Microsoft Dynamics 365 Updates: Industry accelerators; Insights; Business Central modules; Customer Service bots; Password safety

As mid-August approached, the Dynamics 365 team kept busy putting out new updates. Microsoft CVP Steven Guggenheimer highlighted new industry accelerators. The D365 Banking Accelerator is generally available (hear more about the initiative to create it from VeriPark's Wim Geukens in a recent MSDW Podcast episode), joining the ranks with the Automotive, Higher-Education and Nonprofit accelerators. Customer Service Insights added support for 39 new languages, with both alphabets of Serbian coming soon. German, French and Spanish are further optimized for natural language processing, like English, with more complex language models in public preview.

The Dynamics 365 team described the process of building the Dynamics 365 Business Central System Application, constructed out of small modules. Along with a link to a GitHub repository where the latest improvements are published, Microsoft put out a graphic showing the collection of modules, with Extension Management touching many of the other categories.

As Microsoft transitions Business Central logic from the system layer into extensions, the company is taking extra steps to protect sensitive data such as Azure Key Vault contents. In 2019 release wave 2, the Service Password is going away, to be replaced by Isolated Storage, a platform that gets exposed through application code. A DataContext option lets app developers access an extension, with controls that stipulate only a particular user or users from a certain company.