Dynamics 365 Release Waves Are Ending: How to Plan Updates Under the AI at Work Roadmap

Last updated: November 3, 2026

By ZapAI Team

Microsoft stopped publishing Dynamics 365 release wave plans in September 2026 and retires Release Planner by November 15, 2026. The updates didn’t stop. Business Central still gets major updates in April and October, finance and operations apps still take four service updates a year, and Power Platform still ships April and October releases. Plan from the AI at Work roadmap and Message Center, and test every update in a sandbox. Our Dynamics 365 consulting team can help.

For about six years, planning Dynamics 365 updates had a rhythm. A release plan landed months ahead. Early access opened a few weeks later. Features switched on in April or October. Partners built whole readiness calendars around those dates, us included.

That rhythm is gone. Partly. Microsoft announced on August 25, 2026 that it’s retiring the twice-yearly release wave model, there’s no 2026 release wave 2 plan, and the Release Planner app shuts down by November 15, 2026. What didn’t go away is the part that actually breaks things, which is the update itself, because Business Central still moves to a new major version twice a year, Finance and Supply Chain still take service updates on a fixed calendar, and Power Platform environments still get April and October releases you can’t postpone.

So should you stop planning? No. You just plan from different sources now. This guide sorts out what Microsoft retired, what still runs on a schedule for each product family, where to watch for changes, and a readiness process you can run without a release plan PDF. Dates were checked against Microsoft Learn, the Dynamics 365 blog, and Message Center posts on November 3, 2026.

Is the Dynamics 365 Release Wave Really Over?

Yes for the plans, no for the updates. Microsoft stopped publishing release wave plans in September 2026 and moved roadmap content to the AI at Work roadmap. Product release schedules, deployments, and support lifecycles stay as they were.

Microsoft broke the news in aDynamics 365 blog post by Richard Riley, general manager for agents and low code, and in Message Center post MC1461529. Both are dated August 25, 2026. Four dates matter.

• August 25, 2026. Microsoft renames the Microsoft 365 Roadmap to the AI at Work roadmap and announces that business apps are joining it.
• September 2026 is when new Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse capabilities start appearing there, and when Microsoft Learn stops getting new release plans. So no 2026 release wave 2 plan. Ever.
• Fall 2026. Roadmap items with a preview or general availability date of June 1, 2026 or later move across from Release Planner.
• By November 15, 2026, Release Planner retires. Personal saved views from My Release Plans won’t migrate.

Old plans aren’t deleted. The 2025 release wave 2 plan on Learn now carries a banner saying it was archived as of October 2026 and is no longer maintained. Useful as history. Risky as a source of dates.

What Did Microsoft Actually Retire, and What Stayed?

Only the publishing model went away, meaning twice-yearly release plans, the Release Planner app, and the September wave announcement. Microsoft kept product release schedules, rollout processes, preview programs, upgrade planning, and Message Center as the source for tenant-specific notices.

That split is the whole story. Read MC1461529 closely and the list of unchanged items is longer than the list of retired ones. The blog post says plainly that the change doesn’t alter how products are built, released, or deployed, and that products with established release schedules keep following them.

What did change is how and when you hear about features. Items now go up on the AI at Work roadmap once they’re committed, then move through stages like In Development, Rolling Out, and Launched. You can filter by product, export to CSV, subscribe by RSS, and look up a feature by its ID. No fixed publishing date.

Our read, and it’s opinion. This change hurts teams that planned once per wave and barely touches teams that already watched Message Center every week. A release plan was a pile of promises published months ahead. A rolling roadmap is closer to the truth, but nobody hands it to you in one PDF anymore. Miss an item and it stays missed until a user trips over it.

How Does the Old Release Wave Model Compare to Now?

Planning moved from two big documents a year to a feed you check monthly. Deployment calendars mostly stayed put. The table below lines up the old wave model against what’s true as of November 2026.

Do Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service Still Update in April and October?

They do. Model-driven apps, including Sales and Customer Service, still get two major releases a year in April and October, and you can’t postpone them. What changed is that release channels, not waves, now decide when user-facing features switch on.

Microsoft’s general availability deployment schedule shows the October 2026 release reaching North America over the weekend of October 23 to 26, 2026, four weeks after the first release region went on September 25 to 28. The page is blunt about delays. You can’t postpone the April and October releases.

