Microsoft retires release waves: how to keep track of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform from here

What disappears, and when does it happen?

The announcement came in two channels at once: a post on the Dynamics 365 blog and message MC1461529 in the Microsoft 365 Message Center, both dated 25 August 2026. The core of it is simple. The twice-yearly release wave 1 and release wave 2 model is retired, and roadmap communication moves to the AI at Work roadmap, the roadmap formerly known as the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

The saved-views row is the one that hits daily operations hardest. Many administrators and product owners have built their working routine around a filtered view in Release Planner, and the new roadmap does not offer personal saved views at all. A replacement exists, but it looks different: shareable filter links, CSV export and RSS. That means the routine has to be recreated as a shared link rather than a personal bookmark, and it is a small change of habit that is easy to postpone until it is too late.

What replaces the release wave plans?

The AI at Work roadmap is one shared, public roadmap across Microsoft 365, Copilot, Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Dataverse. The logic changes from batching to streaming: instead of holding announcements until the next scheduled wave, Microsoft publishes each capability as soon as the plan is committed. Every item is then tracked live through three states: in development, rolling out, and launched. In practice this means most capabilities appear on the roadmap earlier than they would have under the wave calendar, and you can follow them all the way to delivery instead of losing sight of them after the announcement.

The working tools are plain but sufficient: you can filter the roadmap to your products, export complete or filtered views to CSV, subscribe to filtered views through RSS, share filter links directly with stakeholders, and look up individual capabilities by feature ID. For teams that would rather query the roadmap than browse it, Microsoft also offers the Release Communications MCP Server, a service that requires no sign-in, licence or API key and makes the same roadmap data queryable from AI assistants and agent tooling. The other half of the picture is covered by Microsoft MCP Server for Enterprise, which gives AI agents read access to your own Message Center and service health. Those are the notices that apply to your tenant, not the roadmap for everyone. If your organisation is already experimenting with AI agents in operations, something we have written about in the article on agentic AI and CRM strategy, this is the natural monitoring hook.

What is not changing?

Microsoft is explicit that this is a communication change, not a product change. How Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are built, released and deployed stays the same. Established release schedules continue, preview and testing programmes continue, and upgrade and support lifecycles continue. Message Center remains the authoritative source for changes that affect your specific tenant, and Microsoft Learn remains the home of product documentation, including the platform documentation we lean on in the article on Microsoft Fabric and Dynamics 365.

That distinction matters for how you should react. There is no technical migration to plan, no environments to touch, no licences affected. The work sits entirely on the governance side: who in your organisation keeps track of what is coming, and in what rhythm.

Why this is a governance question, not a news item

If you treat this as a pure portal swap, where one Microsoft website replaces another, you miss what the wave model actually did for most organisations. The release plan was a free governance artefact. Twice a year it gave you a complete, dated document you could put on the agenda of an architecture board or a management meeting, and it gave the whole Microsoft ecosystem, customers, partners and consultants alike, a shared moment to review what was coming. Many organisations never read the plan itself, but got the summary served through their partner, a seminar or the trade press, all of which were anchored to the same two dates.

"The release wave document was never just information. For many organisations it was the planning rhythm itself. The rhythm does not disappear because Microsoft stops writing the document; it moves over to you."

Cartagena, based on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform deliveries to Norwegian organisations from 20 to several hundred users

Continuous publishing is better information, but it rewards organisations that already have a review habit and quietly punishes those that do not. When disclosure is a stream rather than an event, nobody sends you a reminder. Features that change user interfaces, alter default behaviour or introduce new AI capabilities will keep arriving; the difference is that discovering them in time is now an internal responsibility. This is the same discipline we describe in the article on Power Platform governance for mid-sized organisations: platform change does not manage itself, someone has to own it.

How do you build your own review cadence?

Microsoft's own recommendation in the announcement is to establish a recurring review, monthly or quarterly depending on how quickly your organisation adopts new capabilities, built on a saved filter and an RSS subscription. We agree, and we would make it more concrete. The table below shows what the wave model gave you implicitly, and what now has to be set up explicitly.

The single most important line in that table is the owner. In our experience the difference between organisations that stay ahead of platform change and those that get surprised by it is rarely tooling; it is whether one named person has the mandate and the calendar slot to look. A system owner or product owner with two hours a month is enough for most mid-sized organisations. How that role fits into a delivery is part of what we cover on our page about how we run Dynamics 365 implementations.

Pattern: a recurring situation we see in the Norwegian mid-market: the organisation has no stewardship agreement and no internal owner for platform change, and learns about a new default behaviour when users ask why the screen looks different. Under the wave model, the twice-yearly news cycle acted as an informal safety net for exactly these organisations. That net is now gone, which makes the named owner and the monthly look at the roadmap less of a nice-to-have and more of a minimum.

What should you do before 15 November?

• Secure what you rely on. If anyone in your organisation uses saved views in My Release Plans, document their content now and recreate them as filters on the new roadmap. The views do not carry over.
• Update internal references. Bookmarks, onboarding documents, governance wikis and steering group templates that point to Release Planner or release plans on Learn should point to the AI at Work roadmap instead.
• Set up the filter and the RSS feed. Ten minutes of configuration: filter the roadmap to your products and cloud environment, subscribe to the filtered view, and share the filter link with the people who need it.
• Decide the rhythm and the owner. Monthly or quarterly, in an existing meeting or a new one, but with one named person responsible for looking and for escalating what matters.
• Keep the Message Center routine. The roadmap tells you what is coming for everyone; Message Center tells you what is landing in your tenant. You need both, and they are not the same list.