A QUICK LOOK AT THE 2022 RELEASE WAVE 1 PLANS FOR DYNAMICS 365 & POWER PLATFORM
A QUICK LOOK AT THE 2022 RELEASE WAVE 1 PLANS FOR DYNAMICS 365 & POWER PLATFORM
Microsoft has published release plans for its second major wave of cloud updates for 2021 covering Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. The Dynamics 365 and industry clouds release plan for the 2022 release wave 1 describes new features releasing from January 2022 through April 2022.
The 2022 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 and industry clouds brings new innovations that provide you with significant capabilities to transform your business. The release contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Insights, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Business Central, Connected Spaces, Guides, Remote Assist, Customer Insights, Customer Voice, and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Financial Services, and Non-profit.
Release Wave Quick-Jump Sections
- Model-driven apps
- Dynamics 365 Sales
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Dynamics 365 Field Service
- Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Power Apps Web Portals
- Power BI
2022 Release Wave 1 Timeline
The first edition of these two release plans was published on 25January. Administrators can now evaluate a selection of the new features and updates in non-production environments before these are enabled by default.
- Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2 Features available for early access
- Power Apps Release Wave 2 Features available for early access

Early Access Preview
From 31st January, administrators will be able to test and validate a selection of new features and capabilities that will be part of 2022 Release Wave 1 before these are automatically enabled for users from April 2022.
General Availability
Microsoft says regional production deployment of the 2022 Release Wave 1 is due to commence from 1st April 2022.
Model-driven apps
What’s New for Model-driven Apps in 2022 Release Wave 1?
- Modern advanced find
Microsoft is preparing to replace the legacy advanced find experience, so the new Release Wave will introduce a modern advanced find with a new view management experience. This includes:- An advanced find entry point through the global Dataverse search bar
- An enhanced selector enabling users to search for a view
- Simpler personalisation of views including options to hide and reorder views across all devices
- Exploring any table in a model-driven app through structured search and filters. (Public Preview from February / General Availability from April)
- New activity dropdown showing only relevant activitiesThe new dropdown will only show contextual activities that are relevant to each app. Activities which aren’t included in the app metadata will be hidden by default. (Public Preview from February / General Availability from April)
- In-App NotificationsFrom April this capability will be generally available enabling administrators to configure notifications within apps as an alternative to email alerts and push notifications.
- Easy record sharing
A new record sharing experience (currently available in public preview) will reach general availability in the 2022 Release Wave 1 Initially this is only available for Account, Case, Opportunity, and Contact tables, enabling users to share records similarly to Office documents with other users who have sufficient record permissions. (Now available in Public Preview / General Availability from April)
What’s New for Dynamics 365 Sales in 2022 Release Wave 1?
Sales Premium features accessible with a D365 Sales Enterprise licence
Selected Dynamics 365 Sales Premium features will be available to customers with a Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise licence, subject to monthly capacity limits. This includes:
- Conversation intelligence with three hours per user / month
- Access to the sales accelerator workspace with up to 1,500 records connected to a sales sequence per environment / month
- Predictive scoring with up to 1,500 leads or opportunities scored per environment / month
Sales Hub preinstalled on all environments
In this release wave, Microsoft will make the Sales Hub available and preinstalled in all existing and new environments. This will only be visible to users with specific security roles including system admin, system customizer, salesperson and sales manager.
Forecast enhancements
Announced updates include:
- Capability for sellers to toggle a full year, and year to-date, forecast views which support comparisons between organisational targets and actual YTD performance across multiple periods.
- Updating quotas with inline editing and rollups.
- Filter underlying opportunities in a forecasting using column-level filter controls.
- The ability to monitor stagnated deals, using the number of days stuck in the current stage, and understand their impact on the predictive score. (All General Availability from April)
Discover accounts and contacts from email interactions
This updated ‘who knows whom’ feature is designed to help sellers identify hidden relationships that exist within an organisation based on interactions tracked in Dynamics and Exchange Online.
This supports queries on contacts and accounts that colleagues may have interacted with over email to identify related contacts and potential connections. It will also be supported by an interaction score that reflects the engagement strength of a relationship between the contact or account and a colleague.(Public preview from April)
Capture phone contacts and recent calls
Enabling data to be more easily captured, this feature will provide a one-click process to add phone contacts to Dynamics 365 Sales and log calls from recent mobile phone calls. (Public Preview from February / General Availability from April)
Log information using mobile phone camera
This will provide an improved experience to capture business cards and scan handwritten notes using a phone camera to extract digitised text into Dynamics 365 Sales. (Public Preview from February / General Availability from April)
Outlook deep-link integration
In this release, Microsoft is improving the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app to provide deep-link integration with Outlook and make it context-aware. This will include support for email templates when composing emails and auto-filling relevant information from the Dynamics mobile app in Outlook emails. (Public Preview from February / General Availability from April)
What’s New for Dynamics 365 Customer Service in 2022 Release Wave 1?
