In October 2018 there will be another big release for Dynamics 365, including Marketing,  Sales, Service, Social Engagement, Finance and Operations, Talent, Retail, Business Central (Nav), PowerApps, Microsoft Flows and Power BI (Business Intelligence), Data Integration and Mixed Reality business apps.

These were the news published just yesterday at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2018 celebrated in Seattle.

The release notes (Download the October ’18 Release Notes PDF) include more than 100 changes across all those technologies, so get a coffee and start reading 🙂

If there was a particular area that I had to highlight, that would probably be PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. See below my favorite features.

PowerApps

Dynamics 365 entity forms with embedded canvas apps

PowerApps within PowerApps! That’s basically it. So we will have the ability to put the powerful and flexible Canvas apps within our Model-Driven apps, like custom controls.

Canvas apps with Solutions

To improve our ALM process, we will be able to pack our Canvas apps within Solutions, allowing us to deploy them easily between environments (e.g. dev=>test=>…=>prod).

Solution Checker

This utility within the platform will help us to identify potential design and performance issues in our apps.

Microsoft Flow

Custom controls in Business Process Flows

Previously, business process flows only permitted the available XRM attribute types (such as text, optionset, lookup, number, and so on) to be surfaced as control steps inside business process flow stages. Now, custom controls, which offer rich interaction mechanisms both in Unified Interface and the Web Client, are supported. They power
controls such as sliders, radial knobs, timelines, and even the LinkedIn controls.

Flow management connector, SDK, and APIs

Microsoft Flow is becoming the core processing solution in the Dynamics ecosystem. More documentation will be provided around its SDK and APIs to improve deployments, automation and governance.

Location as a connector

The feature allows users to create a location range that will trigger a flow when a mobile device enters or leaves it. Cool, isn’t it?!

Flows in Visio

We will be able to design our flows in Microsoft Visio, so you won’t have a excuse for “no documentation” now 🙂