Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Monthly Update-March 2022

Quick Links: Featured News | Release Waves and Service Updates | Product Updates | Training Corner

Featured News

2022 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available

2022 Release Wave 1 Plan release:

• Release Plan documentation to learn about the upcoming capabilities for D365 & Power Platform has been released
  • What’s new and Planned for:
    • Dynamics 365 Sales
    • Dynamics 365 Customer Service
    • Dynamics 365 Field Service
    • Dynamics 365 Marketing
    • Power Apps
    • Power Apps Portals
    • Power Automate
    • Dataverse
    • AI builder
    • Governance and Administration
    • Pro development
    • Data integration

Early Access Available:

• The ‘Early Access” features are automatically enabled when the Wave becomes generally available.
  • early access features page
  • How to opt-in Early Access page

April 2022 | General Availability

• Production deployment receives the new capabilities based on the rollout schedule.
  • Deployment schedule
• For the 2022 Release wave 1 overview check this page on Dynamics 365 blog

Accelerate revenue with Dynamics 365 Sales and AI Sales Premium features with Sales Enterprise

Check out the short video of the Digital Selling Capabilities and see how with the 2022 Release Wave 1.  With 2022 Release Wave 1, You can use selected Dynamics 365 Sales Premium features with the Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license.

• Allow real-time call insights to drive better call outcomes. Conversation intelligence
• Enable sellers to collaborate more effectively in the moments that matter. With Embedded Teams Chat
• Help sellers prioritize activities that will have the highest impact. The sales accelerator
• Help sellers focus on the leads and opportunities that are most likely to close. Predictive lead and opportunity scoring
• For more information check out this page on Microsoft cloud blog.

Deprecations & Service Retirement – Power Platform

April 2022

Upcoming WS-TRUST\OrganizationServiceProxy Authentication Type Shutdown in the spring of 2022
We are doing this to provide better Identity security, authentication support, cross platform support and to enable future improvements in our overall platform supported
product suite.

Effective February 4, 2020, the WS-Trust authentication type that is used by custom clients to connect to Dataverse is deprecated

• Who is affected?
  • This affects you, your customer, or your tools if you’re connecting to Dataverse\PowerPlatform and:
  • You’re using a version of our SDK Client OLDER than 9.0.2.3 (shipped in April of 2018)
  • You’re using Office365 Authentication with the CrmServiceClient on ANY version.
  • You’re Using the OrganizationServiceProxy directly, either via the CrmServiceClient, or using it directly from the Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.dll
  • This does NOT affect Plugins that run on the Dataverse Server.
• Requested GO-DO’s
  • If you are in the in the use case above, make plans and fix it now without waiting until close to the deadline.
  • If you are using tools, Partner or ISV provided tools, raise awareness, provide the link HERE which walks though identification and updates required.
• Retirement phased approach
  • Effective April 2021, the authentication protocol will be retired for all new environments within a tenant.
  • The retirement of new environments starts April 1, 2021 and rolls out gradually in all regions within a 6-week window.
  • Effective April 2022, the authentication protocol will be retired for all new and existing environments within a tenant.
  • More information: Use of Office365 authentication with the WS-Trust security protocol

Model-driven app controls Deprecation & Retirement

• Some older controls for model-driven apps are deprecated.
• These controls include Flip Switch, Calendar Control (V1), Linear Slider, Radial Knob, Arc Knob, Linear Gauge; along with the Website Preview control, MultiSelectPicklistControl (V1), and the Flip Label (two radio buttons format option).
• Why is this needed?
  • These controls are outdated and don’t conform to our current standards for usability and accessibility.
  • For example, we’ve received feedback that the Flip Label control is difficult to determine its intended use and users commonly don’t see the options available to choose from, such as "yes / no" or "enable / disable."
• Impact
  • Starting April 2021, these controls can no longer be added to forms.
  • For instances of Flip Label control, the control will be transitioned to a drop-down.
  • For all other controls, they'll continue to work within existing forms until April 2022

October 2022

Some client APIs Deprecation & Retirement - Deprecated Client API : ClientGlobalContext.js.aspx

• The ClientGlobalContext.js.aspx page is deprecated and scheduled to be unavailable after October 1, 2022.
• Use Power Apps component framework overview to build configurable and reusable components that enable external integrations in a supported way or usecustom pages to add custom full page or dialog or pane experiences into model-driven apps, with the flexibility of the canvas designer.
• Check the list of deprecated client APIs here

November 2022

Dataverse OData v2.0 Service removal

• We plan to remove the Dataverse OData v2.0 Organization Data Service on November 11, 2022.
• This announcement does not involve the deprecated Organization Service SOAP endpoint.
• At this time, no date has been announced for the removal of the SOAP endpoint.
• The Organization Data Service was deprecated with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement v8.0 in favor of the Web API, an OData v4.0 service.
• Today, less than .06% of requests to Dataverse use this endpoint. Removing this endpoint will enable Dataverse to improve overall performance.
• Any code that uses the Organization Data Service should be migrated to use the Web API before that time.
• More information: OData v2.0 Service removal date announcement

Data export Service

• Data Export Service (DES) is deprecated.
• 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.
• For more details, check out this page on Power Apps blog.

Important upcoming changes – supporting articles

• Important upcoming changes and deprecations in canvas apps
• Important upcoming changes and deprecations in Power Apps portals
• Important changes (deprecations) coming in Power Apps and Power Automate

Release Waves and Service Updates

Manage Updates

Release Waves:

• Bring new innovations, new features and capabilities into the products through 2 Waves per year.
• Current Release Wave :
  • 2021 Release Wave 2 is current. 
  • 2022 Release Wave 1 is announced. 
  • Early Access Available.  GA: April 2022

Service Updates:

Continuously bring stability and reliability into the products with set of repaired functionalities, hotfixes. Usually on a weekly cadence.

