Category: Power Automate

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 5th of the new functionality in the Governance and administration section is link Business Central environments to Power Platform environments.

Link your Business Central to a Power Platform environment from the admin center to provide a default target environment for integrations and apply Power Platform environment settings to your Business Central environment. This simplifies the integration process and reduces the need to specify the target environment for each integration.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: –
General Availability: May 2024

Feature Details

Business Central integrates with many different Power Platform and Dynamics 365 products in various ways. In 2024 release wave 1, Business Central administrators are able to link a Business Central environment to a Power Platform environment from the Business Central admin center.

This capability provides the following benefits:

• The Business Central environment will inherit settings that are enabled on the linked Power Platform environment in the Power Platform admin center, such as customer-managed encryption keys.
• The linked Power Platform environment will provide a default target environment for any integrations set up between Business Central and other Dynamics 365 and Power Platform products, such as Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Automate.

Business Central environments can only be linked to Power Platform environments that are in the same Azure geography and are of the same type (production or sandbox). Linking environments isn’t a permanent operation, meaning it’s possible to unlink and relink environments. Environment lifecycle operations, such as updating or deleting an environment, on each of the linked environments is administered separately.

My Opinion

This was something I’d found odd when working with Power Automate, that there was no way of linking a Power Automate environment with a Business Central one. After all, I would want my development environment in Power Automate linked with my development one in Business Central, and the same for QA, UAT and production environments in both.

It’s good to see that this feature is being added; I think it will go quite some way to avoiding problems with a Power Automate environment being inadvertently linked with the wrong Business Central one.

This post is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Power Automate), 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 last article of the Working with Power Automate series, I showed how a flow could be created from a template; the example I used was a Business Central purchase order approval flow. However, while I showed the flow being created from the template in the Power Auto,ate portal, they can also be created from a template within Business Central itself.

The process is actually very similar to manually creating a flow from within Business Central; on a page, click the Automate » Power Automate » Create approval flow action:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Power Automate), how do I… Create a New Cloud Flow for Business Central From a Template”

I’ve been doing a fair bit of work with Power Automate alongside Business Central recently and have come across a limitation which I had not expected.

It is best practice, aligned with application lifecycle management, to develop flows within a solution and to use environment variables for settings within the flows (such as for the environment and company).

I’ve discovered though that it is not possible to use environment variables for instant flows for Business Central; for all other types of flow they are available and do work, but not instant ones. This limitation is also only for instant flows with Business Central; other instant flows such as manually triggered ones do work with environment variables.

There is an item open for votes for this issue to be resolved, which can be voted upon here.

This seems like a very unusual limitation which goes against the ALM principles which Microsoft are promoting for developing flows in general and specifically with Business Central.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 1st of the new functionality in the Copilot and AI innovation section is introduce Power Automate Copilot integration with Business Central.

Copilot is the AI-powered work assistant that boosts creativity and improves productivity for small and medium-sized organizations.

Building Power Automate flows without predefined templates can be a mundane and complicated process. With Copilot in Power Automate, this process is much smoother because flows can be built based on just the natural language input from the user.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2024
General Availability: –

Feature Details

This feature integrates Copilot in Power Automate with Business Central, so that you can start creating automation flows based on natural language. When such flows are opened in Power Automate for further refinement, you can take advantage of the Copilot experience in Power Automate.

Copilot in Power Automate allows open-ended and conversational experiences while authoring flows that use your Business Central data. You can ask questions and get assistance to improve and change those flows. Copilot stays with you in your flow and helps you build, set up, and run an automation on your behalf through a comfortable chat experience. Copilot takes your input and provides either documentation, links, or answers in the Copilot chat pane. But most important, it makes changes to the structure of the flow based on your natural language description.

This feature helps you streamline business processes and improve productivity by shortening the path to automation.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1: Introduce Power Automate Copilot Integration with Business Central”