Dynamics Update

We're recording our last episode before the Swedish summer holidays, and to close things out we welcome back Jinnie Wong for a return conversation on Business Performance Analytics — this time joined by members of her engineering team, including Yaswant Vishwakarma, who leads the pipeline work, and Wei (Weizhu), who's building the Analytics MCP server. Rishabh Kamra rounds out the crew.

A lot has happened since Ginny's last visit. Back then, BPA had just shipped Record-to-Report and Procure-to-Pay and was on the cusp of Order-to-Cash. The data model now spans the entire ERP, with models for supply chain management, project operations, human resources, and commerce rolling out over the coming year. The recurring theme of the episode is that the real magic lives under the hood: BPA's fact tables sit at the transaction level, and the heavy lifting is in the data engineering — star schemas conformed across dimensions, and transform pipelines that scale automatically from a million rows to a hundred million as data volumes grow. Johan makes the case that for anyone who's ever wrestled with hand-built cubes and bespoke star schemas, a shared, downloadable model built on near-identical ERP data is the single biggest win here.

We dig into the extensibility story — publishing the BPA model into Microsoft Fabric to build a single unified model — and the features in flight: custom measures (currently in private preview), with custom tables and columns targeted for later this year. The conversation then turns to the Dynamics 365 ERP Analytics MCP server, which sits on top of BPA's semantic model and lets you go from a CFO's question to an answer through natural language, with row-level security enforced so a procurement manager and a sales manager never see each other's data. Wei's analogy lands well: MCP is the cordless vacuum — strip away the UX plumbing and you spend your time on insight, not cord management.

We also cover the roadmap many customers are waiting on: more frequent and manual data refreshes (expected around August), the path from the current eight-quarter window toward seven years of history with automatic archival, expanded capacity, and the question everyone asks — financial reporting. There are no immediate plans to deprecate financial reporting, but BPA is the natural next step, with single-source validation as a key advantage. And yes, it remains included in the Dynamics 365 Finance license; you pay for storage and compute, not a separate product. GA for the MCP server is aimed at the second half of the year.

If you want to go deeper, Ginny hosts office hours every Tuesday at 8 a.m., a monthly CAB on the last Thursday, and an active Viva Engage community where the team answers questions directly.

Read more on Microsoft Learn:

• Business performance analytics: https://learn.microsoft.com/dynamics365/finance/business-performance-analytics/business-performance…
• Dynamics 365 ERP Analytics MCP (preview): https://learn.microsoft.com/dynamics365/finance/business-performance-analytics/erp-analytics-mcp-ov…
• Jinnie Wong - Jinnie Wong, CDMP | LinkedIn
• Wei Zhu - Wei Z. | LinkedIn
• Yaswant Vishwakarma - Yaswant Vishwakarma | LinkedIn

A big thank you to Ginny, Yashwant, Wei, and the whole BPA team.

/Gustav and Johan

This special episode comes to you from a sunny morning on the floor at DynamicsMinds*, where Gustav Sundblad and Johan Persson are joined for the second time by Dynamics 365 Principal Architect Patrick Mouwen. A man much of the Commerce community would happily call a "commerce hero" for documenting the Dynamics 365 Commerce CSU APIs so they can be easily understood by everyone using them.

Microsoft's Commerce MCP is intentionally scenario-focused today; Patrick showed how customers can extend it in their own tenant with a low-code metadata layer over existing Commerce/F&O APIs — curated, task-level tools, not a 1:1 mapping of APIs to MCP.

💡 The key insight:
Metadata and architecture matter. By embedding metadata in MCP tools and splitting systems into domain-based servers (e.g., cart, payments), you reduce cost, latency, and hallucinations. He also emphasized using focused sub-agents rather than one large agent.

The demos showed real value. From automating quote-to-order flows to fixing master data issues — all while keeping Commerce’s built-in guardrails intact. Problems like incorrect discounts come down to configuration, not AI.
Looking ahead, Patrick pointed to Agent 365 for governance and a future of agentic commerce, in which APIs become critical as personal shopping agents act across brands.

