Release wave 2 2021 Human Resources

Finally, the day is here when the release notes are publicly available!

In the notes, you can read that Microsoft focus on three areas;

Broaden the human capital management (HCM) ecosystem: Continue broadening our HCM ecosystem through integration APIs and strategic partnerships.

Reimagine the employee experience: Expand our investments in the employee experience and bringing those experiences into the flow of work.

App unification: Deliver app unification through a simplified platform with better application lifecycle management tooling and extensibility.

Release notes Wave 2 2021

There are some massive news!

The entire infrastructure of Dynamics 365 Human Resources and connection with the other Finance and Operations apps is completely changing! The old HR functionality in F&O apps will be replaced (and licensed)

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Finally, HR is back together with the other Finance and Operations apps and you don’t have to think about the integration between HR and Finance anymore! This is great news! Some clarification is needed.

I don’t have any D365 Finance and Operations apps, but I do have D365 HR

Lucky you, change will come, but you don’t have to worry about anything! Your system will just get more functionality that has been in F&O apps but may have been missing in HR. More fun for you (and hopefully some help from MS to move your database……

I do have one or more of the D365 Finance and Operations apps, but don’t use the HR functionallity included in them and I have D365 HR

You have to make sure your data is the same, sometime in the future your apps will be merged and you will have the same database, so the data needs to be aligned. If you have big differences, you’ll have some work to do.

I do have one or more of the D365 Finance and Operations apps and I use the HR functionality included in them, but I don’t have D365 HR

As far as I’ve read from the notes, you will now have to buy D365 HR and start using that. Read my post about licensing. You do get added functionality and a system Microsoft is working on improving a lot (with an awesome team that works hard on making it great!)

You can find a Microsoft FAQ about the change here

Other news

Bulk approve employee enrollments in benefits

Now you have to approve one and one employee in benefits, from November 2021 (Public preview) and January 2022 (General available), you can finally bulk update this! You get a new way of doing inquiries to benefits which will help you get more information and bulk update employee enrollment.

Improvements to leave and absence app in Teams

More good stuff is coming to the app. New features are:

• Users can edit or cancel their existing submitted or approved leave requests.
• Managers can view their direct reports’ leave balances while reviewing leave requests.
• Calendar enhancements will allow users to view a companywide calendar or their extended reports’ availability calendar, based on their roles and permissions.

Improved extensibility options

It will be exciting to see everything in this feature. There are some functionalities in the F&O apps that will help with extensibilities, but they also write about the usage of the Power Platform tools. Hope some new and improved integrations will come here!

Manage employee sick leave

YES! I’ve been waiting for this! It isn’t in public preview until March 2022, with no set GA date, but I do very much look forward to this, it’s an area that has been lacking.

The functionalities are:

• Open-ended sick leave requests.
• Return-to-work notices.
• Sick leave reporting.
• Management and approval of sick leave requests.

Summary

A lot is happening with HR. It’s no longer going to be the bastard child somewhere between Dataverse and the F&O database, it’s completely moving in with F&O. This makes it easier for the consultants that already know how to integrate F&O with everything else and it makes the apps more aligned. I’m very happy this change is coming (although I would wish it was all moving to Dataverse, but that would probably kill DV). In addition to this, you also get some great enhancements to other areas.