Overview of Dynamics 365 Business Central October '18 release

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

With the October '18 release, Dynamics 365 Business Central is available in the cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid deployments. Pick your flavor of Business Central, or use your existing on-premises solution of Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV, or Dynamics SL and connect to the cloud through Business Central. (These release notes describe functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy.)

Business Central partners get a portal to facilitate their interactions with customers and to manage the lifecycle of their applications and customizations. Business users get a further streamlined and refreshed user experience with many productivity improvements, facilitating heavy transactional users. The service is also going through a hardening process, with much improved resiliency, robustness, and performance across the application.

Business Central everywhere - cloud, hybrid, and on-premises availability

Business Central gets an on-premises deployment option that serves as a successor to Dynamics NAV. In other words, rather than a new version number for Dynamics NAV, customers can get Business Central on-premises. The experience for partners and customers on-premises is no different from the familiar Dynamics NAV upgrades, except for the change in name. This is a convergence point for Dynamics SMB products—going forward, they are all considered customers of Business Central, in the cloud or on-premises, even if they are running differently branded products such as Dynamics SL, Dynamics GP, and older versions of Dynamics NAV.

High productivity user experience

Get more work done with productivity features such as filtering of lists and totals, and copy and paste rows. With a host of new keyboard shortcuts to accelerate your business tasks, and improved keyboard navigation throughout, Business Central is ready to support the diverse needs of your workforce. Do things quickly, or find out how to do them with the new Tell Me window.

Business users get a fresh and modern experience in all main screens of Business Central. Whether you are accessing your data from the browser or the Windows 10 desktop app, you will experience a consistently smooth, intuitive, and modern interface as you transition across role centers, lists, worksheets, transaction documents, or details pages (such as the customer card).

Application improvements

Various new or improved application functionality is added, such as the Non-Inventory item type, document line tracking, and improved layout in 31 reports. In addition, it is now easier to perform common actions, such as filling in journal lines and adding required information. Common tasks, such as payment processing and canceling purchase posting are also improved. The Create Company assisted setup now allows you to skip the accounting period setup and includes a step for user setup.

Permission sets are editable

From the list of permission sets, you can add new and copy an existing permission set. The resulting set will be of type User-Defined, which can be edited at any time. From each user card, the Effective Permissions window shows which permissions a user has and through which permission set(s) they are granted, either through the entitlement, through a default set (System), or through a customized set (User-Defined). Here you can also change permission sets of type User-Defined.

Tenant administration

Business Central partners manage the lifecycle of the tenant through the Dynamics 365 Business Central administration center. The administration center is the portal for VARs to engage with customers and manage health, troubleshooting, notifications, and sandboxes of the customer tenant.

Improved Visual Studio Code AL experience

Be more productive when developing and troubleshooting extensions with new and improved developer tools, such as sandbox environments with production data, improved breakpoint support, better inline Help, ability to trace raised events in a given user scenario, support for .NET Interop for on-premises deployments, extension support for enums, report data set and field groups, and more.

Making Business Central available in new markets

Business Central has a combined localization strategy inclusive of both Microsoft-led and partner-led models. We continue to respond to partner-led scenarios and anticipate additional countries being delivered via localization app extensions in Microsoft AppSource. Additionally, Microsoft will also deliver a localized version of Business Central in Iceland, Norway, and Mexico in this release.

Tell us what you think

Help us improve Dynamics 365 Business Central by discussing ideas, providing suggestions, and giving feedback. Use the Business Central forum at https://aka.ms/businesscentralideas.

See Also

Summary of what's new in Business Central