In just under one month’s time, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10 after 10 whole years on the market. There are still hundreds of millions of Windows 10 PCs online, and all of those users will be at risk come October 14 if they don’t take the necessary steps to remain secure on the platform.
After support ends, Microsoft will not issue new features, bug fixes, or security updates to Windows 10 as a platform. Your PC will be vulnerable to kernel exploits discovered in Windows 10 beyond October 14, and over time apps and drivers will drop support for the platform too, though this won’t happen right away.
Microsoft is only offering access to the ESU program for one year for consumers, but the program is free when you sign-in with a Microsoft account and backup your PC settings to the cloud using Windows 10’s built-in backup tool. However, If you don’t want to back up to the cloud, you can also pay $30 USD or 1,000 Microsoft reward points for the same access, which covers up to 10 devices.
The best option is to upgrade to Windows 11 to remain supported with security updates and new features, but this is only an option for PCs that meet Windows 11’s high system requirements. If your PC is older than 2018, then it’s unlikely to be officially supported by Windows 11.
Take action to ensure your PC remains supported and secure beyond October 14 if you’re still running Windows 10. Doing nothing will result in your PC being unpatched and vulnerable to potential security holes that are discovered in the Windows 10 OS, and Windows Update will not pull in and install security updates unless you manually enroll into the ESU program.
Enrolling into the ESU program is a simple process that only requires a few clicks. The button to enroll can be found in the Windows Update area of the Windows Settings app. If you can’t see the button to enroll, make sure your PC is up to date with the latest security updates and ensure the “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available” toggle is switched to on.
Open Windows Settings
Select Windows Update
Select “Enroll now”
Follow the on-screen instructions
You will be asked to sign-in with a Microsoft account and either pay for access to the ESU program or back-up your PC settings. s.
Microsoft’s AI capabilities within Dynamics 365 are transforming business operations by automating tasks, enhancing customer interactions, and providing valuable insights. The integration of features like Copilot and autonomous AI agents allows organizations to focus on strategic initiatives while improving overall productivity and customer satisfaction.
Microsoft Copilot leverages OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o and DALL-E 3, along with Microsoft’s proprietary Prometheus model. The details of Prometheus are considered confidential by Microsoft, making it difficult to compare its architecture with other tools. According to the company, the model does not generate content autonomously but focuses on improving efficiency and ensuring that searches and queries comply with privacy guidelines while providing the most relevant information.
Key Features of Microsoft AI in Dynamics 365
Copilot Integration: Dynamics 365 Copilot serves as an AI assistant that helps users automate repetitive tasks, generate insights, and enhance customer interactions. It allows sales teams to focus on building relationships rather than getting bogged down by clerical work. For instance, it can draft email responses, summarize meetings, and pull relevant information from various sources like SharePoint and Outlook.
Generative AI Capabilities: Leveraging Azure OpenAI Service, Dynamics 365 apps utilize generative AI to assist business users in content creation, data analysis, and customer segmentation. This includes generating personalized marketing content and automating data exploration tasks, which helps marketers and sales teams work more efficiently.
Enhanced Customer Service: AI in Dynamics 365 empowers customer service agents by providing contextual answers to queries and automating responses in both chat and email formats. This ensures that agents can deliver exceptional customer care while reducing response times.
Autonomous AI Agents: Microsoft has introduced autonomous AI agents within Dynamics 365 that can perform tasks such as lead qualification and supplier communications. These agents streamline workflows by automating routine tasks, verifying data, and maintaining organized communication with suppliers, ultimately enhancing operational efficiency.
Business Transformation: The integration of AI is reshaping how businesses operate, and enables those to analyze data, execute workflows, and enhance decision-making processes. AI agents are designed to continuously learn and adapt, providing businesses with the tools needed to improve customer engagement and operational efficiency.
Regardless of the skills required for a position, many jobs involve tedious and repetitive tasks. Systems that keep all teams in sync require constant data collection, which means someone (or everyone) is responsible for data entry.
Salespeople are not hired for their ability to type quickly on a keyboard; they are hired to engage with as many potential customers as possible. Copilot and Dynamics 365 enable them to do exactly that.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales is an AI-powered assistant designed to enhance productivity and streamline sales processes. It provides several capabilities that are particularly useful to manage account plans effectively.
Record Summarization
Copilot can generate concise summaries of account records by extracting key information from predefined fields. This helps sales teams quickly understand the status and details of an account without manually reviewing extensive data. Administrators can customize the fields used for summarization to align with business priorities.
