Dynamics Update

10.0.45

Johan and Gustav return well-rested from summer break to dive into Dynamics 365 release 10.0.45, admitting it takes about a week to get back to full functionality after vacation. They acknowledge their previous episode on 44 arrived fashionably late but encourage listeners to read the release notes themselves since their technical bias might miss functional gems.

Gustav opens with the Customer Invoice Logging Framework - a mouthful of a name for what's essentially a structured logging system that tracks invoice lifecycles. Having tested it in preview, he demonstrates how it provides a centralized workspace showing batch job execution results, error tracking, and direct links to problematic sales orders. This eliminates the old nightmare of calling IT to check BizTalk for invoice status.

Johan champions Application Insights integration for batch jobs, explaining how it creates a single monitoring pane across Azure services. He emphasizes the importance of establishing baselines when everything works perfectly, not just monitoring failures. The conversation reveals a crucial insight about batch jobs often appearing successful while actually failing underneath.

Electronic Reporting gets significant attention with performance improvements and a game-changing Key Vault integration. Johan's eureka moment: Key Vault can serve as environment variables during database refreshes, automatically reconfiguring integrations without manual intervention. They also tackle the terrifying scenario of Electronic Reporting retry mechanisms accidentally sending thousands of duplicate invoices to customers.

The episode wraps with commerce updates including the Bing Maps to Azure Maps transition, enhanced pricing management capabilities, and the new Warehousing app V4.

10.0.44

Johan and Gustav reunite in the same room to explore the latest Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations release 10.0.44, discovering some surprising gems along the way. Gustav kicks off with excitement about long-overdue fixed assets improvements, including automated inventory value adjustments that tie purchase orders directly to asset journals, and a new budget depreciation proposal feature that saves time across multiple legal entities.

The conversation shifts to the evolving payments landscape, where Johan highlights the new native Klarna integration for buy-now-pay-later scenarios and expanded Adyen capabilities including QR code payments. They discuss how these standardized integrations eliminate the custom development headaches that have plagued payment provider implementations, forcing providers to adhere to common frameworks rather than reinventing the wheel each time.

A standout feature emerges in the form of "immersive home" - an AI-powered task-focused interface that replaces the traditional module-based navigation. Rather than clicking through workspaces, users get intelligent recommendations about what needs their attention right now. Gustav notes this fulfills a promise that's been made since AX 2012 but never quite delivered until AI made it genuinely useful.

The episode wraps with practical improvements like automated cleanup of temporary data to reduce storage costs, better offline sync monitoring for POS systems, and enhanced visibility into year-end closing processes. These seemingly small features address real pain points that consultants encounter daily in the field.

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Gustav and Johan encourage listeners to dive into the full release notes themselves, admitting they're "egotistical" in only covering what interests them most.

LINKS:

Service update availability
What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Commerce 10.0.44
What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 10.0.44
What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Finance 10.0.44

What's new or changed in Platform updates

Interview - Max Hentschel

Dynamics Update: Dual Write Deep Dive with Max Sentchell

Episode recorded in Portorož, Slovenia

Johan and Gustav chat with Max Sentchell, a Microsoft Technical Architect who created the popular DW Helper tool out of frustration with manually configuring dual write mappings. His GitHub tool automates the painful process of setting up 80-90 mappings in the correct sequence across multiple environments.

The conversation debunks a major misconception: dual write isn't broken, it just works differently than traditional integrations by syncing database fields directly. Most "dual write errors" actually originate in Finance & Operations or Dataverse, not the connector itself.

The real challenge isn't technical though. Dual write projects fail when organizations treat them as mere technical implementations rather than fundamental workflow changes. CRM and ERP teams can no longer work in silos - they need unified processes, shared deployments, and coordinated database refreshes.

Max's key insight: dual write exposes hidden master data quality issues, but the technology works reliably when teams collaborate properly from day one. The upcoming move to Power Platform Admin Center will make this unified approach more visible to customers.

Interview - Patrick Mouwen

The hosts welcomed Patrick Mouwen, a Netherlands-based solution architect with 15+ years in Dynamics, who's become the unofficial evangelist for one of Microsoft's most underutilized powerhouses: the Commerce Scale Unit (CSU). What started as a technical deep-dive quickly revealed why this caching layer might be the secret weapon your organization didn't know it needed.

Patrick painted the CSU's evolution from humble beginnings—when Dynamics Commerce was just simple file transfers between POS systems and ERP—to today's sophisticated API-driven architecture. The CSU sits between your ERP and front-end applications, caching data in deployable regional instances that deliver lightning-fast responses for inventory lookups, pricing calculations, and order processing. It's the difference between customers seeing spinning wheels and instant results.

The conversation took an interesting turn when Patrick shared his "wild guess" about the future: CSU expanding beyond commerce to become a universal API layer for all Dynamics data, potentially including Dataverse and third-party sources. He demonstrated this vision with a real example—showing how partners could skip building custom pricing services for Customer Engagement by simply tapping into CSU's pricing APIs that handle 98% of scenarios, including the new unified pricing engine.

