Dynamics 365 Release Waves: What They Are and How to Prepare

Twice a year, Microsoft releases a wave of updates to Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. These release waves are one of the most significant things that happen to your environment all year, and one of the most consistently underestimated. If you’re not preparing for them, you’re setting yourself up for broken workflows, confused users, and emergency support calls.

Here’s what release waves actually are, what they contain, and how to make sure they don’t catch you off guard.

What Is a Dynamics 365 Release Wave?

Microsoft ships Dynamics 365 updates in two major waves per year: Release Wave 1, which rolls out from April through September, and Release Wave 2, which covers October through March. Each wave contains hundreds of new features, UI changes, behavioral updates, and under-the-hood improvements across Dynamics 365 apps and the Power Platform.

These aren’t optional patches you can skip. Some updates are automatically enabled by Microsoft. Others are opt-in initially but become mandatory later in the wave. Either way, they’re coming to your environment whether you’re ready or not.

What’s Typically Included

Release waves touch a wide range of areas. On any given wave you might see changes to the Dynamics 365 Sales interface, updates to how Power Automate handles certain triggers, new Copilot capabilities being surfaced in existing views, modifications to Business Central calculations, or changes to how security roles interact with certain features.

Some of these are purely additive, meaning new features you can start using. But others change existing behavior, and that’s where things get tricky for teams running customized environments.

Why Customized Environments Are More At Risk

If you’re running Dynamics 365 exactly as Microsoft shipped it, release waves are relatively low risk. The updates are tested against the default configuration.

But most organizations aren’t running a vanilla environment. They have custom forms, plugins, JavaScript web resources, Power Automate flows built around specific field behaviors, and integrations with third-party tools. When Microsoft changes how a core feature behaves, those customizations can break in ways that aren’t obvious until a user runs into it in production.

This is one of the most common sources of unexpected support issues we see: a release wave updated something at the platform level, and it quietly broke a custom workflow or changed the behavior of a plugin that was built around the old functionality.

How Microsoft Communicates Release Waves

Microsoft publishes detailed release wave documentation well in advance. The release plans are available through the Dynamics 365 release plans page and through the Power Platform admin center. You can also enable release wave features early in a sandbox environment before they go live in production.

The challenge isn’t access to information—it’s having the bandwidth to read through hundreds of feature entries, understand which ones apply to your specific apps and configuration, test them, and prepare your users. Most internal teams don’t have time for that on top of their regular workload.

The Right Way to Prepare

Good release wave preparation follows a consistent pattern. First, you review the release notes for each app you’re running and flag anything that could affect your custom configurations or your users’ daily workflows. Second, you enable those features early in a sandbox environment and test them against your actual setup, not just the default behavior. Third, you regression test your custom plugins, flows, and integrations. Fourth, you communicate changes to users before they go live so no one is surprised. And fifth, you have a rollback plan for features that can be disabled if something goes wrong.

That’s a meaningful amount of work done twice a year, every year. For organizations without a dedicated Dynamics administrator, it often doesn’t happen at all, and that’s when release waves start causing real problems.

What Happens When You Don’t Prepare

The most common outcome is that a feature goes live in production and breaks something users rely on. Maybe a form field is now hidden behind a new UI pattern. Maybe a Power Automate flow fails because a trigger behaves differently. Maybe a plugin throws an error because it was calling an API that changed in the update.

These issues are fixable, but they’re disruptive and reactive. Users lose trust in the system. Administrators get flooded with support tickets. And the fixes take longer than they would have if the issue had been caught in a sandbox before the update went live.

Release Wave Management as Part of Ongoing Support

The best approach is to treat release wave readiness as a recurring part of your Dynamics 365 support model, not a one-off project you scramble through twice a year. That means having someone who knows your environment reviewing each wave, testing against your specific customizations, and flagging anything that needs attention before it reaches production.

This is exactly the kind of proactive work that separates a real support partnership from a break-fix arrangement. A support partner who knows your system can move through release wave preparation much faster than someone starting from scratch, and they’re far more likely to catch the subtle issues that only appear when you test against your actual configuration.

The Bottom Line

Dynamics 365 release waves are a permanent part of running the platform. They bring real improvements, but they also bring real risk for customized environments. The organizations that handle them well aren’t the ones with the most resources—they’re the ones with a consistent process and someone who knows their system well enough to spot problems before they hit production.

If you’re not sure whether your release wave process is working, that’s usually a sign it isn’t. We’re happy to walk through what a proper preparation process looks like for your environment. Get in touch here.

For the official Microsoft release wave documentation and early access timelines, see the Dynamics 365 release plans on Microsoft Learn.