In June last year, Microsoft released the 2020 release wave 2 timeline for its Power Platform and Dynamics 365 services. This was the second and final major release wave for the previous year. Today, the Redmond firm has unveiled plans for the first release wave for this year concerning both the aforementioned platforms.
The 2021 release wave 1 plans provides information on the major enhancements and new capabilities that will be arriving for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform between April and September. The timeline below showcases a quick overview of how users can expect this rollout to commence over the following months:
- January 27: Release plans unveiled
- February 1: Early Access available - customers to be allowed to test the features in a non-production environment
- TBA: Release plans to be made available in 11 additional languages; namely Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish
- April 1: General availability - Production deployments begin, with regional deployments to initiate on April 2
For Dynamics 365, the focus of the new capabilities will center around Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, Guides, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Business Central, Customer Insights, Customer Voice, and industry accelerators. For the Power Platform, meanwhile, all services falling under its scope including Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents will be improved upon. Microsoft has also specifically remarked upon new capabilities for the AI Builder and Power Apps portal in Power Apps.
Interested users can check out the detailed release plans for the Power Platform here, and for Dynamics 365 here.