It's this time of the year again. Microsoft publishes all investments and plans around their product portfolio. For the first time, there is an own segment for the Copilot 1st party products - such as Copilot for Sales or Copilot for Finance.
But first - when can you expect all the new features?
The 2025 Release Wave 1 covers all investments that are planned from April to September this year.
Each Feature for it's own has a potentially Public Preview date and a General Availability (GA) date:
Unfortunately, there are also plenty of interesting features "only" starting to rollout in Public Preview first during that Release Wave while GA is after September 2025.
Disclaimer: Please review preview features in a separate sandbox environment with the goal of being prepared once they hit general availability for productive usage.
Links Links Links
First of all - here are all the necessary links you need, right to your hand
Blog
Release Plans
Videos
My Highlights for Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Public Preview starts in April 2025
A new agent-based experience automates time entry creation, expense report submissions, and policy checks, eliminating manual data entry and reducing administrative burdens for project managers, consultants, and invoice administrators.
Seb's Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆
Of course, we need to wait for how this turns out in the first previews. But my hopes are huge for getting a small glimpse of the future here. Reducing recurring administration tasks for a number of employees can free up head space and time.
Public Preview starts in September 2025
Limits for the Project and Task plan (Project for the web integration) will be increased in phases over the next months. This includes the following:
Number of tasks per project
Number of assignments per task
Number of assignments per project
Duration of project length
Seb's Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Yes, yes, yes! Highly anticipated and awaited for many customers all other the globe. And good to see the longterm investment to improve the performance. This will help a lot with the end-user and customer acceptance.
Public Preview starts in September 2025, General Available March 2026
The users will be able to select and import tasks from one or more existing projects during project creation to safe time and rely on previous, successful project packages and implementations.
Seb's Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆
Importing project tasks from projects - yes, plural - sounds fantastic. And is used already by many customers throughout the history of projects that I was allowed to accompany.
Especially when the implementation offers a seamless user experience and efficiently handles the import of task packages, this feature will add significant value.
Public Preview starts in September 2025, General Available March 2026
In the Project plan, when selecting the (i) icon next to a task name, the Task details pane opens so you can enter more information. This pane is part of Microsoft Project for the web and is embedded in an iframe, that makes it non-customizable.
With this new feature users will be able to view and edit custom columns here. Accessing data and especially custom data information will made more easy. It also removes the need to show the tasks in a custom grid somewhere else on the Project form.
Seb's Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆
Don't get me wrong - it's a great feature. The feature description just gives me too many question marks. Will it be possible to fully customize the iframe? Order and structure of it, can we may add custom controls, charts, web resources?
It's definitely one step in the right direction. Especially after the integration of custom fields in the Grid structure itself, this feels like the next logically step!
Public Preview starts in September 2025, General Available March 2026
At the moment, users can duplicate a project via the "Copy Project" option on the main project form, which utilizes the Copy Project V3 API. However, this method does not include copying team members or their mappings. The Copy Project V4 API, on the other hand, does support copying both team members and their mappings, but it does not have a user interface.
The new feature combines now the capabilities of V3 and V4 into a single, user-friendly interface, handling the following attributes:
Source Project
Target Project
Team Member Mapping:
Don't copy team members
Replace team members with generic team members
Copy the named/generic team members as in the source project
Seb's Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆
Nice addition and streamlining of the general feature of copy project feature. I was already wondering why there is a V4 of the same API but not really delivering the full functionality.
I hope this will connect to the project template feature.
In addition: users will be also able to copy externally scheduled projects in future.
Time Recording
Next to an simplified Approval overview, the whole time recording experience for Mobile and Web (Model Driven app) receives an overhaul in the upcoming months.
Public Preview May 2025, General Available September 2025
The following we know about a the interface:
A new Calendar interface to view, create, and modify time entries.
The ability to track time logged across varying timelines (weekly, monthly, and so on).
Tighter integration of work breakdown structure (for assigned tasks and projects) within the time entry creation step (Quick create forms).
Improved tracking in the form of benchmarking (Actuals vs. Target hours) and visualizations to help team members track their progress on project tasks.
Public Preview March 2025, General Available August 2025
Following the capabilities of the Power Platform, a Power App will support users to track their times on mobile:
A view that summarizes all Microsoft Outlook meetings and Microsoft to-do items for that day. These meetings and to-do items can then directly be used to log time entries.
The ability to view projects and tasks on which the team member is currently staffed, and the duration that the staffed project is going to run for.
A section to view day-wise time entries, across statuses (Draft, Submitted, and so on) where users can modify or delete editable entries, submit entries for approval or recall already submitted entries.
Users now get access to a new mode of logging time with the help of a timer that can be used to record the duration of granular work performed, and then later be tagged to a project or task and turned into a time entry.
Seb's Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I truly can't wait for the public previews. The mobile app is scheduled to make the start in March. Especially the integration to Microsoft To-do and Outlook enables new processes and optimizing a time-friendly logging of time entries for many consultants and project team members.
This can be a truly game-changer as the product finally leverages more capabilities of the whole platform itself.
In the Calendar interface I hope for a better visualization. The existing list of time entries is great for a lower number of different tasks and projects, but especially with a lot of different project and task assignments, it can be tough. Notably as well as soon as start and end time requirements (Europe customers, I look at you 👀) make an entrance to the requirements.
Public Preview August 2025, General Available October 2025
During Project planning, what-if analysis capability for estimates will enable users to model scenarios and evaluate their impact on key financial goals.
Scenario modeling: Use existing quotes to simulate scenarios and assess their effects on goals like profitability and gross margins.
Goal-oriented analysis: Select specific goals and target values to model pricing changes effectively.
Dynamic pricing dimensions: Adjust key pricing dimensions to explore how changes influence the selected goals.
Informed decision-making: Review multiple what-if analysis models, compare outcomes, and apply the most suitable option to the quote
Seb's Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆
Comparing different versions of estimates, in best case with specific views on different KPIs sounds pretty good! This will help Project Managers during their project planning phase, but also the Sales Manager in their quotation.
Big question for me is the integration to the Project plan. Ideally changes on these estimates have impact on the Project plan and vice versa to allow Project Managers to develop different strategies.
Billing Improvements
General Available September 2025
Next to the already mentioned improvements, there are really plenty of additions to the product. I was positively surprised as I saw the long list in the docs.
This not only includes new Features on the CE side which we mostly focus here, but also the Finance and Operations side, including Expense Management.
The overall Billing and Sales integration, Quotation and Project Contracting receives major improvements for the usability, too:
Simplification of Project Invoices
Reduced clicks to (bulk-)edit one or more invoice line details
Improved Subcontract information - one vendor in one place
modify subcontract line
track subcontract usage
Monitor billing progress for subcontracts
Enhanced Quote and Project Contract experiences with new overviews, LLM-based summaries, KPIs and Visualizations to gain faster better insights in quote and contract data
Conclusion
It's refreshing that not everything is clustered with new AI and Copilot functions and features - don't get me wrong please. I'm a fan. I like to play around with AI and figure out how it can help my daily work tasks. Microsoft just need to balance that with the overall improvement of their Business Applications.
Yet, a lot of the features will go GA after the release wave, like in October or may even next year. Definitely worth to check those release dates twice. Do keep track of potential changes and updates you’re interested in, I can only recommend creating your own release plan on the Microsoft website.
At the end, I’m more than happy. I could have literally picked each of the new features listed in the documentation, as it was really tough to decide for my highlights of upcoming Release Wave.
Just a bit sad there were no visualizations, so I don’t have to guess so much 😁
Hope they will be added at a later point!
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