What Is A Release Wave?

A release wave is Microsoft way of regularly updating their technology stack. As we know, business needs are continually evolving, and Microsoft are making it their mission to stay ahead of the curve, so twice a year they push a ‘release wave’ updating their Microsoft Dynamics applications to ensure that they have the most up-to-date functionality required to bring you to the forefront of operational efficiency.

The release waves are often tailored to 2 forms of release, the public preview and then general availability.  We’ll be focusing on the dates of the general availability in this article so that you know when these new enhancements are available to you.

Overview Of Dynamics 365 Commerce

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce is an Omnichannel solution that brings together different areas of your business allowing you to manage your organisation end-to-end. This retail focused solution allows you to combine sales, intelligence, and productivity into a single platform, so you have a 360-degree view of your customer.

Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce give s you the ability to seamlessly engage with your customers across retail channels, modernise and streamline your operations and gain scalability through a fully integrated omnichannel retail solution.

What To Expect & When

This release wave is broken down into 2 sections there’s Omnichannel commerce and there’s Store Commerce. These updates are expected to be generally available within the April to June 2025 time frame. Naturally this is the expected release timeframe, and there’s yet to be any concrete dates set in stone. So as soon as we know more, we’ll let you know (just fill in the form at the bottom of the page and we’ll reach out when we know more)

Omnichannel Commerce

Modernising your cross-channel approach in retail operations is the focus of this wave release for Omnichannel Commerce. In April you’ll see the roll out of multifaced pricing strategies and the use of sales order attributes to define pricing rules. This will provide a comprehensive framework to enable you to roll out a unified pricing module that works across multiple business processes.

In June you’ll be able to modernise commerce payments to enable new payment methods. Many payment providers provide notifications & payment related reports. It’s because of this that modern commerce systems need to support these features. 

Store Commerce

The first update (in April) that’ll be released is monitoring and managing store commerce offline readiness. This focusses on ensuring that you have a successful function of the offline mode, meaning if you have network or service interruptions, then you can continue running as normal. Administrators will automatically have access to offline readiness monitoring for their organisation. You’ll also be able to simplify Store Commerce offline with database size management. With automatic, proactive compression and removal of large indexes you can prevent the Store Commerce offline database exceeding the SQL Server Express size limit!

Following the April release in June you’ll see that you can customise payments, peripherals on Store Commerce app for iOS, notify associates of network and other offline data issues as well as improve your Store Commerce health check. These updates have been designed to enable you to have a frictionless sales experience on any device, anywhere in the world.

If you wish to learn more about these aspects or see exactly how they can benefit your data to day operations, then please get in touch today.