Recent Changes Tracking
Copilot tracks and summarizes recent updates to account records, such as modifications to contact details, opportunities, or other key fields. This ensures that sales teams stay informed about the latest developments in their accounts, enabling timely and informed decision-making.
Meeting Preparation
For upcoming meetings, Copilot compiles relevant information from associated account or opportunity records. This includes key metrics, recent interactions, and other critical details, helping sales representatives prepare efficiently and focus on meaningful client engagement.
Information Assistance
Copilot provides instant access to account-related documents and answers to sales-specific queries. It integrates with SharePoint to fetch product-related materials or other relevant documents, eliminating the need to switch between multiple applications.
Email Assistance
Copilot assists in composing professional emails tailored to account plans. It can summarize email threads, add notes to customer records, and remind users to follow up on unanswered emails. This ensures consistent and timely communication with clients.
News Updates
Copilot delivers curated news updates about accounts, sourced from Bing. These updates can serve as conversation starters or provide insights into the dynamics of a customer’s organization. Users should verify the authenticity of the news before using it in discussions.
Embedded Experiences
Copilot integrates seamlessly into Dynamics 365 Sales, offering embedded summaries and insights directly within account forms. This allows users to access critical information without navigating away from their workflow.
These features collectively enable sales teams to manage account plans more effectively, ensuring they have the insights and tools needed to build stronger customer relationships and drive business growth.
In the Dynamics 365 Business Central environment, small and medium-sized businesses can equip their teams with numerous innovative features offered by Copilot. Teams looking for support in bringing products to market faster can upload product images to Copilot, which will generate descriptions based on attributes such as color, material, size, and more.
Users can customize responses to match their specific tone of voice and branding. Copilot can also assist with bank statement reconciliation and financial reporting. After uploading bank statements to the dashboard, Copilot can automatically match known transactions in the Business Central account and suggest the appropriate ledger accounts for recording transactions.
There is also a dedicated Copilot solution for Dynamics 365 Finance, which allows businesses to automatically generate customer account summaries, track invoices and payment histories, and even receive recommendations for improving cash flow.
Additionally, Dynamics 365 Business Central users can customize Copilot with unique features using developer tools. It is possible to create powerful AI experiences for any industry or role and deploy them internally or at scale via Microsoft AppSource.
Ask the assistant for information about the supply chain, summarize complex conversations, and even assess the impact and risk of changes to procurement decisions. In the future, Microsoft plans for Copilot to be able to guide users to specific pages within the application and suggest relevant actions to help them complete their tasks.
In Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Copilot assists project managers to quickly create new project plans. Simply tell the assistant what needs to be done, and Copilot will take care of the rest. It can streamline the creation of project status reports, integrating summaries of planning and financial data into each report.
Copilot excels in continuous risk mitigation and identification. For instance, to analyze active projects and detect common risk factors, such as budget overruns.
Dynamics 365 was already an impressive software portfolio, packed with features and functionalities that make it an invaluable tool for businesses across industries. with the arrival of Copilot, its usefulness took a huge leap forward that few would have expected from an already powerful product.
Few other applications have showcased the same level of versatility as Microsoft Copilot. ,It is proven to be an incredibly valuable support tool for professionals working in vastly different business sectors.
It has demonstrated the immense potential of Redmond’s AI-powered digital assistant to help organizations of all types and sizes to streamline their daily operations, and ultimately boost productivity and efficiency.
Whether you’re writing emails or tackling a long to-do list, get it done with Copilot Chat. Your Microsoft 365 subscription gives you free access, so simply sign in with your work account to get started.
The initial challenge is to realise that it’s not a new search engine and is not meant to replace Google.
Don’t expect instant, comprehensive accurate answers, but engage in ‘conversation’. Treat AI like a team of colleagues—ask follow-up questions, clarify requests, iterate together.
AI is not as a single tool, but a ‘team’:
Claude for deep reasoning
ChatGPT for creative brainstorming
Gemini for technical research
Copilot for workflow integration
Each has its strengths. Used together, they can be your personal board of advisors.
AI isn’t magic. nor a threat to your role. It’s a thought partner—available 24/7—that gets smarter as you get better at using it.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly accessible and perform a variety of tasks, from generating text and images to curating music playlists. Some tools you can try:
ChatGPT: Generative AI Chatbot
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a popular chatbot based on GPT-3.5 (or GPT-4 for the paid version). To use ChatGPT:
Go to ChatGPT’s website and sign up using a Google, Microsoft, or Apple account, or your email.
Follow the on-screen prompts to complete the signup process.
Chat with ChatGPT to get help with writing, understanding complex topics, generating ideas, and more.