Admin feature | Service Updates - ( doesn’t apply to Release Waves)
Managing your maintenance Window for database and application updates in Power Platform Admin Center.

Understanding Release Wave Updates

• Release Wave Plan for visibility on what’s coming.
• Release Wave schedule  for visibility on deployment timelines  for Power Apps, Dynamics 365 CE Apps and Industry Clouds
  • Wave 1 Period:   April – September
  • Wave 2 Period:  October to March.
• Release Wave Opt-in to early access update
  • Understand the opt-in process to early updates for Dynamics 365 environment and how to opt-in to early access updates.
• General Availability deployment
  • After a release cycle has been made "generally available" to users, environments are typically automatically turned on.
    This is so users can receive ongoing mandatory updates which will enable the early access features and general available features of the release.

Tips to Stay Informed on Updates

• Stay Informed on important service updates and other major updates changes with Message Center notifications through Email preferences for Dynamics and PowerApps using Microsoft 365 Admin center  or Manage email notifications to admins using PowerShell

Microsoft Dataverse – Service Updates

Click here to see the Latest Version Availability for your Dataverse

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Apps – Service Updates

Microsoft Dynamics 365 On-premises – Service Updates

For the latest Service Updates for Dynamics 365 on-premise release version 9.0 and 9.1 visit Service Updates

Latest On-Premises Update | January 2022 release

• Dynamics CRM (On-Premise) 9.1
  • Service Update 1.7 – January 2022
• Dynamics CRM 9.0
  • Service Update 0.35 – January 2022

Product Updates

Power Apps

Try out the new Productivity, Collaboration features

• Modern Advanced Find allows users to access any table and use advanced filters to explore data
• Users can be alerted to key items to address, which makes them more likely to be successful leveraging In App Notifications

Collaboration features

• See colleagues who are currently working on the record and easily start chats with them
• See on-line status of colleagues in-app and easily start chats with them via improved people card
• Easily share links to records with colleagues

Enable these features with instructions provided on this page on Power Apps blog

Modern advanced find with enhanced view management in model-driven apps

• Finding and then acting on information in model-driven apps can take two forms:

• • Searching for specific records (which we modernized recently through Dataverse search) and
  • Exploring a table for record sets that meet a specific criterion: Advanced find.

• We are announcing the availability of:

• • Modern advanced find that not only replaces the legacy experience but also adds new enhancements to view personalization to help you be more productive with model-driven apps.
  • View selector enhancements to help you create and find views easily. Hiding, Changing the order of Views and Sharing.

Learn more on this page on Power Apps blog.

Model-driven apps offline for Makers (preview)

Do your users need to work on the go with spotty connectivity?

• With model-driven apps offline for makers experience in preview, it is now easier than before to set up an app to work offline.
• People in your organization can work seamlessly without worrying about connectivity!

• In this preview, you’ll now also be able to choose the offline mode for your mobile apps. The new offline-first mode is optimized to improve your device performance and it works better in low-network conditions than “classic offline” mode.

Learn more on how makers can enable this capability on this page on Power Apps blog.

Announcing new Dataverse auditing features

Learn more, on what’s the auditing new feature, the flexible audit data management and audit retention policy on this page on Power Apps blog

Tenant-level hygiene analytics for Power Apps

Learn more, on how this works from this page on Power Apps blog.

Localizing content on a custom page

Power Platform CLI January update

Learn more on this page on Power Apps blog

Power Apps Portals

Announcing General Availability (GA) of Power Apps portals as mobile apps

Learn more on  how to Create low code-no code branded app, Managing basic offline experience, Distribute your app  on this page on Power Apps blog.

Announcing General Availability (GA) of code components for portals

Check out what’s new and learn more on this post on Power Apps blog

Announcing General Availability (GA) of Power Apps portals support for Query data using portals Web API

Check out what’s new and learn more from this post on Power Apps blog.

Power Automate

Announcing Tenant-level analytics for Power Automate Cloud flows

• The latest updates to the Tenant-level analytics include analytics for Power Automate – Cloud flows deployed across multiple environments or the entire tenant.
• Tenant-wide analytics are built on service telemetry data derived from Power Platform apps, bots, and services.
• These solutions allow environment admins to effectively monitor activities related to Cloud flows across the organization. 
• This update includes an expansion to the Data Export pipeline making Usage & Inventory metrics for Cloud flows available to Power Platform customers.

Learn more on how this works from post on Power Automate blog

Power Automate for desktop – January 2022 update

• We are happy to announce that the February 2022 update of Power Automate for desktop (version 2.16) has been released!
• You can download the latest release here.
• New features and updates have been added and include:
  • Monitoring notification window for console attended desktop flow runs
  • Performance improvements in flow designer
  • New ‘Display custom form’ action (Preview)
  • New actions to convert a file to base64 and vice versa
  • New ‘Extract tables from PDF’ action
  • New property for datatable variables
  • New ability to copy a subflow and paste in other flows
  • Renaming variables to existing names is now permitted
  • Auto clean up of local actions log file

Check out the full list and details on the Power Automate blog page.

Learning and Training Corner

Customizing Power Apps Portals - Azure B2C Branding and Passing Attributes to Dataverse

Review the walkthrough video

Customizing Power Apps Portals - Basic Liquid Templating Building Left Side Navigation

Review the walkthrough video

Useful Links