Business Central Launch Event 2024 Release Wave 2 - Recording of Live Opening

Overview

The recording of the live opening of the 2024 release wave 2 launch event walks through the release in 16 chapters. It starts with Copilot (default on, Copilot Chat for analysis views in 20 additional languages, Copilot for Finance, item substitution and number series generation) and moves to subscription billing, Power BI reports, sustainability, projects, service, Shopify and Field Service.

It then covers Power Automate, modern search in preview, column resizing and access keys, Word reporting, and 156 community contributions. The later chapters cover administrators (flexible update management, partner access per environment, audit logging to Microsoft 365), developers (AL-Go for GitHub, AL improvements, code navigation, AI toolkit, AI testing, managed AI resources) and performance work (profiler scheduling, job queue order, warehouse ledger posting, page scripting in pipelines).

Key points

• Copilot is default on without setup; an admin page controls which Copilot capabilities are enabled in the company.
• Copilot Chat builds analysis views from questions and is available in 20 additional languages.
• Modern search is in preview and is expected to leave preview the following month. It uses full-text search in partner-marked columns, and legacy search stays available for comprehensive searching.
• Flexible update management, coming in preview, extends the update postponement window from 60 days to 5 months.
• Partners (delegated admins) can be assigned to specific environments, and administrative actions are logged to the Microsoft 365 unified audit log.
• AL-Go for GitHub adds security hardening, ISV app compatibility testing and performance baseline testing.
• An AI testing toolkit is in preview and works with Azure AI Studio. Managed AI resources for ISVs are in private preview, with expansion to public preview planned.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• other “Analysis View” at 3:48
• other “Customer page” at 4:08
• other “Customer list” at 4:08
• other “Item list” at 4:08
• other “Dimensions” at 7:24
• other “Unit of measure” at 7:24
• other “Variance” at 7:24
• other “Number series” at 7:41
• other “query object” at 24:21
• table “Warehouse Ledger Entry” at 35:21

Not found in BC28-30: table “Warehouse Ledger Entry”.

Quotes

• 3:07 “you can now start using co-pilot without having to set up anything that basically means it’s default on”
• 5:43 “adding 20 languages with this release it’s now available in all these languages”
• 8:36 “subscription billing it’s quite interesting I mean both you customers out there but also Partners listening in”
• 9:36 “it is expected that when you open business Central that you can see the generic like you know income what’s my turnover what’s my”
• 11:15 “we built a rich sustainability tracking module inside business Central with row center with scorecards with goals uh recording greenhouse gases both carbon credits”
• 13:16 “we actually in this release making it much easier to work with them embedded inside business Central so you don’t in many cases need”
• 14:17 “here we have French now access keys are available in all the languages on this slide in this release”
• 14:37 “it’s in preview uh right now in this month it will come out uh in next month”
• 14:37 “search it’s in preview uh right now in this month it will come out uh in next month but that’s basically the possibility to”
• 16:18 “there’s are actually 156 Community uh contribut tions in this release so thank you again to everybody out there that has contributed through GitHub”
• 17:59 “this capability is coming out in preview and what is it this is ability for the administrators to postpone the updates to for a”
• 18:19 “you can see that it goes from 60 days to 5 months this is how long you can uh keep working on the on”
• 20:20 “you can assign the partner of record the delegated admin to a specific environment and they will only have access to that specific environment”
• 21:59 “we also added a fantastic capability for you to easily test your Solutions uh for compatibility with all of the isv apps which you”
• 25:01 “we wanted to make it much easier for you to navigate from the beautiful fantastic AI uh sorry AI as well and UI of”
• 28:01 “there’s absolutely no customer data emitted with this Telemetry so it is a pure metadata uh pure knowledge about you know which actions were”
• 30:03 “please take a look at the preview which we published at aka.ms BC ups”
• 31:24 “we are gradually coming to the place where we would like to expand this private preview into the public preview”
• 34:00 “many of you are working with hundreds of thousands of items in your inventory and search was not performing uh in those circumstances”
• 34:40 “the first job that comes in that is the job that is going to be uh processed the moment that the service has resources”
• 34:40 “that also enabled the opportunity to inject the priority into job Q category so for instance some jobs may have higher”
• 35:00 “we refactored the process of posting into warehouse ledger entry which is an amazing story”

Disclaimers in the video

• 14:37 preview: search it’s in preview uh right now in this month it will come out uh in next month
• 17:59 preview: this capability is coming out in preview
• 18:39 subject-to-change: we still encourage many of you to and all of you to keep latest to make sure that your Solutions are easily updatable
• 30:03 preview: please take a look at the preview which we published at aka.ms BC ups
• 31:24 coming-later: we are gradually coming to the place where we would like to expand this private preview into the public preview so there will definitely be a further announcements on this topic

Presenters (as heard): Lilman, Maya, Yanik Bower, Dimitri JV, Yanik, Dimitri.