Thanks again to Patrick for joining us!

 

**Links**

- Dynamics 365 Commerce MCP server (preview): https://learn.microsoft.com/dynamics365/commerce/commerce-mcp?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004702

- Expose a REST API in API Management as an MCP server: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/api-management/export-rest-mcp-server?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004702

- AI gateway in Azure API Management: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/api-management/genai-gateway-capabilities?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004702

Patrick Mouwen | LinkedIn

Johan and Gustav reunite for a release notes episode, noting how rare these have become as Microsoft spreads out its update cadence - leaving more time to actually digest features amid the breakneck pace of AI innovation. They open with small wins: BCC support finally arriving in electronic reporting emails, and the new "in" operator simplifying bank reconciliation matching rules.

A meaningful discussion emerges around license keys versus feature management. Using product lifecycle state as a springboard, Johan cautions that enabling license keys does far more than surface UI elements - it adds and removes columns and tables underneath. He argues for keeping license keys in their out-of-box configuration since Microsoft doesn't test every permutation. A memorable anecdote: a customer who disabled the CDS integration key only to break dual write entirely. The hosts note that MCP servers with X++ now make analyzing these dependencies far easier.

The standout feature is dynamic warehouse work classification through Power Fx. Rather than building location directives in X++ code requiring developer deployment, users can now configure prioritization logic directly from the UI. Johan sees Copilot generating these formulas, though Gustav raises legitimate concerns about configuration drift across environments - prompting talk of treating configuration as version-controlled code through agents and MCP.

Commerce gets attention with cross-legal-entity order fulfillment closing the intercompany loop, mid-transaction payment terminal switching for dying batteries, and contextual switching between POS and external apps without full integrations.

The episode closes on MCP enhancements: attachment support in the ERP MCP, SQL-based data tools that offload calculations the AI struggles with to SQL, the deprecation of client/server keywords, and Finance & Operations joining the Power Platform API reference.

 

In this episode, we welcome back Max Henchel, Technical Consultant at Microsoft, to dive deep into the topic of telemetry. We previously discussed Dual-write, but realized we needed to go back to basics to explain the telemetry infrastructure and how to actually start measuring performance in a smart way.

Max is one of the primary drivers behind the ISM Telemetry Model, a framework that simplifies working with Application Insights for Dynamics users.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why isn't out-of-the-box telemetry enough? How the ISM model acts as a "wrapper" to make it easier for partners and customers to get started without drowning in data.
• The importance of custom emission points: Why you can't just "flip a switch," but actually need to design your telemetry to understand critical business processes like order flows and batch jobs.
• Cost vs. Benefit: Strategies for data storage and how to keep costs down in Azure by focusing on short-term analysis (e.g., 30-day retention).
• From "It's slow" to hard facts: How to use telemetry to address subjective experiences of performance with actual data and system "heartbeats".
• Exception logging: How to find the notorious "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error using call stacks directly in App Insights, without needing to copy production databases for debugging.
• Cross-Enterprise Monitoring: Using a single Application Insights repository to track an end-to-end chain across different applications like AIS or Power Platform.

Three tips to get started:

1. Set it up now: It takes less than an hour to get basic telemetry in place.
2. Use FastTrack reports: Leverage ready-made dashboards to get immediate visualization.
3. Learn Kusto (KQL): Max recommends the Kusto Detective Agency for a fun, interactive way to learn how to query your data.

In this episode, hosts Johan Persson and Gustav Sundblad welcome Microsoft product experts Shivam Pandey and Roger Sa to discuss the critical strategies for managing high-volume data in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. As data storage costs and performance stability become top priorities for enterprises, the team explores the latest innovations in archiving and long-term retention.

