One Version - a New way of Service updates for Dynamics 365 F&O

News coming up.. However was expected. Like we discussed in The Ever Green "Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations", Microsoft has been focused on getting the ever green approach to F&O as well. And the introduction of One Version service updates is a necessary step towards that.

So what is One version service updates?
Almost 5 months back, Microsoft annouced that there will be a Change to the way MS will deliver Dynamics 365 updates, to ensure that all their customers will be on the most current version, or at least the latest version possible.

So below table illustrates the relavant information.

Also microsoft announced, two online sessions in December to share more information. Please go to Microsoft Managed Continuous Updates Recurring Sessions with the Product team | December 11, 13, 2018 and get registered to know more 😉

Some highlights from what Microsoft has shared on www so far: 

• Next major release from what I understand is version 10.0 and will be released around April 2019
• There will be 2 major updates per year going forward. One in April and one in October
• There will be service updates rolled out each month starting in November 2018. And Customers are required to have an update no older than 3 months. 
• So you could only skip two updates - however, ideally if you have followed the extension principles in your customization, nothing should STOP you from have the update every month
• All the service updates will be backward compatible with the new experiences (changes in the system) as opt-in. So if you want the new experience you will have to configure accordingly
• All the Breaking changes will have a 12-month lead time. This will enable the customers as well as the ISVs to include this in their sprint planning and validate
• Especially for ISVs, there is a Partner early access progress, which allows early access to the platform update and thus enable them to validate and make necessary changes to their solutions

Some important information about how this will be done: 

• Customers get to choose the date and time of the maintenance window in LCS for Microsoft to perform the update on their tier-2 (UAT) and PROD environments
• Customers can also use the Tiles on the Environment details page in LCS to perofrm the necessary updates on their own. For example, one might want to do this on a sandbox environment
• Expected down time is 30mins to 1 hour. However Microsoft will ask for 3 hours of downtime
• All batch jobs will be suspended during the maintenance window and will be resumed after completion

Finally some more updates for Retail: 

• Retail service updates will include Dynamics 365 headquaters, Retail server and Cloud POS
• Downtime is same as HQ, however, impact on channel operations can be reduced by using Modern POS Offline and Retail Store scale unit functionalities
• Microsoft Support will demand that all instore components to be running on released software that is less than one year old
• That means that backward compatibility for all self-hosted components will be provided for 12 months
• Also the self-hosted components do not need to be updated at the same time
• The new POS functionality coming in with new service updates will have to be appropriately enabled in the Screen layouts before they can be viewed by the stores. So this gives control over rollout

Also below is a proposed timeline regarding One version service updates. The indicated line shows that all applications under Dynamics 365 umbrella will be on v10.0 April update in Aprill 2019. And there onwards, it will be a continual phase.   

You can, of course, find more information in Microsoft Docs, here are some useful links: 

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/fin-and-ops/get-started/one-version
• https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/2018/07/06/modernizing-the-way-we-update-dynamics-365/

Hope this helps. Please do share your thoughts and also help me correct if you find any wrong information in here. Cheers!

Getting to know Dynamics 365 for Talent

Today, we have so many different applications under the umbrella of Microsoft Dynamics 365. And for ease of understanding, they are categorized into the below groups (as of today, not sure what changes tomorrow, especially with the naming 😉). 

• Customer Engagement
• D365 for Sales
• D365 for Customer Service
• D365 for Field Service
• D365 for Marketing
• D365 for Project Service Automation
• Unified Operations
• D365 for Finance and Operations
• D365 for Retail
• D365 Business Central
• D365 for Talent
• Power Platform
• PowerApps
• Microsoft Flow
• Power BI

And the approach strategy opted by Microsoft for the Customers of the future - Dynamics365, forces us to get an understanding of each of the above products. And this is my attempt to learn and share the D365 Umbrella application insights. 

Today I did some reading about Dynamics 365 for Talent. Logically, D365 for Talent is divided into #3 categories, Attract, Onboard and Human Resource (CoreHR). As you can imagine one of the primary targets for any HR team is to Attract the right people with the required competence through profile shortlisting, interviews and by making the right offer. 

Onboarding the new team member is the next major step, where a proficient system can add value to both the company and also the new employee, by multiple folds. CoreHR is used for all traditional Human resource activities including Goals and Performance review. 

When you have the correct .onmicrosoft.com account with all required permissions, you should be able to jump between these three seamlessly. 

Human resources (Core HR): 

From what I see, the HR Core module is hosted on an AX / Dynamics 365 F&O server. You can also understand this from the UI. 
[Update]:  After learning more with the help of Malin Donoso Martnes (Thanks for that, Malin 😄) Core HR (and also the other modular apps) are on layered on top of the new common data service, which is on Azure. It's based on the HR/personal module in AX, that's why the interface looks the same.

The below picture shows you the various modules in the Core HR module. 

