Dynamics 365 and Power Platform timeline for the 2020 release wave 1

Key dates for the upcoming release wave

As the business environment rapidly changes, we’re dedicated to proactively delivering new capabilities to enable our customers and partners to drive toward strong business outcomes. We deliver these capabilities through two release waves per year.

Today, we’re announcing the key dates for the first release wave of updates planned for 2020, starting April 2020. These dates will help you plan and on-board these updates with confidence.

  • January 27, 2020: Release plans available
    Learn about the new upcoming capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
  • February 3, 2020: Early access available
    Try the new features and capabilities that will be part of the April update of the 2020 release wave 1 before they’re enabled automatically.
  • April 1, 2020: General availability
    This is when the production deployment for the 2020 release wave 1 begins. Regional deployments will commence on April 3rd, 2020.

Early visibility through release plans

On January 27th, 2020, we plan to publish the release plans for the 2020 release wave 1 with the initial list of features for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform that will be delivered during the release wave. The release plans provide you with early visibility in order to get ready for the updates planned from April 2020 to September 2020.

Early access to mandatory end-user impacting features

Customers and partners can validate the upcoming features and capabilities months in advance before they’re enabled automatically twice per year, during the April and October updates. Early access enables you to validate these new features in a non-production environment and get ready to roll out the changes with confidence to users. Early access for the 2020 release wave 1 April update will start on February 3rd, 2020. To learn more about early access, please check the early access FAQ.

We also plan to publish release overview guides and videos during the early access period to help customers and partners on-board the new capabilities.

Production updates for 2020 release wave 1

Updates to production deployments will automatically start to roll out in April 2020.  Regional production deployments commence on April 3rd, 2020.  A detailed rollout schedule will be published by March 2020.

2019 release wave 2 updates deployed seamlessly

As a quick recap, we enabled our customers, during the early access period (August and September), to try over 70 new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform in their sandbox environments. This ensured that our customers could on-board the new capabilities with confidence and proper change management, before they were automatically deployed to production environments.

Production deployment updates for the new capabilities started during the month of October 2019 and will continue through March 2020. There are hundreds of new capabilities included in this release wave and you can find more details in the release plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

In addition to feature details found on release plans, we encourage you to visit and bookmark the product updates page to learn more about new features delivered to market and watching the release overview videos and the release virtual launch event on-demand.

If you have any questions or feedback, please join the discussion in the Release Readiness forum in the Dynamics community.