Microsoft Business Applications: Dynamics 365 – PowerApps – Dataverse- Flow – PowerBI
You can find the release notes at this link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/april19/
Some highlights are:
Sales forecasting – with the help of Cortana
Deeper integration with LinkedIn
Teams integration with Relationship Assistant
App licensing requirements presented to app makers while building PowerApps – know if your app will work with your licensing!
Canvas apps with responsive layouts
Save and reuse PowerApps components
Earlier today Microsoft announced some important information about the Spring release notes for Dynamics. That blog post can be found here:
As indicated in that blog, this is an important release because all D365 customers will be on the same version.
Key dates for the release notes can be found here:
https://aka.ms/bagreleasecalendar
Most notably they will be released on January 21st.
Bookmark this URL! You’ll find the release notes here once they’re released! https://aka.ms/businessappsreleasenotes
Recently they added a new connector for PowerBI – and you may want to use it in place of your Dynamics 365 connector!
Here are some of the key benefits:
Improved performance
Data load and refresh times will be decreased. This was a big pain point with the D365 connector when working with large datasets.
Sorting the entities by custom and system entities
When you decide to bring in tables, you can see which entities are system and which are custom from the data table selector.
Friendly option set values
Options sets will show up as their friendly values. Before, you would have to build a table with the Value and Name and merge it with the entity table to get the friendly values.
Alphabetical order of column names in tables
This was one of my biggest pain points because the columns seemed to show up in no particular order using the D365 connector. With the CDS Connector, the columns will be in alphabetical order when you need to edit the queries.
For those who want a quick answer:
The Common Data Model (CDM) is a standardized, modular, extensible collection of data schemas published by Microsoft that are designed to make it easier for you to build, use, and analyze data. This collection of predefined schemas—consisting of entities, attributes, semantic metadata and relationships—represent commonly used concepts and activities, such as Account and Campaign, to simplify the creation, aggregation, and analysis of data. – Microsoft 
For those looking for more detail:
The CDM is a common data structure that you should use to build out all of your business applications for consistency in entities, attributes and relationships.
For example:
Scenario 1: You’re a company that sells and manufactures widgets. Your sales, manufacturing and accounting departments all manage their own business processes and data within their own application. That’s 3 applications. AKA your IT departments worst nightmare. And each individual application may have different data structure and records for the same Accounts data. Sending/receiving data from one system to another may require custom attribute mapping and some data may not make it.
Scenario 2: You’re a company that has motivated executives who have had their ears to the ground on Microsoft’s digital transformation message. You also sell and manufacture widgets. You have since converted all of your business applications into the CDM and your Sales, Manufacturing and Accounting teams all share the same set of Account data. No integration needs to take place and your IT department’s business expense for Advil has gone to $0. Building out additional business applications is a breeze – since the core of your application has already been built for you.
Which company do you think has the leg up on their competition?
