As Alysa outlines in her blog post, the release of the July update marks the availability of several new applications as well as important updates to many of our existing Dynamics 365 Cloud Services.

Before we talk about the new Applications and capabilities, I want to start by talking about the new deployment options for Finance & Operations. It was just a few months ago in my last blog post that I shared our plans to create two additional deployment options for Dynamics 365 for Operations, Microsoft’s cloud ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) service. Today I am pleased to announce that the local business data deployment option for on-premises deployments became generally available on June 28, 2017.

As Alysa mentions in her blog post, in addition to the option to deploy Finance and Operations as a Microsoft managed service running in Microsoft Azure, customers now can deploy it in their own data center to help meet the needs of their business.

The on-premises deployment option (also referred to as local business data) provides a unique differentiator to enterprise customers versus other ERP products by providing a choice as customers can start on-premises and have the option to easily move their solution to the cloud, when they are ready, to take advantage of cloud scale and the rich analytic experiences it delivers. The on-premises solution is based on a modern architecture that focuses on leveraging Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016 to bring forward a deployment running in a customer’s data center.

While we believe in our Cloud Service as the best deployment option, we do understand customers may need to support business process execution in their data centers in certain cases. With on-premises deployments customers can address these core business requirements:

• Data Residency – Some government and industry regulations require customers to store business data locally. In some cases, this is also mandated by our customer’s IT standards.
• Business Continuity – Whether you have a production facility, a warehouse, or a service shop, we can run your mission critical business processes locally in the facility when network latencies cannot be relied upon. On-premises deployments provide enhanced business continuity for scenarios that require low latency integrations with other on-premises systems or require deployments in regions where there are no options for a reliable network infrastructure. In some cases, local infrastructure issues can be addressed, along with a financially backed SLA, with Azure ExpressRoute.
• Data Center investments – Customers can leverage recent hardware investments as well as their IT staff that are already working with familiar Microsoft interfaces and tools such as Windows 2016 and SQL Server 2016 to run their Finance and Operations instance locally. Customers have the option to lift on-premises deployments to the cloud when it is time for a refresh.

On-premises deployments is the next step in our journey to support the deployment options that our customers have asked for to meet their business needs. Finance and Operations is unique in our ability to allow customers to deploy where ever and how ever they want, and with the introduction later this year of the cloud + edge deployment option, we will deliver the best of on-premises and cloud deployments in one option to help support our customers worldwide.

We have a rich set of resources you can find here that can help you learn about, and prepare for, on-premises deployments including the system requirements as well as what you need to do to download and provision the software.

Now, onto new application features and updates to existing Cloud Services….

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations, Enterprise edition

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations is now Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations, Enterprise edition. Our offering is comprehensive and covers the gamut of both Operations and Finance and shows that we are continuing to deliver the global features and functionality that our customers want and need not just across the application, but helping our partners to deliver feature-rich industry experiences as well.

In addition to the updates to Finance and Operations, I am excited by the release of two new modern, purpose built applications: Dynamics 365 for Retail which is designed to provide retailers with an integrated end-to-end view of their operations with centralized management and clear visibility across stores, employees, customers, inventory, and financials and is generally available. And Dynamics 365 for Talent which provides a 360-degree view of your workforce from sourcing and recruiting, to onboarding and retention and is available in Preview for customers and partners participating through the Dynamics 365 Insider Program and will be generally available later this month.

I wanted to highlight some of the major investment areas for this update which include embedded analytics, an improved mobile experience, increased speed and predictability of implementations, and the new upgrade experience from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Let’s take a look:

Analytics – embedded analytics integrated directly into the form and workspace; with drill down capabilities into transactions; 15 rich dashboards across the functional spectrum will be immensely useful for end users in their daily functions to help them make better, faster decisions to achieve optimal outcomes.

Modern Mobile experiences for the warehouse worker, expense management, and time keeping, as well as a unified approvals mobile app that marks the start of a new journey with our customers.

Faster and more predictable implementations – A number of capabilities to speed and improve the implementation process are in the new update, including the ability to create company configurations that can be copied to create new ones based on existing companies. Cost Accounting has been modernized with a great Getting Started guide and a simplified experience with a new background validator that helps to keep the system of record continually viable. The Fall Release 2017 will see us apply these learnings across all our modules with new Getting Started and validation wizards.

Upgrade from Dynamics 2012 is now in Preview – We have re-imagined the upgrade experience from Dynamics AX 2012 releases to Finance & Operations and are happy to share it with our customers and partners. The changes are focused on simplifying the migration while keeping the abstractions and the use consistent. The new features contribute to simplified change management and improved support for the data governance needs of your organization.