Release channels are the part people miss. According to the release channel documentation, the Semi-annual channel turns on generally available features twice a year, while the Monthly channel turns them on every month with roughly a week of notice. And an environment or app set to Auto uses Monthly. Check that setting today. If production sits on Auto and your test environment sits on Semi-annual, you’re testing a different product than your users see.

Early access is in limbo. Microsoft’s early access article, updated October 20, 2026, says the Early Access switch was removed before the April 2026 release and should return later in 2026, ahead of the next Semi-annual release. When it’s back, Semi-annual environments get about seven weeks to validate and Monthly ones about two. Back in February 2026, Message Center post MC1226444 also pulled the release wave label from the Updates card in the Power Platform admin center. The vocabulary is changing faster than the code.

Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 Contact Center run their own release processes, per the same channel article, so don’t assume they follow Power Apps. Our Dynamics 365 Customer Service guide covers the agent features that keep arriving on this cadence. Running custom forms and plugins? Our notes on CRM customization best practices explain which customizations tend to break first. For environment and channel policy across a whole tenant, see our Power Platform governance guide.

What’s the Business Central Update Schedule Now?

Unchanged. Business Central gets two major updates a year, in April and October, plus a minor update in every other month. Each major update comes with a five-month update period, a one-month grace period, and then an enforced period.

Microsoft’s Business Central update cycles page, revised in October 2026, now says service updates follow a rolling schedule and points to the AI at Work roadmap. The mechanics underneath haven’t moved an inch.

• Preview sandboxes open about a month before each major, so every March and September.
• General availability usually falls on the first workday of April and October, and existing environments get the update offered about a week later.
• Five calendar months. That’s the update period, and admins can reschedule to any date inside it from the Business Central admin center.
• Then a one-month grace period where you can’t push the date out anymore.
• After that comes the enforced period. Extensions that block the update might be uninstalled so the update succeeds. Your data stays. Your app doesn’t.

For version 29.0, the 2026 release wave 2 release notes say admins can schedule the update anywhere in a five-month window that ends in February 2027. Funny detail. Microsoft still calls it a release wave in the page title. The plan is gone and the label survived. If the published cadence holds, the next major update arrives in April 2027, with preview sandboxes in March.

Spend five minutes on notifications. The notification recipients list in the admin center gets update emails, up to 100 addresses, and Microsoft says those emails will become a subset of Message Center posts and eventually be deprecated. Is your only signal an email to a former IT manager’s inbox? Fix it this week.

Planning a first rollout rather than an update? Our Business Central implementation guide covers environments and testing from day one.

How Do Finance and Supply Chain Updates Work Without a Release Plan?

Same as before. Finance, Supply Chain Management, and the other finance and operations apps get four service updates a year, with autoupdates in February, April, July, and October. You must take at least two a year and can pause one at a time.

Dates run well into 2027 on the service update availability page, which Microsoft refreshed on October 30, 2026. Here are the near-term ones.

Check end of service too. Version 10.0.47 stops getting cumulative updates on November 20, 2026. Still on it? You’re out of runway this month.

Two more details shape the calendar. Sandbox autoupdates run seven days before production, and you can choose between two autoupdate windows four weeks apart, which hands a slower test team a whole extra month. Microsoft’s advice on that same page is to use the Regression suite automation tool, RSAT, for regression testing. We agree, with one caveat further down. If your Finance updates keep landing on a team that has no time to test, that’s the kind of gap our Dynamics 365 Finance services exist to close.

Where Should You Track Dynamics 365 Changes Now?

Four places. The AI at Work roadmap for what’s coming, Message Center for what’s hitting your tenant, the product admin centers for your environments’ actual dates, and release notes on Learn for what shipped.

The roadmap filter is the fiddly bit. Business Central’s 29.0 release notes link every feature to a roadmap ID, like 573384 for Page Scripting, so you can jump from a release note to its roadmap entry and back. Save one filter per product you own and subscribe to its RSS feed. Ten minutes of setup.

Teams that like automation have another option. Microsoft’s Release Communications MCP Server lets an AI client such as VS Code with GitHub Copilot query the roadmap in plain language. No license and no sign-in are required, and the data refreshes daily. Nice for a weekly digest. Not a substitute for reading the Message Center post about your own tenant, because the roadmap is public and generic while Message Center knows your environments.

What Does a Practical Update-Readiness Process Look Like?

Name an owner per product, put every update date on one calendar, copy production into a sandbox when each update is offered, rerun scripted regression tests, and sign off before the production date. Light touch monthly. Full pass for the big releases.

