If you manage your business with Dynamics 365 Business Central Online, you probably know that twice a year in April and October, Microsoft releases updates to the application as part of the Business Central Release Plan.
There is no right way to manage these updates – that’s entirely up to you and the way your business decides. But we thought it was about time we put together some recommendations to ensure our customers get the best update experience.
The areas we will cover off in this guide are:
Release cycle
Microsoft updates Business Central Online with two major update cycles per year, with major releases every April and October. Major updates introduce new features, enhancements, and platform improvements. The major update of these waves occurs in the first month, with minor releases generally released monthly to maintain constant improvement of the platform and application.
Three different periods apply to Business Central environment updates:
The Preview Period allows for testing of the new functionality before the version is made available as an update. This period typically starts a month before the release of the new major version. During this time, administrators can create a sandbox in the new version.
The Update Period allows you to update any of your environments to the new version, and lasts 5 calendar months, and starts about one week after the start of the release wave. Administrators can schedule updates at any date within this period.
Following the update period, there is a one-month Grace Period in which any non-updated environments are scheduled to update Automatically by Microsoft. After this month, the Enforced Update Period then commences and any extensions preventing the update are automatically uninstalled so the update succeeds.
To ensure you receive the appropriate notifications for both major and minor releases, and that we are well placed to support you to take the recommended stems within the above time limits, we strongly recommend that you configure the notification recipients in your Admin Centre.
The admin centre
The Business Central Admin Centre is the portal that allows management of a Business Central tenant and its environments. Here we outline key setups to be considered to help support the recommended update release process.
Permissions
To be able to perform any of the management requirements for Business Central, the user must be assigned a supported Microsoft Entra role. The Entra roles a user requires are either Dynamics 365 Administrator or Dynamics 365 Business Central Administrator.
Access to the admin centre
To access the Business Central Admin Centre, perform the following steps:
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Log in to Business Central, select the Settings gear icon on the top-right of the page and select Admin Center.
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If you have the correct permissions, you will see the following screen that will show information about your tenant and environments.
- Take note of the URL of your Admin Centre and bookmark for future quick access.
Environment properties
Certain settings for Business Central are set at the environment level.
To see the properties for an environment:
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Login to the Business Central Admin Centre, select Environments and the environment name that you need to see properties for.
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The specific environment details are then shown.
Set update window
Every environment must have a six-hour window in which Microsoft will apply updates. It is recommended that this be a time that is not usual working hours. Updates will start at any time during the allocated window, not necessarily at the start.
To set the update window, in the Business Central Admin Centre, navigate to the environment you wish to configure, select Update Settings and then Set update window.
Then adjust the time of the update window to suit your requirements.
Set up telemetry
Telemetry is information about usage, performance or errors in a Business Central environment.
This information is essential for FUJIFILM MicroChannel to assist our customers. To do this, we maintain an Application Insights instance that receives this information from our customer environments to enable troubleshooting and support when required.
It is important to note that the information provided to FUJIFILM MicroChannel is sanitised and does not contain customer, financial or any other personally identifiable information.
Every Business Central environment should have the connection strung for the FUJIFILM MicroChannel application insights instance.
To set the FUJIFILM MicroChannel Application Insights string in your environments, follow these steps.
Note: When the Application Insights Connection String is added, the environment will restart and all active user sessions will be terminated.
- Log in to the Business Central Admin Centre
- Click on the environment you wish to configure
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Under Telemetry click Define
- In the view that is presented, toggle Enable Telemetry
- Enter the FUJIFILM MicroChannel Connection String (Ask your MicroChannel consultant for the connection string)
Notification recipients
Notification recipients are the people that will be alerted when an update message is sent from Microsoft regarding any of the environments in the tenant.
Every tenant should have at least three notification recipients:
- One from the IT department - we recommend a monitored mailbox;
- One from a key or super user of Business Central; and
- The FUJIFILM MicroChannel support desk email internal.bc.mctsupport@microchannel.com.au.
Additionally, we recommend you add your lead contact at FUJIFILM MicroChannel should you be engaged with any projects (e.g. Consultant, Solution Architect, Project Manager).
