WOW! What a release! I'm happy about this one as LOT of new features were added and we also have some BIG news. Let's surf this wave together :)
🎯 Areas of focus:
1. HCM ecosystem: keep opening it through integration APIs and strategic partnerships.
2. Employee experience: delivering a better experience and migrating it to workflow(s).
3. App unification: simpler and better ALM tooling and extensibility.
Let's review the feature list together:
👉 General 👈
Consistent environment management and integrations between Human Resources and Finance and Operations app
Why: To provide a consistent admin experience for managing the application lifecycle for Human Resources.
What: Deploying, updating, and integrating between applications made easy by the consistency between Human Resources and Finance and Operations apps. Managing environments, updates, and integrations the same way is done in Finance and Operations. Consistency managing environments with LCS, issue search and RSAT, experience for upgrades, updates, and hotfixes for environments. Consistency by integrating options with Microsoft Power Platform using virtual entities and Dual write. Consistency for continuous delivery of custom solutions is applied to environment and regional availability.
Who: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically enabled.
When: PP Aug 2021 | GA Oct 2021
Create one set of human resources capabilities within Dynamics 365
Why: To provide a single set of Human Resources capabilities within Dynamics 365.
What: Merging capabilities from the standalone Human Resources app into Finance and Operations infrastructure. The investments include these modules: Leave and Absence, Benefits Management, Tasks Management, and others not listed here.
Who: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically enabled.
When: PP Aug 2021 | GA Jan 2022
👉 Integrations and extensibility 👈
Improve extensibility options
Why: To ensure customers the ability to extend and expand functionality through integrations and customizations via Microsoft Dataverse.
What: Extending Dynamics 365 Human Resources to ensure specific customer business processes based on industry, region, or company policy and improving employee experience. Using the available tools as part of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities and using Power Platform to enhance and extend the solution when is needed.
Who: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically enabled.
When: PP Aug 2021 | GA Oct 2021
👉 Benefits Management 👈
Benefits administration bulk actions inquiry view redesign
Why: To deliver a simpler user experience by adding bulk editing capabilities to Benefits Management.
What: Selecting and confirming selections of all employee benefits enrollments. Accessing to data based on plan types, employee type, plan bundles, and do bulk selections based on those pivots. Viewing flex credit allocations for plans and identify potential mistakes. Creating custom criteria to see enrolment information and save them as custom views.
Who: Users by admins, makers, or analysts.
When: PP Nov 2021 | GA Jan 2022
👉 Employee and Manager Self-Service 👈
Employee Leave and absence experience enhancements in Microsoft Teams
Why: To provide a better experience for employees and managers related to Leave and Absence Human Resource Team App.
What: Submitting, editing, and canceling existing leave requests using the Teams App for employees. Enhancing details for managers, such as direct report leave balances and better visibility of the team and company calendar. Providing a better calendar experience that will help to view company-wide absence based on roles and permissions.
Who: Users by admins, makers, or analysts.
When: PP Jan 2022 | GA Mar 2022
👉 Leave and Absence 👈
Manage employee sick leave
Why: To manage employee sick leave in detail to meet company policies.
What: Providing organizations the ability to manage sick leaves more in-depth by including open-ended sick leave requests, return-to-work notices, sick leave reporting (yes!) and manage and approve sick leave requests.
Who: Users by admins, makers, or analysts.
When: PP Mar 2022 | GA TBD
If you want to have a look at the complete guide, find it here: Microsoft Dynamics 365 2021 release wave 2 plan overview | Microsoft Docs
🚨 Features planned to be released from Oct 2021 - Mar 2022 🚨