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 User experiences section is Scan barcodes with Business Central mobile app for iOS and Android.

The barcode scanner control increases warehouse users’ productivity as they can scan barcodes using the device camera or even the dedicated barcode scanner. This feature also opens scenarios for partners to create more advanced experiences using a barcode scanner.

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

Feature Details

The new barcode scanning feature supports three different scenarios, each with varying levels of complexity. The scenarios range from simple user interface (UI) features to more advanced approaches that cater to ISVs.

• Scenario 1: UI button
  The mobile client renders a user-friendly control on page fields for starting the barcode scanner. To enable the barcode scanning action on a field, the ExtendedDatatype property in AL code must be set to Barcode. Pages with such fields, which are only supported for text and code data types, will automatically display a barcode scanning button in the UI, enabling scanning via the device camera. This scanning is highly efficient and responsive, featuring mobile OS level processing and supporting the most well-known 1D and 2D barcode formats. Once a barcode is scanned, its value is entered in the field on the page, and the focus moves to the next quick-entry field on the page. This feature is supported on both iOS and Android platforms.
• Scenario 2: AL action
  AL developers are also able to trigger the barcode scanning UI via an AL-based action, so the barcode scanning can be started via a button, link, or some other semiautomated logic (for instance, when a page is opened). Also supported on iOS and Android platforms, this scenario uses the same camera-based scanning technology as scenario 1 and returns the scanned barcode value to AL code for further processing.
• Scenario 3: Barcode event
  This scenario targets professional hardware devices, typically with laser-based barcode scanners, offering greater flexibility to developers. It is only supported by hardware barcode scanners, such as Zebra or Datalogic, running Android 11 and above (there’s no support for iOS). With this scenario, developers register a barcode subscriber that listens for subsequent barcode events on the AL side. When the hardware scans a barcode, its value is sent to the Business Central mobile app and then to AL code. In other words, AL code can intercept an event from an Android device and process the decoded barcode further. Additionally, this scenario supports scanning barcodes and building up a document without interacting with any UI.

My Opinion

As I said in the article on the Print and Scan Barcodes new feature, adding barcode scanning in by default into Business Central is a very good thing; it’s nice to see these apps for Android and iOS to complement the support for scanning itself.

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 User experiences section is Mark fields as read-only when customizing UI.

Business Central offers a powerful suite of user interface (UI) customization tools that empowers customers to quickly optimize the experience for individual users, for each role, or for the entire organization. Customers often ask their supporting partner to simplify how data is presented on a page, to improve readability and optimize data entry. Now, customers can self-serve by making fields non-editable directly in the UI, adding to the existing UI simplification capabilities such as hiding or moving fields on the page.

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

Feature Details

Business Central now includes the following:

• Make fields non-editable: When customizing the UI, use the context menu to specify that a field should be read-only. You can always undo your customization later. Setting the editable state of a field is not a security feature and should only be used to optimize pages for readability and efficient data entry. This enhancement does not allow making fields editable if the application developer has specified that a field should be read-only.
• Choose the scope of your change: Personalize your own workspace or roll out the change safely for one or more roles (profiles) starting with a sandbox or directly in production.

Try it out

To experience making fields read-only, sign in to Business Central and follow this example (or similar):

1. Navigate to the Profiles (Roles) list and choose Customize Pages for your current profile.
2. When the new tab loads, navigate to the Item card or another page of your choice.
3. For any editable field, bring up the field customization menu and choose Lock editing.

My Opinion

This is a very welcome enhancement which, due to its simplicity, I am surprised wasn’t already in Business Central. It’s been quite a common request from clients when showing them how to personalise pages by adding, moving or removing fields, to also set them to disabled. Unfortunately, so far we’ve had to say it can’t be done; fortunately, with this enhancement we can now show them how to make fields read-only.

The Supported Upgrade Paths to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Releases document from Microsoft was updated with a note in late October to reflect a change to the upgrade path for Business Central 2019 (v14), starting from 2025 release Wave 1 (v26).

This change will affect the upgrade to Business Central 2025 Release Wave 1 (v26) which will now require you to upgrade from Business Central 2019 (v14) to Business Central 2024 Release Wave 2 (v25), before doing a second upgrade to 2025 Release Wave 1 (v26).

There is also a note that upgrading from minor updates between the release updates might not always be supported; you need to check the Dynamics 365 Business Central Upgrade Compatibility Matrix to check if the version you’re on is compatible and upgrade first to a supported release before continuing the upgrade to a later release.

As time goes by, I expect that the upgrade path for older versions continues to become longer with more versions needing to upgrade to an intermediate version before upgrading to the most recent release.

This is probably more the case with versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, of which all are no longer supported, but will impact earlier versions of 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 of the new functionality in the Service and platform section is Service-to-service apps and device license users can schedule tasks.

In typical commerce, point of sale, and warehousing scenarios, where there’s a high volume of transactions and workloads to be processed by service-to-service apps or device license users, the ability to schedule tasks and execute them in background sessions can greatly improve throughput and reduce risk of errors.

