Dynamics 365 – 2022 Release Wave 2 – Early Access Features

This is Steve Pestillo from P2 Automation. In this video, I want to show you some of the early access features that are available in 2022 Release Wave 2 of Dynamics 365. We upgraded our production environment to the new Wave 2 release, and some of the changes you’ll see are very subtle. I think the best way to show you some of those differences is by showing you the old look and feel along with our new look and feel.

So I’m going to take a copy or a backup copy of the same screen and just put it on the bottom here. So right off the bat, you see it from the very top, instead of my initials, there’s a picture of me, lucky you, and also the owner of this particular account is me, Steve Pestillo, and it shows not only my picture here now, but also the presence indicator. This ties in with Teams obviously, and I’m not available right now because I’m doing this video, so it’s showing as red.

There’s also some subtle differences to the overall look and feel as far as the fonts are concerned. The section headings over here used to be a little bigger, now they’re a little smaller and bold. And also instead of just having a simple, thin border around the sections, they look almost like cards now, if I move this out of the way, there’s a slightly different background color, and there’s a shadow around the sections. I think it’s a cleaner look. The other thing I love is subtle, but I think it really cleans up the screen, the lines that separated the fields, I never understood that, they’re gone. And it’s just a cleaner look I think.

And lastly, if you look at the timeline, it’s hard to do an overlay with that but if I scroll down to the timeline, you’ll see it’s a slightly different look and feel. The header icons are all the same, the cards themselves though look a little bit better. And as you hover over these, all these little icons are no longer there, but the same commands are available by clicking the three dots on the upper right hand corner.

But the biggest change you’ll notice might become a point of frustration initially. Advanced Find is finally gone. We could bring it back, but eventually in future releases, it’s going to go away completely so it might not be a bad idea to start using the new filtering and searching capabilities. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the Advanced Find used to be this funnel, that’s the one icon that’s missing on the new release.

Now, where do you find it? If you go to the Global Search in the original system, you could do a Google or I should say Bing style search where you just type a word and it’ll search across multiple entities. Or you can see some of the recently viewed entities that you have on your screen.

In the new 2022 Release Wave 2, if I click up there, I get the same thing, but down at the bottom, that’s pretty much your new Advanced Find. If you click on that, you can actually search on any table that you have access to.

In our system, Accounts are actually called Organizations. We renamed it so I can start with Organizations, hit Continue, and I’ll get brought over to the Organization view. And my default view is Active Organizations so it starts you out with Status equals Active. And if I want to add a different filter, I could just click add, add a row, pick a field, use Type, and we have types like Leads and Prospects. So I could say, “just show me my prospects and also show me my clients”, and you can go on and on. I can search across multiple entities if I want, and we’ll cover all that in a future video, but when I hit Apply, it’s a similar result if I went to the new Edit Columns or Edit Filters feature. I’ll see my view with an asterisk.

So I’m going to miss Advanced Find, but I do like the new look and feel of the searching capabilities in Dynamics 365 so I’m sure this will become my new normal very quickly.

Stay tuned for future videos on 2022 Release Wave 2, as new features become available and they’ll start rolling out around the October timeframe through March of 2023, we’ll look for things that we think might be important to our clients and bring them to your attention.

In the meantime, if you’d like help automating your small business with Dynamics 365, reach out to us today at www.p2automation.com.