Dynamics 365 Human Resources 2022 release wave 1

Finally, it’s time for the first release notes for 2022 – wave 1 is upon us and it’s awesome!

Like the previous releases the team behind HR has focused on three key areas, this time those areas are:

• Improving business automation: Equip HR professionals with the ability to tailor experiences and automatically complete processes when employees are joining, leaving, and moving within an organization.
• Intelligent talent management: Provide intelligent talent management capabilities to enable companies to ensure the right people are in the right jobs and plan for future investments.
• Environment migration: Deliver migration capabilities to enable moving to the merged infrastructure.

We know that the big change is coming this wave, and we’re all dying to see how it is, what does it mean, and how (and WHEN) can we start seeing these changes in the system? Let’s go through all the new features that are coming. PP stands for Public Preview and GA is for General Availability.

Migration to Finance and Operations infrastructure – PP March ’22 GA July ’22

This is the one people, in March 2022 we’ll get the public preview on copying data and migrating the Power Platform extensions to the new infrastructure. This should be general available in July 2022. For customers on just Human Resources, as said in the wave 2 2021 post, the move shouldn’t be an issue at all.

For all customers with D365 Finance and HR, there is a bit more to do. You still copy the data and do the migration of extensions. In addition to this, in this feature, you can create entities where needed and export and import HR in the Finance environments. I’m quite curious about how this will work and how it will all merge together.

The team has been really busy this last 6 months, not only have they worked on this infrastructure change, which is changing everything, but they’ve also worked on other stuff, some I’ve been waiting for, for years already!

Enable simplified integration with learning management system providers PP – April ’22 GA – July ’22

The learning module in HR is a really good module, which is unfortunately often ignored, people should get their eyes up for this module. This release will make it a lot better! When I do training I always say that the learning module is a complete internal learning system, except for the actual training, which wasn’t that big of an issue if you had in-person training, but has become a lot more annoying the last couple of years… This feature will make it a lot easier to integrate your learning management system with HR, thus making the learning module complete. I wonder who the first LMS will be to develop this integration – you?

Organization and personnel management – Improved business process automation – PP – August ’22

Now for a three for one feature, all thanks to you people adding their suggestions for improvement in the ideas site for HR.

Position assigned during employee creation should be marked as primary and End terms of employment when terminating worker were the two ideas that made these new features come to life.

The feature will enable auto-approvals for active employees’ information when it’s entered by HR. If HR puts in a skill or certification, it shouldn’t need approval from anyone, this feature makes putting information in the system an easier task.

The other feature will make it more efficient when a new employee joins the company. HR can select the data they need and that’s important for them when hiring a new employee and set default information. In addition to this, the feature also makes it possible for automatic assignment of onboarding guides based on the information you have in job or position – yay. As a cherry on top of that, you can also get an automatic enrollment of your employees in compensation, benefit and leave plans based on what department or position they have.

All of these features will make it a lot easier for HR to easier get new employees in the system with correct information and connected to the right compensation, benefit and leave plans.

The last one to make life easier for HR is when an employee leave the company. This feature automatically unenroll and process leave accruals and assign offboarding guide. It will also end terms of employment when it’s terminated.

Intelligent talent management improves workforce – PP – August ’22

Everyone knows that internal recruiting is easier than getting in new people, the people already in the company and have spent money on developing are the ones you really want to keep in the company and evolve into even better employees.

The first feature in this is when you add a new recruiting requisition you can automatically add skills from the job requirements, which makes it even easier for HR to take even more informed decisions on recruiting requests.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the coaching and mentoring feature will be. They say it will enable managers to have conversations based on skills insights, if you don’t know what your employee knows, you can’t really steer them in a direction to make them better either.

The learning feature I hope will be tightly integrated with the new LMS integration previously mentioned. It will give recommendations based on learning content and add that to goals and course assignments. Can we hope and dream about a good connection with Microsoft Viva – a girl can dream!

The last one is very important for internal recruitment, you can match your job postings skills, certification and experience to your employees’ information, thus making more informed decisions when hiring people, you’ve already seen if there are anyone internal you can hire.

That’s it people, we have our new features for wave 1 2022 release – I’m loving it!