Google Bard: Generative AI Chatbot
Google Bard is a chatbot powered by Google’s LaMDA model. To use Google Bard:
Visit Bard’s website and sign in with your Google account.
Click the “Try Bard” button and agree to the terms and privacy policy.
Start chatting with Bard to get assistance with writing code, solving math problems, or having a conversation.
Copy.ai: AI Writing Tool
Copy.ai helps with writing tasks, especially for bloggers and copywriters. To use Copy.ai:
Visit Copy.ai and sign up with Google or email.
Begin chatting with the AI to generate blog posts, emails, and other types of content1.
These are a few more but you need to pay!
DALL·E 2: AI Image Generator
DALL·E 2, created by OpenAI, generates images based on text prompts. To use DALL·E 2:
Midjourney: AI Image Generator
Midjourney is an AI image generator that works through Discord. To use Midjourney:
Spotify AI DJ: AI Virtual DJ
Spotify AI DJ is available to Spotify Premium subscribers and curates music playlists. To use Spotify AI DJ:
Copy.ai: AI Writing Tool
Copy.ai helps with writing tasks, especially for bloggers and copywriters. To use Copy.ai:
Visit Copy.ai and sign up with Google or email.
Begin chatting with the AI to generate blog posts, emails, and other types of content1.
Grammarly: AI Writing Tool
Grammarly is an AI tool that corrects grammar and spelling mistakes. To use Grammarly:
These AI tools can significantly enhance productivity and creativity by automating various tasks and providing intelligent assistance. Whether you need help with writing, generating images, or curating music, there is an AI tool available to meet your needs
025’s Gartner® CFO & Finance Executive Conference featured sessions and hands-on product demonstrations from finance and operations providers covering growth strategies, cost management tools, and AI in finance.
Start with areas that invite automation and deliver immediate impact to your team and bottom line. Financial close, account reconciliation, and supplier communications can use prebuilt agents available from Microsoft. For example the Supplier Communications Agent in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, can automatically respond to vendor emails, assess supply chain disruptions, and update purchase orders—to ensure continuity without manual intervention.
Microsoft Copilot Studio agent builder has a simple interface to quickly and easily build agents. The Financial Insights Agent, is a tool designed internally for Microsoft to help finance professionals to quickly surface and analyze key financial metrics.
Azure OpenAI and semantic search provide the means for users to ask this agent natural language questions like “What’s my total operational expenditure (OPEX) as a percentage of expenses?” and to receive instant, contextual answers.
Significantly reduce time spent on manual data retrieval and analysis and enhance decision making with real-time insights. This agent exemplifies how AI can transform planning and analysis workflows, to make finance teams more agile and strategic.
Last year Forrester surveyed a wide variety of industries that ran an on-premises Dynamics ERP product (NAV, GP, or Business Central) and that had later transitioned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Cloud.
Despite the investment in computer hardware and the investment in the on-premises ERP development , Forrester found that over a period of three years, these companies averaged payback within six months, and over 3 years:
A Return on Investment (ROI) of 265%
A Net Present Value (NPV) of the investment to transition to Business Central in the cloud of $529k
86% of the respondents reported reduced IT support costs, including professional services, data center and hardware, licensing, and third-party software, with an average annual savings of $69,703 (a 55% reduction).
There are other factors from scalability, to automatic updates, and ease of working with embedded Microsoft products like Outlook, Teams, Excel, Power Bi, and Copilot
In SQL Server 2016, SSMS became a standalone application, so it’s important to select the version that supports the user’s SQL Server version. The current version is 21.0.1, released this year.
Different versions of SSMS can be installed on the same machine.
Beginning with version 21, Microsoft uses the Visual Studio Installer to download and to install SSMS, and creating a standalone offline installer
Business Central online is a service that consists of a Microsoft-maintained platform and business functionality. Microsoft partners provide extra business functionality, to address specific industry or localization needs. Both business functionality and service components are monitored continuously and updated as appropriate.
New capabilities roll out in release waves that consist of a major update and monthly minor updates. Most capabilities are made available in major updates, but some become available in minor updates.
Critical fixes roll out as soon as possible after they pass tests and are verified in Microsoft’s protected staging environment. Refer to the release plan for an overview of new and upcoming functionality.
All updates that Microsoft applies to Business Central online are also shipped with the subsequent cumulative update for Business Central on-premises.
Microsoft releases two major updates per year—typically in April (Wave 1) and October (Wave 2)—plus monthly minor updates.
Each major release introduces new functionality and enhancements based on user feedback and Microsoft’s roadmap for continuous improvement.