- New Customer Service admin app
A new consolidated administration centre will be introduced to unify tasks across the Customer Service Hub, Omnichannel admin and app profile manager. (Public preview from February / General availability from April)
- Enhanced email template experience
This includes a new insert template gallery that will provide multiple views and search capabilities to compose messages using existing templates. (General availability from July)
Also, Microsoft will bring a new email template creation experience in this release wave. (Public preview from May / General availability from July)
- Analytics for knowledge articles and search terms
New capabilities will include knowledge post historical usage trends and key word search phrases. (General availability from April) - SLA usability enhancements
Service level agreement improvements include the ability to customise display text for the Succeeded and Expired display text of the SLA timer. Success conditions can also be defined in greater detail using a related entity in addition to the primary entity. (General availability from April) - Embedded Microsoft TeamsNew features will enable users to chat with contacts within Dynamics, access recent chats and link chats to case and conversation records. (General availability from April)
- Unified routing diagnostics enhancements
Errors and exceptions that occur during the routing process will be better accessible to admins to understand why some items are unassigned. (General availability from April)
What’s New for Dynamics 365 Field Service in 2022 Release Wave 1?
- Mobile usability enhancements
Further enhancements to the mobile experience will include customisable quick action shortcuts from the booking calendar control and asset details shown within the booking form.(Early access from February and General Availability from April)
What’s New for Dynamics 365 Marketing in 2022 Release Wave 1?
- Raise triggers from a journey to run another journey or flow
Within real-time customer journey orchestrations this new capability will provide greater flexibility to trigger custom processes and Power Automate flows. A new journey tile will be available in the designer to prompt an event trigger so that any connected journey or flow will be run when a customer reaches this point. (Public preview from February /General Availability from April) - Unified customer activity across apps
Real-time and outbound marketing activities will be accessible within the Dynamics 365 unified timeline alongside interactions captured in other apps including D365 Sales and Customer Service. This will include a timeline filter for marketing-only activities. (Public preview from April /General Availability from June) - Built-in Microsoft Teams chat for Marketing
Inline Teams chat capabilities will be accessible within entities across Dynamics 365 Marketing, these will include email template and landing page editors to support greater team collaboration. (Public preview from April / General Availability from June) - Easily personalise emails with predefined dynamic field text
To quickly personalise messages using dynamic text, marketers will be able to access a list of the most commonly used predefined field tokens, without the need to navigate database structures to apply personalisations for first / last name, email and other field values. (Public preview from April / General Availability from June)
What’s New for Power Apps Web Portals in 2022 Release Wave 1?
- Dataverse search integration in portalsThis Release Wave will introduce a new option to use Dataverse record search across tables and columns in portals in line with security permissions. This will be the default experience for all new portals and Microsoft says Dataverse search will eventually replace the long-standing search experience, but no timeline has been announced at the time of writing. (General availability from April)
- Relevance search integration for knowledge management in portals
Relevance search is replacing the current portal global search functionality. The new capabilities include additional filter controls and content level access to provide an added layer of portal access control to knowledge articles. (General availability from April)
What’s New for Power BI in 2022 Release Wave 1?
- Create Power BI reports with new data sources
In this initial public preview, additional data sources will be added to the Create page in the Power BI service. These includes Excel, CSV and SharePoint to automatically create reports from these sources without copy / paste or connecting using Power BI desktop. (Public preview from April) - Quick measures using natural language
A further public preview will introduce the ability to generate Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) measures using natural language statements. This will cover routine mathematical operations and time-based calculations that will provide measure suggestions. (Public preview from April) - Power BI integration in Outlook & Office Hub
The Power BI personal app will be fully integrating with Outlook and the Office hub, enabling reports to be included directly in emails that open within Outlook to reduce application switching. (Public preview from May) - Embed Power BI scorecards in PowerPoint presentations
This capability will allow users to embed and use live Power BI scorecards within PowerPoint presentations. (General availability from September)
Read more about these updates, and others, that will be available during the 2022 Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.
- Dynamics 365 – PDF or Micosoft Docs
- Power Platform – PDF or Micosoft Docs