Spring is in the air with flowers and rain and 500 pages of Release Notes. I’d like to highlight some of the features I’m looking forward to.

Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations

Expense Client Usability

I’m a fan of any UI refreshes in the application, especially the forms I have to personally use on a regular basis. I can already feel myself getting reimbursed faster.

Simplified View – Templates and Saved Views

These are additional UI improvements for allowing different groups of users to have different Form views. Seems like this will improve productivity; I hope there will be options to deploy the correct query/view from a Workspace or Menu item so users can get the appropriate Default view. It’s also unclear what options will be available via the X++ Development tools.

Enhanced Grid Experiences

There are a lot of forms in the Project module dealing with the Work Breakdown Structure or Subprojects that could benefit from fancy grid controls. Also, there are some “light weight” reporting scenarios that could be lit up using these controls.

Updated Navigation Bar that Aligns With Office Header

I have mixed feelings. I liked the menu path for screenshots and documentation. Hopefully the menu search being obvious is worth the trade off.

Developer Tools and Application Lifecycle Management

Lots of fantastic concepts in this article for developers, especially partners. Developer VMs can become a significant costs for developing for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, so reducing this cost is a plus. Also, having a Microsoft managed version of a Tier 1 environment could standardize some disparate processes.

Event-driven Architecture for Integrations

There are so many possibilities when adding Event driven architecture (think Microsoft Flow); the challenge sometimes is imagining and defining good business scenarios.

Finance and Operations, Entities in CDS for Apps

Since CDS was released in the April 2018, F&O has needed a more native integration. This is a welcome addition to the stack.

However, the release notes don’t specify if this kind of CDS integration can be customized using the development tools. I hope that’s part of the experience so we can light up scenarios outside those listed in the article.

One Version Experience

The Embedded Power BI tool looks interesting.

Business Intelligence (Power BI)

New Filter Experience

This is in regards to the Filter bar on the right side. I would guess most report consumers don’t even know this exists. Having a way to have it expanded and formatted will turn those types of filters into viable options.

Drill Between PBIX Reports

It’s been possible in the past to do a version of this using URL formulas and URL filtering. Will be good to have more built in options.

Performance Analyzer for Reports

Excellent idea, especially for DirectQuery based data connections or complicated DAX expressions.

Azure Machine Learning Integration

Nice to get options other than web services to consume Machine Learning models.