Microsoft are retiring the legacy web interface for Dynamics 365. As a result, all online Dynamics 365 systems must transition to the Unified Interface before 1st December 2020.
But what does this mean for organisations and users?
What is the Unified Interface?
The Unified Interface is a new design, viewing and interaction experience for Dynamics 365, to provide a consistent and optimised experience across all devices, screen sizes and browsers.
By adopting the Unified Interface, your organisation will experience the latest available experiences in usability, accessibility, functionality and speed.
Why is Microsoft retiring the old web interface?
Microsoft have been clear for some time that Unified Interface is the future for Dynamics 365 and that the legacy web interface will eventually be retired.
With the increase of users accessing Dynamics 365 through mobiles, tablets and browsers alongside the more app-centric experience, it is far more efficient for the user experience to be consistent across these devices and clients.
This way, an application only needs to be designed once.
Who is affected?
Any organisation utilising a Dynamics 365 Online platform that utilises the legacy web interface and has not yet moved to the Unified Interface will be affected by the changes.
Organisations whose systems were built with Unified Interface, or who are currently on-premise, will not be affected at this time.
How could it affect my organisation?
If your environment uses the legacy web interface, some components may be at risk of breaking when moving to the Unified Interface.
As a result, a review of plug-ins and scripts would be advisable to ensure that there are no processes which rely on deprecated features before Unified Interface is rolled out.
What do I need to do?
As there is now a firm deadline for the move to Unified Interface, organisations yet to move will not have the time to consider how the Unified Interface features can be utilised to refresh and update their workloads and processes.
As the Unified Interface has been available for some time, there is a gap in the functionality offered by the legacy interface compared to the new Unified Interface, meaning that you may wish to explore the new and improved ways you can work with the Unified Interface going forward.
However, given the impending deadline, the primary focus should be to ensure that you test your user journeys and processes in a non-production environment with the Unified Interface switched on.
By testing your processes and identifying any breaks or errors, you should work with your internal teams and your external support organisation to remediate these issues ahead of the December 1st 2020 deadline.
Next steps
Microsoft have released a playbook for customers to plan and execute transitions from the legacy web client to UI, which can be found here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/model-driven-apps/unified-interface-playbook