Administrators can set a maintenance window for each environment that determines when Microsoft is allowed to update that environment. F
Unlike traditional on-premises systems, updates cannot be skipped or indefinitely delayed in Business Central’s cloud environment. Microsoft gives you a grace period if you request it, but eventually, your environment will be updated automatically.
That means:
Customizations or extensions may break if they’re not compatible with Microsoft’s code changes
Key processes could be disrupted
Integrations might fail
Your team has a tight window to test and adapt before the update goes live
Preview period
The preview period allows for testing of the new functionality before the version is made available as update to your environment. Administrators can create a Sandbox environment from the Business Central administration centre on the new version, for example to try out new functionality or test compatibility of extensions in a cloud environment. This period typically starts a month before the release of the new major version, that is, every March and September
What can go wrong if you ignore updates?
Many organizations underestimate the complexity of Business Central updates—until something breaks. Here are just a few of the issues we’ve seen:
Custom reports no longer pull the correct data
Integrations with Power BI, Shopify, or CRMs stop syncing
Custom apps or extensions become incompatible
Users are locked out, or their permissions change unexpectedly
Month-end close is delayed due to unexpected system behavior
These disruptions affect more than just IT—they delay invoicing, reporting, inventory planning, and other critical business functions.
How the update process should work
To minimize risk, companies need a structured approach to Business Central updates. Here’s best-practice update process overview :
1. Review the release notes
Before proceeding, your team should carefully review the upcoming release’s changes. Microsoft publishes detailed documentation outlining new features but does not include deprecated code, functionality, or compatibility changes.
2. Deploy to a sandbox
Next, create a sandbox environment and apply the new version. This gives your team a safe place to:
Restore a copy of your production environment
Test standard workflows and reports
Check third-party extensions and integrations
Identify and resolve issues early
3. Run Regression and User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
Involve users from accounting, sales, operations, and IT to test core business processes. Regression testing ensures that existing processes still work, while UAT confirms that end-users can do their jobs without surprises.
4. Plan for go-live and support
After successful testing, plan your rollout. Make sure users know what’s changing and when. Post-update monitoring is also critical to catch any lingering issues quickly.
Why so many teams struggle with updates
The challenge isn’t just about knowledge—it’s capacity. Most internal IT and finance teams are already stretched thin and don’t have a stand by test and update team. Testing update gets pushed to the back burner—until it’s too late.
Common problems include:
Lack of a sandbox
No time to review or understand release notes
No time to create a test plan
In-house customizations that are undocumented, or break with new or deprecated code
Inconsistent documentation of business processes
Managing downtime during busy periods (like month-end, audits or year-end)
What to do next
If your team hasn’t started preparing for the next update, now’s the time. Here are three steps you can take today:
Consider Is your team ready for the next Business Central update? Have they read the Microsoft release notes?
Talk to our experts: Its more cost effective to avoid an issue than to correct it.
Synergy Software Business Central release management services.
To help you to stay current, secure, and focused on running your business, we can handle:
Review of release notes
Testing in a sandbox
Regression testing of key workflows
Advising you of changes
Resolving compatibility issues
Guiding your team through go-live
Training end users and initial handholding support as the deal with new or changed featrures
Stay informed: Subscribe to our blog for updates, news, best practices, and Business Central tips.
Version v1.33.0, release brings us closer to the vision of a modern, developer-first SQL experience inside Visual Studio Code. These three capabilities simplify and modernize the way developers build applications using SQL Server in Visual Studio Code:
Local SQL Server Container (Public Preview) — Easily spin up and manage SQL Server containers directly from within the extension – without writing a single Docker command. This new capability is perfect for prototyping, developing, or testing workloads using the same engine available in production environments.
Connection Groups
If you manage multiple projects, clients, or environments, then Connection Groups bring structure to your connection list by allowing you to group saved connections into folders — with custom colors for quick visual organization. This new feature improves navigation and makes it easier to keep development, staging, and production environments organized—all within the MSSQL extension.
GitHub Copilot Agent Mode (Public Preview) — A conversational, schema-aware assistant to help you to connect, to explore, to understand, and to optimize your database through natural language interactions. contextual, action-driven chat experience into the MSSQL extension. This first release enables GitHub Copilot to interpret your intent and perform real tasks inside Visual Studio Code—to make it easier to interact with your database through natural language prompts.
Key highlights
List servers – View all available SQL Server connections
Connect to server or database – Establish a new database connection
Disconnect from server or database – End the active connection
Show database schema – Display the schema for the connected database
Connection Groups — Organize your saved connections into folders with custom colours for improved clarity and control.
