Finance and Operations: new and planned for cross-app capabilities2 min read

Published On - March 7, 2021

Сarl Tremblay

Compared to what’s coming for D365 Supply Chain Management and D365 for Finance, Finance and Operations CRM has got way fewer new features. However, that does not make them less attractive for organizations, since the update aims to unleash cross-app capabilities as well as data and process integration.

Cross-app Features

Here are 6 features to benefit F&O apps:

  1. Grids: column freezing – since the feature is tightly bonded and depends on new grid control feature, it provides organizations with the ability to freeze grids columns to prevent scrolling. You can freeze multiple columns and reorder them later if needed.
  2. React 17 upgrade – react version 15 has been upgraded to version 17. However, it’s still in the test phase, whereas users can play around with extensible controls or custom JavaScript code, mainly those which are using React APIs, to ensure the upgrade is error-free.
  3. Saved views: translation support – help teams to view names and descriptions in their current language. The feature is fully dependent on the saved views feature and only available for organizational views.
  4. Authentication enhancement – Ws-Fed protocol has been upgraded to OWIN OpenID Connect (OIDC) for F&O apps to seamlessly comply with current protocol standards as well as onboard/integrate external partners.
  5. Excel add-in: publish batch size configuration – the feature allows users to specify the number of rows to include in each published batch when changes to data records have been published through Excel add-in. Workbook templates can be configured for maximum batch size as well.
  6. There is also a bucket of upgrades related to client feature states, which will be mandatory with the 10.0.17 release:
    1. Attachment recovery, what helps users and administrators to recover items from recycling bin for a configured period of time;
    2. Recommended fields – the feature aims to create personalized suggestions through AI solutions to increase users’ productivity. Once a user adds a field to a page or a column to a grid – there will be a list of suggested fields;
    3. The MS team has also improved jQuery components used by F&O apps, moving the jQuery version to 3.5.0, jQuery UI to 1.12.1, and qTip to 3.0.3.

Apart from cross-app features, the MS team is also going to deliver phase 4 for F&O data in Microsoft Dataverse. It is said that the dual framework will be used to create a synchronous, bidirectional connection between Finance and Operations apps and customer engagement apps delivering users unified experience (including enabling custom entities, extensions to existing entities and etc.).