To maintain the list of notification recipients in the Business Central Admin Centre, select Notification Recipients and then Add recipient or Remove Recipient as required.
It is also recommended that all relevant people sign up for email notifications relevant to Business Central in the Microsoft 365 Message Centre. Instructions on doing this can be found here.
Working with sandbox environments
Sandbox environments are test or non-production environments for Business Central.
If your current sandbox does not have enough data to test an update, or contains extensions that have not yet been promoted to the production environment, a new sandbox can be created as a copy of the production environment. This action can be taken at any time and does not impact production environment performance.
Every Business Central installation is entitled to a maximum of three sandboxes per production environment. Each tenant starts with 80GB of database capacity which is then increased with each user license (2GB for essential, 3GB for premium and 1GB for device) and each additional production environment (4GB).
Capacity is detailed in the Capacity tab of the Admin Centre. Before creating a sandbox please ensure you have available storage and environment capacity.
Creating a sandbox
To create a new sandbox as a copy of the production environment:
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Navigate to the Business Central Admin Centre, navigate to the detail page of the environment you wish to copy and select Copy.
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Enter an Environment name, set the New environment type to Sandbox and click the Copy button.
- Click Create and the copy process will begin. When the environment is ready, it will appear in the Environments tab.
Note: When creating a new sandbox environment, all outbound communication is disabled. If you need to test integrations in the sandbox, you must specifically allow HTTP client requests for the extensions that communicate with the outside world.
To configure this, navigate to the Extension Management page in the newly copied Business Central and select the Configure option of the relevant extension and toggle Allow HTTPClient Requests.
Deleting a sandbox
If a sandbox is no longer required, it can be deleted. If you delete an environment in error, you can recover the environment within a specific number of days.
To delete a sandbox:
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Navigate to the Business Central Admin Centre, select the Environments tab and click on the environment you wish to delete. In the environment details page, select the Delete option from the options at the top of the page.
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Note the warning message presented. Once deleted the environment can not be retrieved. Select Yes to delete the sandbox.
Updating Environments
Update notifications
When an update is available for your environment, each notification recipient will receive an email from Microsoft with details about the update.
If you log in to the Business Central Admin Centre when an update is available you will see the Available Update Version listed next to the applicable environments in the Environments list.
Note: If there is a potential issue with an extension in your environment, Microsoft will send an email to the notification recipients outlining the key information. If you receive this email, contact FUJIFILM MicroChannel Support to ensure that the correct process to resolve this is taken.
Set update date
When an update is available and you would like to update an environment, you can set the update date. Once this is set, the environment will be updated on that date in the update window that has been configured.
To set the update date, access the environment in the Admin Centre, Click Update Settings and select Select update date.
When an environment is being updated, the Status of the environment will change from Active to Updating.
Confirmation of update
When an update is scheduled, Microsoft will send all notification recipients an email confirming the date it is scheduled for. Once the update has been completed, all notification recipients will receive an email confirming this.
Although it is unlikely, if an update fails the notification recipients will receive an email confirming this. Please contact FUJIFILM MicroChannel Support in this instance.
Testing updates
Once you have a sandbox that is updated, we encourage our customers to test key functional areas in the updated environment. Although there is no hard-and-fast rule of what you need to test, the more detailed the testing, the less risk of any surprises during or after the update of your production environment. Of course, you need to be practical as to how much time and effort can be devoted to this process.
We believe a good compromise is not to do full end-to-end regression testing but instead test your key processes. An example of a key process could be the procure to pay process:
- Raise a PO
- Email PO to a vendor
- Receive the goods
- Process a purchase invoice
- Suggest vendor payments
- Create an EFT file
- Email remittance advice to the vendor
It would be a great idea to document these processes so every time there is a major update, you can follow the same steps to complete the testing process as quickly as possible. This can be automated using the Page Scripting tool in Business central: Use page scripting tool for acceptance testing (preview)
Updating production environment
Once you have completed testing in your sandbox environment and confirm it is working as expected, you can then set your Update Date for your production environment. Sit back and relax, you’ve just updated your Dynamics 365 Business Central Online environment like a pro!
We have created a reference checklist to help with this process. This can be downloaded below (click the gear icon > Download):
Images included in this article are courtesy of Microsoft.