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

Feature Details

Scheduling tasks has been enabled for app (S2S) and device license users since the updates 21.2 and 22.5, respectively. In situations that required processing many transactions and workloads—such as posting sales orders, printing receipts, and updating inventory—S2S apps and device license users can now increase throughput by parking these workloads as scheduled tasks that will be automatically and asynchronously run later in background sessions. In this way, they avoid waiting for the completion of these workloads and reduce the risk of errors, timeouts, and performance issues that may occur if processing these workloads synchronously.

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 of the new functionality in the Service and platform section is New operational limits on scheduled tasks and web requests improve throughput.

The new operational limits will improve protection, ensure fairness among users, and inspire elasticity and scalability of their service, while providing higher throughput for environments with many users.

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

Feature Details

Business Central online handles diverse customer workloads with varying load patterns based on seasonality and many other factors, such as the number of active users, external integrations, BI and analytics tasks, and more. To manage these workloads efficiently, Microsoft have built a highly automated system that performs traffic management, load balancing and distribution, scheduled task execution, and capacity allocation based on the factors mentioned. Microsoft continuously improve the elasticity and scalability of their service with more insights to provide the highest performance and throughput for all customers and their workloads.

Microsoft are excited to announce some of these improvements in this release, specifically their increased operational limits. The new limits will significantly benefit their customers with large, complex environments that have many users, scheduled tasks, or web service integrations. They substantially raise the number of web service requests that can be submitted, as well as the number of scheduled tasks and web service requests that can be concurrently processed in each environment.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2: New Operational Limits on Scheduled Tasks and Web Requests Improve Throughput”

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 of the new functionality in the Service and platform section is Synchronize multiple Business Central companies with the same Dataverse environment.

Unlock scenarios where multiple companies must access data in the same Dataverse environment. This enables partners to build new experiences when working in more than one company.

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

Feature Details

When you set up the connection to Dataverse, you can select several Business Central companies from one Dataverse environment.
You can enable multicompany synchronization for each table mapping. On the Integration Table Mappings page, select the Enable Multicompany Synchronization checkbox. Enabling multicompany synchronization has the following effects:

• Removes company filters on user- or team-owned tables, such as the Account and Contact tables.
• Makes sales quotes and orders synchronization more restrictive with respect to the company filter. You must use the company picker in Dataverse or Dynamics 365 Sales to specify the Business Central company that will process a particular document.
• Doesn’t affect tables that are organization-owned, such as the Currency table.

You can open coupled records in different companies using the Open in Business Central action in Dataverse or Dynamics 365 Sales.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2: Synchronize Multiple Business Central Companies With the Same Dataverse 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 fourth of the new functionality in the Reporting and data analysis section is Share a data analysis with a co-worker.

Data analysis mode lets you calculate and analyze data directly from a list page, without having to run a report or switch to another application, such as Excel. After you’ve prepared an analysis on a tab, you can easily communicate your findings with your colleagues by sharing a link to the tab.

Enabled for:
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

Data analysis mode was introduced as a public preview feature in 2023 release wave 1, and provided a new way to interact with data on list pages.

In this release, Microsoft are taking data analysis mode even further:

• From any analysis tab, you can share a link to the tab with co-workers.
• Shared links can also be used as a click-once installation of good out-of-the-box analysis.

When a user clicks a shared link, the page opens in data analysis mode and the analysis is created as an analysis tab.

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 Reporting and data analysis section is Analyze, group, and pivot data on lists.

End users and data analysts can analyze data from lists directly in the client without the need to open the page in Excel or run a report.

The ability to analyze data directly in lists raises the bar for what you can do without having to switch applications, while still allowing customers and partners to do more in report objects, Excel, Power BI, or other data analysis applications.

Enabled for:
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

Analysis mode is a new way of interacting with data on lists. 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.
When you’re ready to analyze data on a list page (where you might have filtered data using a view or filter pane), simply switch to analysis mode:

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2: Analyze, Group, and Pivot Data on Lists”

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.

As with other worksheets, before you can use them, you need need to create a worksheet template. To create the template for the put-away worksheet, search for and open the Warehouse Worksheet Templates list page.

Make sure the cursor is on the PUT-AWAY line and click the Related » Template » Names action:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… Create a Warehouse Put-away Worksheet Template”

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 Onboarding section is Demo tool and data for service scenarios.

To help partners demonstrate the advanced capabilities of Business Central, Microsoft are making a demo tool that provides setup and data for service scenarios.

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

Feature Details

The Contoso Coffee app provides a demo tool and a related set of demo data for service scenarios. You can install the extension in any environment. Presales specialists can run the tool on Cronus or My Company and get the setup and demo data needed to demonstrate various scenarios. For Business Central on-premises, the demo tool and data are available on the product media as source code.

Contoso Coffee is a fictitious company that produces consumer and commercial coffee makers. The Contoso Coffee apps for Business Central add demo data that you can use to learn how to use the Service Management capabilities in Business Central.

This app provides several elements that are used for the main walkthroughs:

• Resources with assigned skills
• Items configured to create service items
• Loaner items
• Standard service codes
• Fault and resolution samples

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2: Demo Tool and Data for Service Scenarios”