Dynamics 365 release waves are retired: what F&O teams must change

Since September 2026, new Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Dataverse capabilities are no longer announced in twice-yearly release plans ("release wave 1" and "release wave 2"). They are published continuously on the AI at Work roadmap. Microsoft announced it on 25 August 2026. No release wave 2 plan is published in September 2026, and Release Planner retires by 15 November 2026 at the latest.

For a Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations team, this does not change how Microsoft ships code: the announcement states that build, release and deployment processes are unchanged, and that products with established release schedules keep them. What changes is how you track what is coming and how you prepare your regression testing.

• September 2026: new Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Dataverse capabilities start publishing to the AI at Work roadmap.
• September to November 2026: existing content with a public preview or general availability date of 1 June 2026 or later transitions; updates are communicated through Message Center.
• By 15 November 2026: the transition completes and Release Planner retires. Saved views in "My Release Plans" do not carry over.
• Release plans already published on Microsoft Learn stay available for reference, but no new ones appear there from September 2026.

Each roadmap item is published once the plan is committed, then moves through three statuses: In Development, Rolling Out and Launched. The roadmap lets you filter by product, export to CSV, subscribe via RSS, share links and search by feature ID. Microsoft also offers a "Release Communications MCP Server" to pull this data into your own AI tools.

Many teams organised their tracking around two dates a year: read the release plan, spot the features that touch their X++ extensions, plan the tests. Without waves, that rhythm is gone. Four concrete adjustments:

1. Replace the twice-yearly read with a monthly review. Microsoft itself recommends a recurring review, monthly or quarterly, using a saved filter and an RSS subscription. Filter on Finance, Supply Chain Management and the other products you run.
2. Track the status, not the wave date. An item moving to "Rolling Out" is the signal to check its impact on your customisations: table extensions, Chain of Command on standard methods, reports, data entities.
3. Keep Message Center as the source for tenant-specific changes. The announcement confirms that tenant-relevant notifications stay there.
4. Update your links. Internal docs, wikis, Azure DevOps work items: anything pointing to release plans or Release Planner should be fixed before 15 November 2026.

The F&O service updates themselves are not affected by the announcement. Test preparation stays the same; what changes is where you learn about what is coming. Our page on D365 F&O One Version updates covers the code side of regression management.

The RSS feed of a filtered view is enough for most teams: plug it into Teams, Outlook or a monitoring tool, and triage once a month. To go further, the Release Communications MCP Server lets an AI agent query the roadmap, for example to list the "Rolling Out" items that concern the modules you have customised. The same protocol, MCP, is also used to connect agents to F&O itself: see our article on the Dynamics 365 ERP MCP server.

Once the impact is known, the code still has to be fixed. That is where Skalp AI comes in: ERP context analysis, specification, X++ code and unit tests, delivered to your Azure DevOps and validated by your IT lead. The credit (≈ €400 on Basic, €200 on Pro, lower in packs) is only consumed when the code is generated. To see what AI can and cannot do in X++, read building X++ without a consultant in 2026, then compare the Basic, Pro and Max plans.

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog, "One always-on roadmap: Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse join the AI at Work roadmap", Richard Riley, 25 Aug 2026, accessed 11 Oct 2026.