte d’Ivoire
• Curacao
• Dominica
• Grenada
• Guam
• Guinea
• Guyana
• Haiti
• Micronesia
• New Caledonia
• Palau
• Papua New Guinea
• Samoa
• Seychelles
• Suriname
• Vanuatu

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The ninth of the new functionality in the Country and regional section is e-invoicing with NemHandel in Denmark.

Danish companies can use e-invoicing with the NemHandel as required by the new Danish Bookkeeping Act.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Oct 2023
General Availability: Nov 2023

Feature Details

As the new Danish Bookkeeping Act requires an embedded feature for e-invoicing that’s connected with the NemHandel service, a new e-invoicing app has been created on top of Microsoft’s new global e-invoicing core app. This new app enables all features that are required by Danish authorities.