Also if you navigate to the Home, there will be a "Click here to Get Started" Button, which directs you to the most basic scenarios you could try and learn from. 

Attract: 

Attract provides capabilities for managing the process of hiring new talent. 

Candidates can be added to open jobs, and they can then be advanced from stage to stage until either an offer is extended or the application is rejected. During each stage, candidates move through activities such as screening calls, assessments, and interviews. After candidates apply, they receive an email that invites them to sign in to Attract, where they can follow the status of the job and their application. They can also respond to any tasks that are assigned to them.

There is a lot of focus on User friendliness and at the same time CDS behind the scenes ensures that the data is secured based on the access permissions tagged to the login account. 

Onboard: 

Onboarding helps new employees perform more effectively while also gaining a sense of belonging in their new role. Helps to understand their new role more quickly and accurately than they would have otherwise, and they get a head start on establishing relationships that can help them succeed. If not done correctly, new employees might leave questioning their decision to join your organization. This is where D365 for Talent jumps in with a user-friendly design to make a welcoming change.

By looking at the applications Onboard & Attract, they feel closer to the XRM backend. However, I am not sure how (and if at all possible) to see the solutions involved.  

Finally to conclude the introduction to Dynamics 365 for Talent, the below picture illustrates the processes involved from identifying a resource to hiring that person. And seems like D365 for Talent, can help through this journey in a modern way of communicating.

Also the below picture illustrates what is really different with D365 for Talent, when compared to other tools available to serve similar purposes. 

Hope this helps and feel free to comment your views. Cheers. 

Azure DevOps and Sample Windows Web App

It has been a while that I wrote a post in here.. been busy days 😅
This is the era of tons of information over WWW and new topics / services are born everyday. And for me, the only logical way to learn some new cool things in this fast paced industry is to Learn by doing.. and thus, back to sharing what I am doing 😃

Today's learning's: 

• Azure DevOps (VSTS transformed into DevOps now)
• Azure Windows Web App (as a service)
• Azure SQL database
• Git Push from Visual studio 2017

If you have a Azure account (can also easily create a free account for one time use), one of the first things which will pop up when you login to https://portal.azure.com/ is to Create DevOps project 

So I created a new DevOps project and went through the UI experience/suggestions and created a new Windows Web app. 

Once I finished the process, Azure will automatically create several resources for me.

1. An Azure DevOps project was create - https://dev.azure.com/ajit0705/avadna 

2. Also the Sample ASP.net Application is also loaded into my Repos 

3. Also generates the first build in DevOps 

4. Also queues the release to the automatically created pipeline  

5. And also all the Azure resources required to support Web App as a service are also created in the background 

And all this is done in matter of few mins. 

So all I now have to concentrate on just building my website without worrying about anything else. 

With Git in place, which is new to me as I have been always working with TFS and VSTS together with AX and Dynamics 365 F&O, the next step is to Clone the repository which was created automatically for you on-to your local computer and start making changes to the ASP.net solution. 

Also you connect to the Azure database server from VS to proceed

Once you make your changes in your local repository, you need to push the changes to Azure DevOps and this is very easy to do from VS 2017. 

1.  You will notice the number of changes in the bottom-left corner of VS

2. Once you click on the small pencil icon, you will be taken to Team explorer showing all the changes you have made. 

Where you can add a comment to identify the purpose of the change and click Commit all. 

3. You will notice a pop-up will mentions that your changes have been committed locally now. However needs to be synced with server to push the change into the DevOps Repo. 

4. Also you can notice the up-arrow (as there is only changes from local to server to be synced) in the bottom-left corner of VS which indicates that they local commits are yet to be synced with server. Click on it. 

5.  In the Team explorer - Synchronization; just push the changes 

The next cool thing done by Azure DevOps is Automatic Build and Release after every new Push to the Server. Thus the site will be updated automatically if there is not failures in the release. 

So if you have Azure subscription already, just try this out - End-to-end the whole process won't take more than 45 mins and you get to learn so much 😇

Work hard! Cheers.... 

The Ever Green "Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations"

Now we have heard so much about Ever green product life cycle for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. After the latest product release, Microsoft has taken a step further towards Ever-green approach with D365Ops. 

• Latest Platform release: Platform Update 15 -- 7.0.4841 -- released on March 2018
• Latest Application release: 8.0 -- 8.0.30 & 8.0.35 -- released on April 2018

Many of you might already know that Dynamics 365 (previously CRM) let's the users skip One update only. That is, if a Customer is live with D365 and is also working on a Module development on the particular live-production-version, and if Microsoft releases newer versions during this development cycle, the Customer will have to get the work done as quickly as possible to 1. Release the development done; 2. Update the product to the newer MS released version at least in the next update cycle; 3. And thereby stay in the Product support criteria. 

