Happy October!  The days are getting shorter and cooler, love this time of year!  Welcome to another monthly update.  This article will get you caught up on the latest news and notes in the world of Dynamics 365 CE and Power Platform.  If you missed any previous updates you can find those articles here.  We've also been presenting some of this content through a public webcast, and we'll have more on that later.  But for now let's dive right in!

Featured News

2022 Release Wave 2 Is General Available In October 2022

The Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 release plan for the 2022 release wave 2 describes new features releasing from October 2022 through March 2023.

• Video 2022 RW2 Release Highlights: Dynamics 365 Sales 2022 Release Wave 2 Release Highlights

When does the 2022 Release Wave 2 start rolling out to Production environments?

• October 1, 2022 - Production deployment for the 2022 release wave 2 begins.
• The general availability deployment is based on the regions where environments are created. Regional deployments rollout will start on October 1, 2022.
• Check the deployment schedule based on your regions and understand when the 2022RW2 will land on your production environment here.

How can I know 2022 Release Wave 2 features that will be enabled by default on my organization?

• For Power Apps HERE
• For Dynamics 365 Apps HERE

Check out the 2022 Release Wave 2 Plan for:

• Microsoft Power Platform
• Microsoft Dynamics 365

 LEARN MORE>>

Events | Microsoft Ignite

Date: October 12-14, 2022 at 9:00 AM PDT

Digital & in-person

Audience: IT professionals, power users, IT and business leaders, business analysts, solution architects, and Microsoft partners

The best of what's next

• Experience what’s ahead for business applications and accelerate innovation with new features in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.
• Explore the latest innovations, learn from product experts and partners, level up your skillset, and create connections from around the world.
• Join us October 12–14 at 9:00 AM PDT to help shape the future of tech.

Register here>>

Events | Customer Experience Reimaged

Date: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 9:00 – 10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

Digital

Audience: Microsoft partners

Join Microsoft Customer Experience leaders along with other leaders at our customers and partners to get essential insights for evolving your CRM and for an inside look at the latest trends and best practices shaping customer experience (CX) today—and tomorrow.

This will include:

• How Microsoft transformed our own customer experience.
• Best practices from leaders who are successfully doubling down on CX.
• Real-world strategies for connecting CX across your business to help improve revenue.
• The latest capabilities across Microsoft Customer Experience Platform and Viva Sales for moving your business beyond CRM.

Register here>>

Microsoft Viva Sales | General Available On October 3, 2022

Microsoft Viva Sales is a seller experience application that lets sellers use Office 365 and Teams to automatically capture data into any CRM system, eliminating manual data entry and giving more time to focus on selling.

• General Availability : October 3, 2022.
• Try out Viva Sales
• Video: How to get started using Microsoft Viva Sales—YouTube
• Next Steps: To get started with Viva Sales, reach out to your Microsoft sales team and visit the Viva Sales webpage for a demo and more information.
• Read more about Microsoft’s announcements today for the Viva platform

With Viva Sales we address these gaps to mitigate these top pain points:

• Manual data entry is time-consuming and frustrating and bogs down digital sellers. 
• Inability to capture customer engagement data in productivity applications where sellers do their work.
• Lack of AI-based recommendations delivered to the point of action.
• Disconnected processes and tools that slow down productivity.

LEARN MORE>>

Deprecation & Service Retirements

September 2022

Power Apps for Windows will be deprecated and replaced with a new app in Sept, 20, 2022

Effective September 2022, Power Apps for Windows will be deprecated. Microsoft will continue to provide security and other critical updates for the app until Sept 20, 2022.

• We won't release any other features or functionalities for the app.

Learn more>>

October 2022

Dynamics 365 Connector is deprecated

Dynamics 365 connectors must be replaced with a Microsoft Dataverse connector.

• Microsoft Dataverse – This is the newest connector and will, in time, become the only connector available for Dataverse usage. All new features, performance work, and enhancements will be available on this connector.
• Microsoft Dataverse (Legacy) – This is the last generation connector for Microsoft Dataverse. It will continue to operate until it is fully deprecated. It will not receive feature or enhancement updates.
• At that time, you must migrate to using one of the available connectors.

For required actions Learn More>>

NEW UPDATE - Microsoft Dataverse (legacy) connector (CDS 2.0 connector) for Power Automate flows will be deprecated and replaced with another connector

• Effective October 2022, the Microsoft Dataverse (legacy) connector, also referred to as the CDS 2.0 connector, will be deprecated.

Learn more>>

NEW UPDATE - Microsoft Dataverse (legacy) connector (CDS 2.0 connector) for Azure Logic Apps will be deprecated and replaced with another connector

• Effective October 2022, the Microsoft Dataverse (legacy) connector, also referred to as the CDS 2.0 connector, will be deprecated.

Learn more>>

Dynamics 365 Customer Service | SLA items in Web Client are deprecated & Automatic Record Creation Rules in Web Client are deprecated

 Effective October 01, 2020, the service-level agreements (SLAs) are deprecated in the web client.

• Effective October 01, 2020, the automatic record creation and update rules are deprecated in the web client.
• NEW UPDATE: Microsoft will continue to provide support and critical security updates for these features in the web client until April 01, 2023.

Learn more>>

November 2022

Update - Dataverse OData v2.0 Service RETIREMENT has CHANGED and will retire ON APRIL 30, 2023

 We plan to remove the Dataverse OData v2.0 Organization Data Service on April 2023. Read More HERE

Learn more>>

Data Export Service (DES) will retire in November 2022

Data Export Service will continue to work and will be fully supported until it reaches end-of-support and end-of-life a year from this announcement date, in November 2022.

