For 2021 release wave 2, Business Central investments center on helping users get to productive usage faster, whether they are new or existing customers. Microsoft has expanded the built-in tours to cover more standard entities for better onboarding of additional business roles. Microsoft has also continued the Better with Microsoft 365 investment by bringing further capabilities to the Business Central and Teams experience.

Some examples of Microsoft's investments in various areas that we think would be of value to our customers:

Administration: In 2021 release wave 2, Business Central delivers new capabilities to simplify and improve the way our partners administer tenants. Administrators enjoy new experiences for managing licenses and permissions.
Application: You can now get better explanations and guidance on errors that are caused by problems in posting setup and dimensions. Improvements to reporting, bank reconciliation, and supply chain capabilities will also help customers be more productive.
Better with Microsoft 365: Share a record from the browser client in Microsoft Teams.
Governance and administration: This wave adds more operations in the Operation log section of the Business Central admin center.
Modern clients: Improved discoverability of reports across departments by applying a filter to the links that are shown in the Role Explorer.
Onboarding: Built-in tours cover more standard entities to support the onboarding of more business roles. A new help pane will help users get unblocked faster when they experience an issue.
Service and platform: We continue our effort in improving the performance of Business Central.

For a full list of what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central, please click the link below:

New and planned features for Dynamics 365 Business Central, 2021 release wave 2 | Microsoft Docs

What's Next?

Your DSE (Dedicated Support Engineer) will be upgrading your Tenant's Sandbox Environment after refreshing it from Production immediately, to ensure any and all customizations we have built for your organization are compatible with this update.

- If there are any compatibility issues with any of the customizations we have built for you (which is a rare occurrence), a software developer may be required to upgrade the code of your customization.
- If there are no issues in the refreshed Sandbox, we proceed to set a date for upgrading your UAT/TEST and Production environments.

Depending on the Sandbox upgrade results, we set a date and time window to upgrade your UAT and Production environments - during non-operational hours.

What testing is conducted by D365.Global and Microsoft around these upgrades?

We do not test minor Microsoft version upgrades of standard functionality as they are usually very well tested and reliable.
We do appropriate internal regression testing on extensions we build for all customers, and we also encourage clients to do a level of their own regression testing (to the extent that they are comfortable with) in their UAT environment.
We schedule timing of version upgrades with feedback from client system owners.
We recommend scheduling Prod upgrades on a weekend toward the end of the upgrade window so that any issues are caught by the early adopters and fixed by Microsoft.
We recommend not scheduling an upgrade during critical days such as month end.
Microsoft have a high degree of automated testing and reliably notify us well ahead of time if there is a feature or customisation that will break in the next update. If that is the case we promptly update or remove those breakage points prior to the update, and test it appropriately.

Till when do I have to upgrade?

The last date to upgrade to this version of Business Central is 13-Dec-2021.
After this date, your environment will automatically upgrade to the latest version of Business Central