Home » What’s New in Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

What’s New in Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

by Genna Joudrey
6 minutes read

If you haven’t heard, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations is now licensed as two separate applications – Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Microsoft explained that this change occurred because they want to offer more flexibility to customers so they can adopt the capabilities that they need when they need them.

Dynamics 365 Finance versus Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: 

Dynamics 365 Finance: 

  • Drive strategic financial decisions with AI 
  • Unify and automate your financial processes 
  • Reduce operational expenses 
  • Decrease global financial complexity and risk 

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management:  

  • Innovate with intelligent manufacturing operations 
  • Modernize warehouse management 
  • Optimize production performance 
  • Maximize the life of your assets 
  • Automate and streamline your supply chain

Platform updates 

  • Turn on the new grid control through Feature management 

Previously, you could add the new grid control by adding “&debug=reactGrid” to the environment URL. Now, you can turn on the new grid control by using the Feature management workspace. Here’s how:  

  1. Enable the flight by using the following SQL statement:
    • INSERT INTO SYSFLIGHTING (FLIGHTNAME, enabled, FLIGHTSERVICEID, PARTITION) VALUES(‘CLIReactGridEnableFeature’, 1, 0, 5637144576); 
  2. Reset IIS to flush the static flighting cache. 
  3. Go to the Feature management workspace in your Finance and Operations app. 
  4. Select the New grid control feature in the list of features, and then select Enable now in the details pane. 

NOTE: If New grid control does not appear in the list of features, select Check for updates. 

All subsequent user sessions will start with the new gridenabled.

  • Updates to saved views
    • The saved views feature has been updated to improve the administrator’s Personalization page. Managing views and personalizations, the ability to bulk import/export views, and the ability to publish views to users in specific legal entities are a few of the improvements that are now available. You can learn more about this feature here 
  • New controls available for developers
    • The Website Host control has been added to allow developers to embed third-party apps directly into the platform inside iFrames. Microsoft states that this is the first step towards allowing users with certain privileges to embed apps via personalization, similar to the existing scenario for embedding PowerApps. Developers can also use a new star rating control that rates on a scale of 1 to 5 stars.  
  • Excel Add-in authentication and authorization enhancements  
    • Authentication token expiration now silent: The sign-in process validates any existing authentication tokens to determine if the user can continue using an existing authentication context or if they need to sign in again. Previously, if the authentication token had expired, the Excel Add-in would notify the user. Now, the user will be shown a standard sign-in screen, and a message will report the authentication token expiration for debugging purposes.
    • Authentication timeoutIf the authentication process didn’t complete in time, some users would receive an error message with a sign out button. Ignoring the error and selecting Sign in again resulted in a successful authentication, but if users selected Sign out, there was a possibility of getting into an endless loop. 
    • Support for ADFS sign out improvedThe sign-out mechanism is now inside a dialog box. Customers that are using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) benefit from this update because communication from the Excel Add-in to ADFS servers is only allowed in a separate dialog box.  
    • Authorization failure information now providedPreviously, if the user authenticated successfully but didn’t have proper permissions, the Excel Add-in would show a “Load applets” link. Now, the authorization permissions failure will be detailed, so the user understands what has happened and why the error has occurred. 

Other updates 

  • Updated icon for apps 
  • Optimization of loading the data management workspace 
  • Inefficient memory usage by data management export/import jobs 
  • Extensibility enhancements 
  • skipAutoOrderby API 
  • Batch framework contention reduction 

Removed and deprecated features 

To review all removed and deprecated features, read this Microsoft document. They have listed everything that has been eliminated from the platform. 

If you have any questions about the above changes, feel free to email our team. We have Solution Architects, Consultants, and Developers on board that can assist you with any Microsoft platform. Stay tuned for a future blog post that will go into detail on the new features you can preview within Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.