Dynamics Update: 10.0.47 Release Notes

In this episode, hosts Johan Persson and Gustaf Sundblad dive into the latest features and performance enhancements arriving in late March with version 10.0.47. The discussion centers heavily on data management, environment efficiency, and new AI-driven tools.

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Key Highlights:

• Subscription Billing & Commerce: New performance enhancements for unbilled revenue batches and features to purge or archive high-volume commerce transactions.
• Inventory & Warehouse Management: Introduction of inventory transaction consolidation—a prerequisite for long-term archiving—and new load record archiving to reduce Dataverse consumption costs.
• Power Platform Integration: The hosts advocate for moving sandbox environments to the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) to unlock better performance and "no transaction data" copying features.
• AI & Copilot Agents: Updates to the Account Reconciliation Agent and workspace, including improved legal entity filtering in sandbox environments.
• Pricing Management: Enhanced import/export entities for complex trade agreements and a "coming soon" generic base currency feature to simplify global pricing rules.
• Developer Tools: Significant updates to the MCP Server, including OData access for entities, and improvements to Visual Studio 2022 "Find References" filtering.

Episode recorded across three time zones - Singapore, US, and Sweden

Johan and Gustav welcome Prashant Verma (Microsoft Singapore ISD) and Hemanth Kumar (Microsoft Azure FastTrack) for a technical deep dive into the batch telemetry agent. Prashant's origin story reveals that the agent emerged from his Premier Field Engineer days, handling APAC escalations for slow-running batch jobs and throttling issues, and recognizing that customers needed self-service access to insights previously requiring support tickets.

The conversation positions the agent as a "team member" that democratizes root cause analysis, bridging the gap between technical Application Insights data and business users who lack Kusto query skills. Hemant emphasizes the transformation: rather than context-switching between Teams conversations and Application Insights dashboards, system admins can troubleshoot directly within Teams, where business users are already reporting issues.

Johan's thesis emerges: fewer people logging into Finance & Operations is actually better since it's not intuitive for non-daily users. The agent supports this by making troubleshooting accessible to IT staff unfamiliar with F&O's interface. Gustav tests the waters on autonomous monitoring - could agents proactively ping Teams when detecting anomalies? The answer: marry Application Insights anomaly detection with agentic analysis to create alerts that inform users of slow critical jobs and suggest remediation.

The MCP server integration (version 46 required) enables self-healing actions, such as restarting batch jobs, though both hosts and guests emphasize guardrails. Gustav suggests SharePoint lists indicating which jobs are safe to auto-restart; testing reveals Claude 4.5 best follows these instructions without hallucination compared to GPT models.

A revealing war story: a customer configured batch jobs requesting 300 threads when their environment only supported 160 total threads, strangling the entire system for a week until Prashant identified it through telemetry. The agent now surfaces these misconfigurations instantly.

Setup requires just five minutes with existing Application Insights (ISM telemetry no longer needed), plus 15 minutes for agent installation. Model selection matters: 4.1 suffices for simple queries, 5.0 for complex analysis, and Sonnet for query generation.

Episode recorded during hectic times with new puppies and packed schedules

Johan and Gustav tackle Microsoft's announcement about comprehensive sovereign solutions for European organizations - a complex topic they admit requires legal expertise they don't possess, but impacts every European Dynamics implementation. Opening with their standard recommendation of West Europe as primary datacenter and North Europe (UK) as fallback, they debunk latency concerns from 10-12 global implementations spanning Europe, US, and Asia with single instances.

The conversation traces the Max Schrems saga - his persistent legal challenges to US-owned datacenters storing European data, questioning whether peace-time laws hold meaning when conflicts arise. Gustav shares a revealing anecdote about a Swedish governmental organization demanding local datacenter hosting while unknowingly using Office 365 stored elsewhere, illustrating how organizations often lack understanding of where their data actually resides.