The biggest roadblock? Licensing. Patrick's AI-assisted cost analysis shows the per-order impact is surprisingly low, but there's no license option for companies wanting to use just a few APIs rather than full commerce functionality. Despite technical hurdles around documentation and the need for both functional and technical expertise, Patrick can typically implement a headless e-commerce solution using 20-25 key APIs in just five days.

Resources mentioned: CSU documentation on GitHub, inventory visibility integration, unified pricing APIs, headless commerce architecture, Azure AI search capabilities.

Interview - Jared Hall

In this episode, we sit down with Jared Hall, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, who works on the core tools driving the next generation of business automation. We dive into how AI is being implemented in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, and how Microsoft envisions the role of agents in an ERP context.

🔍 In this episode:

• How AI agents are transforming Finance & Operations
• Why trust is critical when deploying AI in financial systems
• A look at six new preview agents for Finance & Operations, including a standout supplier communication agent that reads vendor emails and automatically processes supply chain changes
• The game-changing Model Context Protocol server — now rolling out — which gives agents instant access to ERP business logic with just a few clicks

/Gustav and Johan

Interview - Johanne Sognefest-Haaland - Analytics for Dynamics 365

In this episode, Johan and Gustav welcome Johanna, Head of AI and Analytics at Itera in Bergen, for an insightful discussion on Microsoft Fabric and the evolving world of data platforms.

Johanna shares her expertise on how Microsoft Fabric represents a significant shift in data architecture by unifying multiple tools (Power BI, Synapse, Azure Data Factory) into a single platform. The conversation explores how this integration is democratizing data access, allowing business users rather than just IT specialists to work with enterprise data.

The trio discusses the technical evolution from traditional SQL databases to modern Delta Lakes environments, noting that while the engineering aspects have become simpler, proper data governance remains essential. Johanna introduces the concept of "Full Stack Fabric Developers" who can now work across the entire data pipeline thanks to the platform's accessibility.

They also touch on practical considerations when working with Dynamics 365 data through Fabric Link, addressing common questions about data refresh rates and the realities of near-real-time analytics in business environments.

Gustav and Johan

Interview - Jinnie Wong - Business Performance Analytics

Episode Summary

Johan and Gustav interview Jinnie Wong - Principal Product Manager at Microsoft - about Business Performance Analytics (BPA) for Microsoft Dynamics 365, discussing its features and benefits for financial reporting.

Jinnie gives us a brief introduction to BPA as a solution and she explains how BPA uses dimensional data modelling with strict star schema principles to make financial data more accessible and actionable. A major advantage of BPA is its inclusion in the Dynamics Finance license with Power BI licensing, eliminating the need for separate reporting tools. The process-oriented approach models data at the business process level rather than by module, making it more intuitive for accounting users.

Gustav & Johan

Sushant Mudholkar - The future of DualWrite

Join Gustav and Johan for an insightful conversation with Microsoft Principal Software Engineer Sushant Mudholkar as they explore the critical integration tools in the Dynamics 365 ecosystem.

Discover how DualWrite and Virtual Tables work together to create seamless connections between Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management. In this episode, we dive deep into:

• The fundamentals of DualWrite and its role in modern business processes
• Common challenges organizations face during implementation and how to overcome them
• An exclusive preview of the upcoming asynchronous version of DualWrite
• Best practices for leveraging Virtual Tables effectively
• Real-world integration scenarios and solutions

Whether you're a business analyst, developer, or system architect, this discussion offers valuable insights into maximizing the potential of your Dynamics 365 environment.

Liese-Marie Heyns and Gary Cook - Performance Testing at Scale

In this episode, Gustav and Johan speak with Liese-Marie Heyns and Gary Cook from NTT about handling high-volume data processing in Microsoft Dynamics. They discuss a case where a customer processes 140,000 sales order lines in just two hours, flowing from Dynamics 365 for Sales to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain via DualWrite. Managing this scale of data transfer requires significant system optimization and a deep understanding of potential bottlenecks. The discussion explores how advanced monitoring and automation techniques are essential for handling such intensive workloads.

Gustav and Johan

10.0.43 / Wave 1 2025

In this episode we dive deep into the latest Dynamics 365 release wave, exploring exciting new features for both Finance and Supply Chain. Among the subjects for this episode:

 

- Process Automation in Finance
- Security Governance
- Available to promise improvements
- Security enhancements in UK MTD VAT integration
- Return order invoice support through dual-write
- Asynchronous Dual-Write

Gustav & Johan

Links:
Microsoft Dynamics 365 2025 release wave 1 plan | Microsoft Learn
New and planned features for finance and operations cross-app capabilities, 2025 release wave 1 | Microsoft Learn