The Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE April update is here

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE April update is here - at least it is here if your Dynamics 365 is Online and hosted in the Australian data centre.  

I have checked my Online clients this morning, and the updates were applied yesterday (Saturday 13th April 2019) - see below.

Fortunately, for most people, it seems that Microsoft have backpedalled a little on the expected user interface changes and the update now comes in with them turned off.  This gives us some time to develop any required Unified Interface forms.  These will be required before the classic interface disappears completely.  At the moment I do not know the date for this, so I anticipate that it will be at least 12 months away.  However, if you have business-critical custom entities, I would strongly advise confirming this for yourself, as it is likely that your user interface for these entities may be close to unusable if this change occurs without preparation.

The other change that is apparent now is that Microsoft have removed the overt display of the version number and replaced with a textual line .  Prior to this update, the line 'April 2019 updates enabled' would have included a numeric reference to the software version and the database version and no date.  However, the numeric version number is 9.1.0000.40xx.

If you would like to see how your enmvironment will appear with the unified interface as default go to Settings > Administration > System settings > General and scroll to the relevant area.  I cheat a little bit by using a ctrl-F to scroll to the relevant area, which is where the highlight in the image comes from.

With 'Enable only the unified interface' set to Yes, you will see the unified interface version of your environment.

The above are two of the changes that had the most impact on end users, especially if it happened without planning and preparation.  However, there are many more changes that are less obvious.  Unlike previous upgrades to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online, this release is not happening all at once. The new features will be released between April 2019 and September 2019.  If you want to learn more about these and how they may help your organisation take a look at the videos from Microsoft - see below.