Overview of Dynamics 365 Business Central April '19 release

Since its launch in April 2018, Dynamics 365 Business Central has seen increasing adoption by organizations looking to digitally transform their businesses. In October '18, we launched Business Central as also available in on-premises deployments. April '19 brings an update to Business Central that aims to enhance current customer satisfaction with the product.

Powerful new features for business users

We are pushing productivity to the next level by delivering a smooth and fresh experience to all customers of Business Central — those using the web interface in the browser or the modern Windows App for desktop. Combining modern trends around web-based applications and the complex requirements of a Business Central customer resulted in several improvements addressing productivity of a busy professional.

Among those many changes, we have enabled even more keyboard-centric scenarios around the important features of the product, keeping in mind speed of data entry and analysis, such as quick entry usage and personalization, sorting lists using the keyboard, and navigating around data fields and groups. We have introduced several improvements to features related to the customer context, such as a contextual work date indicator. We have also added options enabling advanced users to be even more productive - such as the focus mode, improved search, and the new option of inspecting the table data behind a page (formerly About This Page). We have also addressed feedback related to filters in Excel export (adding an easy Open in Excel option), common auto-save experience (which includes a new autosave indicator), and modern interface elements, such as the refreshed action bar and all-product navigation.

Additionally, Business Central becomes more intuitive thanks to an advanced personalization experience and better discoverability of new features — that includes refreshed action menus and groups across the product but also the ability to personalize those to suit the user's preference.

Performance, reliability, and scalability enhancements

No matter the industry or size of a small or medium-sized business (SMB), business users expect a dependable service and platform on which to run their business, collaborate, and get work done. Along with our wave of innovative new features, we've invested heavily in boosting performance, reliability, and scalability of Business Central, across the platform and business application.

Business Central runs much faster with a focus on typical business scenarios and usage patterns. The experience in the browser is more responsive thanks to on-demand loading of page elements, server resources are optimized for fast user interaction, and the database has been tuned to handle more data and load it faster.

Users experience a more stable service because upgrades are scheduled to suit the individual business, users are no longer interrupted by maintenance during work hours, and we've also matured service health practices to ensure maximum uptime. Users requiring assistance now have a single screen through which to find self-help material, share ideas with the community, and request support that has also been streamlined to reduce response time.

The Business Central security team works tirelessly behind the scenes to safeguard the security of your data. In addition to continual improvement of our security infrastructure and processes, we ensure Business Central continues to meet ISO27001, ISO27017, ISO27018, SOC 1 & 2 Type 2, HIPPA BAA, and FERPA industry security and privacy compliance standards. For more details and a list of all certificates, see https://aka.ms/d365-compliance-list.

Accessibility

Business Central is ready to support the diversity of your workforce where both the desktop and mobile interfaces are now highly accessible.

Base application as an app

We are making investments in the platform to make it easier for ISVs to get into the cloud. We will achieve this by splitting the big application that we have today into a system app and an app on top of that as an extension, compiled in AL using Visual Studio Code.

Data and AI

The last major investment for the April release is starting our course into the Data and AI future. The only platform that will matter in the next decade is the data platform and the only cloud that will matter is the AI cloud. We need to ensure that we have data sanity, which means that we need to make investments into storing the product data into Common Data Service (CDS) for Apps. The first will be to strengthen and prepare integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales through CDS for Apps, then ensure Business Central data contributes to intelligent insights (notes synching, late payment prediction) in AI for Sales apps, and finally that Business Central users get intelligent insights generated by Dynamics 365 Sales Insights (predictive opportunity scoring).