Dynamics 365 Business Central: Release Update 2020 Wave 1: Context Aware GUI

Release Update 2020 Wave 1: Context Aware GUI

Hello, everyone. We keep going on the 2020 Wave. They keep releasing things that are very, very cool and... It's nice to talk about them. This one is special. It's not functionality within the system, but it's the functionality of the actual client itself. So it's called Content Responsive or Context Responsive GUI (Graphical User Interface). What that means is that the user interface is changing, based on what type of context you're in. How does that work? Simple example here. You have a sales order and the sales order has sales lines. And on the sales line it looks like this, it's a box. And the sales line has a menu here. And one of them has a line and then you can drop down into various options. And then there's availability and some other stuff. Let's say comment.

The dropdown button is talking about the lines in this box. Let's say we have a line here that's item. Type... item and it's a chair, right? So, I can go and click on the line and go into the availability for the chair, because I want to know how much I have of this particular chair in different locations. Or possibly different variants of the chair. However, if the type here is blank, then this here is going to be a comment. So it would be comment or some free text.

Then if I am in this line right now and I go into my line, it doesn't make sense for me to go into an availability list. Why would I want to see the availability of a free text? It doesn't make sense. So the context is no longer there for this availability possibility. So, what happens is that this availability here gets grayed out. It's no longer in context. However, comment works for both. You can actually make a comment on a comment, it's possible. So free texts can have comments and of course the item chair can have comments. So it works for both. So context for comment works for everything. The availability doesn't work for all.

Now, as I was playing through this, the context gets a little gray. I was in a free text and I could actually go into sales prices of free texts, which didn't make any sense to me. That's not a good context. So I'm not sure if Microsoft finally tuned the context there, but the idea is great. So I hope they can do that in more areas where if you're in a particular field, you should only see the things that really matter to that field. Rather than everything that matters to any field that you have on screen. Because that's just too confusing. So check it out.

Let's take a look at something that's really neat. And I like when they changed the application to be more user friendly. It's amazing that we get two times a year just updates, that improve the functionality of the core application. So if I go into a sales order, so this is context driven. Absolutely fantastic. And I get here into a particular sales order. You know that on the line we do have all kinds of information regarding the line. So this is an item here. This is the Paris guest chair, and I can go ahead and see the availability by events, which is one of my favorite screens in the system. Where you can see that we have sales order in here, we got some inventory and this is actually showing all the availability on a timeline. Just with the events that are happening.

But... The point is not to talk about this screen. The point is to talk about something called Context-Aware User Interface. So if I go out of this and this is an item, and now I'm going to create a line here, but it's not an item. It's a text. "This is a test text". And so this is of course going to print out on the line on any order. And even if a user comes in here, they can read that. But if I go into the line, it would not make sense to show the inventory availability for this line, because this is not inventory. And if I click on here, it's grayed out. So now it's actually changing based on what line I'm in.

On related information, you can see half of this stuff is grayed out. Only the stuff that I could actually open, which is not based on the line but based on the order, will highlight. Dimensions, actually curious how dimensions would post on this. And it's interesting that that actually pops up. The comments make sense to me. Anyways, that could be argued back and forth, which one should be highlighted and which will not. In any case, it's definitely a huge improvement to be able to only get the selections that make sense, for the line that you're in on these options up here.