Something similar is coming up for D365Ops as well. The D365Ops online service is covered by the Modern Lifecycle Policy, i.e, products and services that are serviced and supported continuously. 
Licensed customers must stay current with updates to the D365Ops online service in accordance with the following servicing and system requirements:

• Customers purchasing subscriptions of D365Ops after April 1, 2018 will experience continuous updates of the Platform and Financial Reporting. Microsoft will continually update these components with the option to postpone an update for up to 30 days.
  
• Customers who purchased subscriptions to D365Ops prior to April 1, 2018 will be encouraged to move to the latest available platform and financial reporting updates. By July 1, 2018 all customers will receive continual platform and financial reporter updates managed by Microsoft, with the option to postpone for up to 30 days
  
• Platform versions maintain backward compatibility with the application versions that are supported at the time of the platform release within the application support lifecycle.

Microsoft is definitely pushing more towards: 

• Real Automatic updates of the product based on Feedback collected all across the world
• Taking up & away most of the Tedious & repetitive maintenance work from Customers and their partners 
• Encouraging Customers and partners to build more extensions based development and completely discourage any over layering

Have to wait and see how this really turns out into. Good luck..!

Is there a D365 Technical conference in 2018??

Since the start of this year, there is one question which has been bothering me a bit - What happened to the Dynamics 365 (for Finance and Operations) Technical conference for the year 2018, especially after seeing that www.d365tech.com stopped working. There are some blog posts which talk about the same question when you search for D365 technical conference for this year.

Finally we have an update on this from Microsoft - go look for details in https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/BusinessApplicationsSummit

We already understood the intentions from Microsoft in moving towards the direction of having all the Business applications under the same hood "Dynamics 365" - so now it is the time to even have the Technical conferences for various applications under the same hood "Microsoft Business Applications summit".

From the site: 

• Join to learn how Microsoft spans the breadth of business process applications powered by a business analytics and application platform, built atop a common data model, on Azure and connected to Office 365
• Microsoft Business Applications Summit is the convergence of events such as the Data Insights Summit, Convergence, and Dynamics 365 Technical Conference in order to bring together the best of all experiences, break down silos, and build community.

Hope this helps solve some questions in your mind :) 

How to get Admin privileges on Microsoft Subscription?

This might not be news to many of you out there, but was certainly new information for me today. I have deployed a new Azure Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (7.3) VM today. (Installed platform version : Update12 (7.0.4709.41129))

Once the deployment was complete I noticed that I could see two user accounts, traditionally we only had Admin**** account using which we are used to RDP into the newly created server. 

Upon on reading up some more, I understand that Microsoft is aiming to not provide the Admin access for the "Development" and "Build" environments which will be hosted on Microsoft Subscription. 
Currently this is true and mandatory for UAT and PROD environments hosted by Microsoft on their subscription as part of the D365 unified License plan. 

Kindly note that this is not the case, if you deploy the DEV environment on your own Azure subscription, then you obviously have all the details include Admin account details. Also the other option could be to actually download VM harddisk from LCS and run in on your computer. 

I will try some development using the User**** account and try to figure out how feasible it is without having Admin access. Might be tricky for example, 

• you cannot access the AOSService under IIS manager
• you cannot open Visual Studio with "Run as Administrator"
• you cannot restart and/or stop any service you would like

Please do share if you have more insights on this. Happy D365Ops'ing :P 

[Update]: more information can be found in below links
- What you need to know about restricted admin access - Link 
- Restricted access with Platform update 12 - Link 

Error: Field 'xxx' does not exist in D365Ops

Today I encountered a weird error while working with newly created Enums and Tables in Visual Studio 2015 with a Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations project.

Error message while trying to build my project was: The underlying type 'BKA_Status ' or its base type for table 'BKA_GoalMaster' field 'GoalStatus' does not exist.
The underlying type 'BKA_GoalTypes ' or its base type for table 'BKA_GoalMaster' field 'GoalType' does not exist.</Message>

However, I had the 'BKA_Status' as well as 'BKA_GoalTypes' Enums already available in my project and even the project is Synchronized with the database.

Root cause:
To be honest, I was unable to find the root cause for sure. However, I imagine the error has something to do with the refresh of metadata because of the kind of solution which helped to resolve the error. 
I have had 'Extends' property filled in with another Enum which was not existing in the Current model (or) the referenced models for a brief period. Later, I had cleared 'Extends' property before performing the build - and still ended up in the above error message.

Solution/Workaround:
I have tried several generic solutions to refresh the cache, like, restarting Visual Studio (in admin mode), rebuilding the solution, clearing the solution, synchronizing project to the database.. however none worked.

The solution which finally worked for me was to select a dummy - yet real enum value under the 'Extends' property and build the solution. Later, I removed the dummy enum value from the property and performed a successful rebuild to attain the state I wanted to be in.

I know this is a very short and unclear post - but I had to record it as I find so few references while searching for a solution for any problem related to D365Ops. It not like searching for an issue in AX anymore, maybe because of the name 'Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations' :P :P