• This notice is to allow you sufficient time to plan and onboard to Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse which is a successor to Data Export Service.
• The Playbook will guide them through the initialization, planning, and adoption phases.

Learn more>>

Release and Service Updates

Find the latest information on upcoming releases and service updates at the links below:

• Release Wave Plan for visibility on what is coming.

• Release Wave schedule for visibility on deployment timelines for Power Apps, Dynamics 365 CE Apps, and Industry Clouds. 2 waves per year:

• Wave 1 Period: April to September

• Wave 2 Period: October to March

Product Updates

Announcing Public Preview of IP based cookie binding in Dataverse

IP cookie binding in Dataverse

• IP based cookie binding will help our customer’s organization in responding to cookie replay security threat in Dataverse.
• IP based cookie binding blocks the cookie replay attack. It does it by evaluating the IP address attached to the cookie.
• If cookie IP address in the request is different than the IP address of the cookie where it was originally created, the Dataverse API will reject the cookie in real-time, and prompt the user with a message.

LEARN MORE>>

Building UI | Introducing the Creator Kit – Efficiently create performant Fluent UI based Power Apps

Introducing the Creator Kit – ready to be used in production applications!

• The Creator Kit, published by the Microsoft Power CAT team, is a collection of 24+ Fluent UI controls and templates for Power Apps makers to create delightful app experiences more rapidly.
• Video: Creator Kit on Power CAT Live YouTube video

LEARN MORE>>

Announcing public preview of Content Security Policy for Power Apps

• We’re excited to announce the public preview of Content Security Policy for Power Apps!
• With these new capabilities, you can now control the CSP header for model-driven as well as canvas apps in the environment in Power Platform Admin Center. CSP can be configured in both enforced and report-only mode.

Learn more>>

Power Platform Administration Planning

• Behind the scenes, your IT and Center of Excellence team spends time configuring, managing and nurturing the adoption of Microsoft Power Platform.
• Understanding how that time is spent can help you plan who you need on your team and find the highest-impact opportunities to streamline the administrative effort.
• We’ve put together a simple solution (Power Platform Administration Planning) that is designed to help you better:
  • Plan your team structure
  • Review where you spend time and look for automation or innovation opportunities

LEARN MORE>>

Power Fx: Introducing ParseJSON

• We are pleased to announce the experimental release of our ParseJSON function, which can parse JSON strings into Power Fx objects and types.
• This new function dramatically simplifies working with JSON in Canvas apps.

LEARN MORE>>

Power Fx: Introducing Named Formulas

• A powerful concept that has been in Excel for a very long time, that we are now bringing to Power Fx. With it, you can simplify your app’s initialization, reduce app load time, reuse logic, and improve the maintainability of your apps.
• Welcome Named Formulas. A funny name, that derives from how this feature appears in Excel, in the “Name Manager.” In Excel, you can name any cell and refer to that name throughout the workbook.

LEARN MORE>>

Power Pages Announcements

• This TechTalk covers new features and deprecations announced recently around Microsoft Power Pages.

Learn more>>

Configure Dataverse search in portals (preview)

• Dataverse search delivers fast and comprehensive search results sorted by relevance in portals.
• Dataverse search is the same search service used in model-driven apps and other Microsoft Power Platform services built on Microsoft Dataverse.

Learn more>>

Overview of portals as progressive web apps

• You can enable your functional portal as a progressive web app (PWA), with native app–like look and feel, by using Power Apps portals Studio.
• With this feature, Power Apps portals now supports using progressive web app technology to provide multiplatform support to create an app that will work on all platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, and Chromebooks) and form factors (mobile, desktop, and tablet).

Learn more>>

Learning and Training Corner

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technical Update Briefing - Sept 2022

Make sure to check out our Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technical Update Briefing webcast!  Get more information here.

Citizen Developers | Utilizing Power Automate to Query Dataverse Data Outside of the Current Environment

• Whenever you are logged into Power Automate you can use the Dataverse connector to query data in that environment. These connectors are adequate for single-environment data systems, but what if your company needs multiple environments, whether it's to split up organizational units or purposes for each set of data? Power Automate has legacy connectors that achieve this task, but they are not usable by all customers. There is also a new connector that will be released soon to address this for those interested (see more here)
• But the purpose of this article is to show how you can use Power Automate to expand access of your data, regardless of where it lives, to the entire Power Platform to be used in your apps, products, and flows.

LEARN MORE>>

Analyzing Azure DevOps Work Item Revisions with Process Advisor - Part 1

• Microsoft Process Advisor provides organizations the ability to gain a better understanding of business processes that can be optimized. This article covers how to use process mining within Process Advisor to identify trends across multiple types of work items and teams within a project.
• In this article, we will explore setting up the Azure DevOps template, how to modify for relevance and the output from Process Advisor. We will wrap with enhancements to the template to provide additional drill down capabilities across teams, builds and iterations.

LEARN MORE>>

Dataverse | 3 Primary Reasons to Learn Dataverse

There is a broad return on investment when it comes to learning Dataverse:

• Data Stewardship to Scale – helps us to reuse data and set standards across our business

The most inspiring reason for learning Dataverse is the breadth of capabilities you can use to set strong standards for data stewardship.

 How does Dataverse help?

•  Granular Security – secures data across the domain, across tables, including column and role-based security

Microsoft consistently prioritizes security and customer trust. Anyone can learn more about Microsoft’s Security and Trust commitment, or specifically about security and compliance for the Power Platform. So, why do I call this out as one of the three reasons for learning Dataverse?

• Extended Integration Powers – enables us to bring data from anywhere we need it into our solutions

LEARN MORE>>