What follows is how we’d set it up for a mid-market client running Business Central or Finance alongside Power Platform. It’s ZapAI practice, not a Microsoft requirement, so trim it to your size.

1. Owners first. One named person per product family, with a backup, who reads Message Center and decides what gets tested.
2. One calendar for Business Central update windows, Power Platform release weekends, and finance and operations autoupdate dates, with a test deadline two weeks before each.
3. A 30-minute monthly roadmap review using your saved filters. Tag every new item as ignore, watch, or test.
4. Sandbox copies. In Business Central, copy production to a sandbox when an update is offered and schedule the update there right away. In Power Platform, test in a copy that uses the same release channel as production.
5. Scripted regression. Page Scripting for Business Central, RSAT for Finance and Supply Chain, and a written test script for Sales and Customer Service if you have nothing better.
6. Business sign-off, then let the production update run on its date or reschedule it inside the window.
7. Who checks integrations and key reports on the first business morning after? Decide before the update, not during it.

Page Scripting for Business Central

Page Scripting became generally available in Business Central 29.0, the October 2026 update. It records clicks through the web client and replays them, with validation steps, conditions, and parameters. The GA release added multi-row selection and checks on the text in message and error dialogs.

Recording needs the PAGESCRIPTING – REC permission set and playback needs PAGESCRIPTING – PLAY. Scripts save as YAML files, and the bc-replay npm package runs them in a pipeline. The limits are real, though. It captures what AL code does, so it won’t automate control add-ins like charts, embedded Power BI reports, or anything outside the web client.

Where to start? Our rule of thumb is the five processes that would stop the business if they broke. Order to cash. Purchase to pay. A posting run. Bank reconciliation. And whatever your integrations touch. Record those against a sandbox, keep each script small, and rerun them on the preview version every March and September.

RSAT for Finance and Supply Chain

Microsoft describes the Regression suite automation tool as a way to turn Task Recorder recordings into automated tests without code, with test parameters kept in Excel and runs managed through Azure DevOps. Here’s the caveat. Recordings rot when forms change, so a test can fail for cosmetic reasons and nobody trusts the suite after the third false alarm. Budget time each service update to refresh the recordings that broke for no business reason.

A sample readiness calendar

Who Needs to Change Their Process, and Who Doesn’t?

Teams that planned from release plan PDFs need a new routine now. Teams that already watched Message Center and tested every major update in a sandbox will barely notice. Most companies sit somewhere in between.

• If your readiness process starts with downloading the release plan PDF, it has nothing to start from anymore.
• Saved views in Release Planner? Export what you need before November 15 and rebuild them as roadmap filters.
• Production on the Monthly channel by accident because nobody changed Auto. Easy to miss, and fixable in the admin center.
• A small Business Central company with no per-tenant extensions and one integration probably needs an owner, a calendar, and five Page Scripting tests. That’s it.
• Heavily customized Sales or Customer Service with several integrations needs the full process, every release.

Bias disclosed. We sell managed support, so we’d naturally like you to think this is hard. Mostly it isn’t. A focused admin with a calendar and an hour a month can run this for a small tenant. Where it gets heavy is when customizations, agents, and integrations stack up, and on the Monthly channel new features can land every month rather than twice a year, Copilot ones included, as our roundup of Copilot use cases in Dynamics 365 shows. If your partner hasn’t mentioned any of these changes since August, that silence tells you something, and our guide on switching Dynamics 365 partners covers what to do about it.

Wrapping Up

The Dynamics 365 release wave is over as a planning document, not as a deployment schedule. Watch the AI at Work roadmap monthly, treat Message Center as the truth for your tenant, and keep testing each Business Central major, each finance and operations service update, and each Power Platform release in a sandbox before production gets it.

ZapAI is a Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Fabric, and AI consulting firm based in Irving, Texas, serving US mid-market companies. We run update readiness for clients on Business Central and across Power Platform services, from roadmap reviews to Page Scripting suites, for companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and beyond. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your channel settings and your next six months of update dates, talk to our team and we’ll map your calendar with you.

Update Planning Questions We Keep Hearing

Will there be a 2027 release wave 1 plan?

What happens to our Release Planner saved views?

Can we still opt in to early access for Dynamics 365 Sales?

Realistically, how long can we put off a Business Central major update?

Does Page Scripting replace a proper test plan?

Do Finance and Supply Chain customers need to change anything?

Monthly or Semi-annual channel, which one should we pick?