Microsoft's three-tier sovereign cloud offering emerges: Sovereign Public Cloud (current setup enhanced with Data Guardian ensuring European-only personnel access and customer-managed encryption keys for everything), Sovereign Private Cloud (Azure in your basement, managed like public cloud, supporting email and SharePoint initially with broader rollout planned), and National Partner Cloud (locally-owned datacenters managed by European partners like T-Mobile or CGI, reminiscent of Germany's now-closed datacenter).

The Dynamics implications remain murky. While Microsoft 365 and Azure workloads seem straightforward for partner clouds, Johan expresses skepticism about Dynamics timelines given its complexity and surrounding infrastructure requirements. The hosts note CRM already works in Norway and Sweden, but Finance & Operations and Customer Insights remain unavailable, and not all datacenters receive updates simultaneously - West/North Europe lead in frequency and features.

A new wildcard enters: potential tariffs on American-owned datacenters could dramatically impact cloud economics overnight, undermining the predictable subscription model that justified cloud migration.

The Blog Post: Announcing comprehensive sovereign solutions empowering European organizations - The Official Microsoft Blog

Johan returns from sunny Orlando to Sweden's +1°C rain to interview Anne Krupke, Microsoft's Senior Product Marketing Manager who brings a unique perspective - starting as an implementation consultant for supply chain and manufacturing, then FastTrack solution architect, now marketing. Her journey embodies the shift Microsoft is making: selling products the way they're actually implemented.

Anne reveals the genesis of Microsoft's business process-centric approach. For years, partners were process-oriented while Microsoft marketed individual apps and features, creating a jarring disconnect when customers reached implementation. The solution? Sell products using process-centric language that customers actually understand, then show how Dynamics fits their workflows. The pitch materials launched over a year ago have seen thousands of downloads from partners and hundreds of uses internally.

The conversation explores how product teams historically organized around features - warehouse management PMs, general ledger PMs - rather than end-to-end processes. The business process catalog emerged from FastTrack escalations that kept repeating. Anne explains they were only providing best practice recommendations after dealing with problems multiple times, then realized they could just document everything proactively.

Johan and Gustav champion the catalog as crucial guidance, eliminating the "it depends" paralysis that plagued every implementation decision. The first three catalog layers remain product-agnostic, helping navigate scenarios where multiple Microsoft solutions could work - quotations in CRM versus Project Operations versus core SCM. Anne emphasizes this isn't Microsoft alone - crowdsourcing from the partner community makes the catalog a living repository, similar to FastTrack's GitHub telemetry dashboards.

A significant announcement: business process decks are now available on the FastTrack implementation portal for any customer with a Dynamics project, enabling internal pitching and discovery workshops.

Johan and Gustav brave the dark, rainy Swedish fall to discuss Dynamics 365 release 10.0.46, but the real headline isn't in the official notes. Johan shares exciting news from the MVP community: the first production Power Platform Admin Center environment has been deployed, marking a monumental milestone in the shift away from LCS. While limited to certain scenarios initially (no commerce yet, no massive implementations), it signals the beginning of the "one Dynamics, one platform" future.

Gustav tackles e-invoicing developments, noting Switzerland's new structured QR bill addresses and Poland's KSEF QR capabilities. The regulatory landscape across Europe keeps the Pride team scrambling, with different features arriving through different channels - some as standard features, others in quality updates.

Performance takes center stage with subscription billing optimizations that "reduce chattyness" in batch processing - a term Gustav finds amusing to see in official release notes. The hosts champion data entities, with Johan reminiscing about how DMF and OData revolutionized data integration 11 years ago. A new fixed assets transfer entity emerges in preview, while the grid functionality continues evolving with Excel-like capabilities.

The pricing management discussion reveals a significant development: calculating prices without creating sales orders. Gustav notes this helps customers avoid CSU licensing costs while maintaining unified pricing experiences, though he remains a CSU advocate. The conversation highlights the modern challenge - multiple valid approaches to solve the same problem, requiring careful architectural decisions.