We continue to update and expand Finance and Operations as well as our new, purpose-built applications. For the latest view on the full spectrum of our work, make sure to review our roadmap site and check back often to see the ongoing updates that are available.

A few calls to actions:

1. Plan your projects to stay current on the cloud
   1. Make sure your Customizations are “Extensions”. Extensions are cloud safe mechanisms to extend our applications. Customers and ISVs who are based on “Extensions” are already reaping the benefits of simpler updates as well as reaping the benefits of the pace of innovation on the cloud. Read the three part blog series that covers application object extensions, code extensions, as well as event handlers and extensions. Review this session on the new powerful extension capability in X++:  Chain of Command.
   2. Review our Roadmap Site to make sure you are keeping up with our feature roadmap and future plans.
   3. Leverage our ideas portal to either share your feedback or vote on existing feature asks.
   4. Stay current on our cloud updates with your implementations with details about our deployment options.
   5. Visit the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition product documentation portal to learn how to fully leverage the latest updates.
2. Use Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) extensively in your projects including Cloud Powered Support to interact with us. Across the landscape of Business Process Modeler (BPM), Code Analysis, our Upgrade Service, our environment tools deliver immensely rich telemetry dashboards and support experiences and offer a set of rich capabilities available to all deployment options.

In closing

Your feedback matters. Our products and services get better with your continued use and guidance.  Please continue to submit product ideas using the ideas portal for Dynamics 365 and check back to see what other users are proposing or voting on.

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition July 2017 update appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Update May 7, 2021: For the latest information on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, please check out our latest blogs: Enhance visibility and scale operations without interruptions for your supply chain, Boost supply chain resilience with cloud and edge scale units in Supply Chain Management, and Robust warehouse execution with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Wow! Nearly twelve months into the availability of Microsoft’s cloud ERP service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations, and we’re seeing an unprecedented global adoption of cloud business applications by mid-sized and large organizations. Our new enterprise customers are increasingly choosing our cloud solutions, with four out of five selecting Dynamics 365. It’s interesting to see organizations shifting paradigms with respect to business applications, preferring shorter implementations, fewer customizations, repeatable industry or domain solutions, and continuous updates. Most noticeable is the shift from systems of record to systems of intelligence. ERP is becoming cool again!

In my last blog post, I emphasized the importance of our cloud-first approach in business applications and I shared planned investments in cloud capabilities including the new onboarding service FastTrack, business application marketplace AppSource, and support of Azure ExpressRoute. FastTrack, our customer success service to help organizations onboard onto the cloud service, has led to predictable fast implementations. As part of this program, we’re noticing a strong desire among our customers to go live in a short time period, sometimes in 90 days or less, with few customizations to the service. As part of these short implementations, partner solutions are being deployed to enrich and expand business processes. In the last year, many partners have curated their industry or domain solution and published these on the biz app market place. You can discover and explore more than 250 Dynamics 365 solutions on AppSource.

There is no doubt that the future of business processes lies in the cloud and that we can provide our customers with the best value with our cloud services. Helping you choose the right cloud deployment for your organization is imperative.

Ensuring business continuity by distributing compute resources closer to the edge

Businesses require uninterrupted execution of some of their mission critical business processes. A retailer who is helping a customer checkout and keeping queues to a minimum. A manufacturing facility where workers need to keep the production line humming and avoid production delays, especially in lean manufacturing scenarios. Industries rely on expensive machines to produce goods; these machines are highly automated, working on inputs from the ERP systems and provide critical output signals that are used for overall management of the production facility. In such scenarios, it is desirable to run these processes locally while leveraging the power of the cloud to maximize efficiency. Also, some geographies require that transactions and personal information be captured and stored locally.

At the Summit ’16 in Tampa, Florida, we announced the plans for a hybrid cloud deployment meant to accommodate these specific scenarios, so that organizations can combine the best of both worlds. Dynamics 365 for Operations plans to enable organizations to run their business processes from application servers at the edges, meaning that transactions are supported by local application services and business data is stored locally. Each such facility running at the edge is called “My Workplace”. The central cloud node provides a single view of the business across distributed ”My Workplace” instances while utilizing the power of the Microsoft cloud for embedded intelligence in business processes.

The Microsoft cloud connection ensures data aggregation, financial reporting, intelligence, and more. The cloud instance also provides the local installation with data failover in the Microsoft cloud, automated deployment and continuous updates, and elastic compute capacity to infuse “intelligence” into the business process when needed. This hybrid cloud deployment model scales out through federation of the on-premises nodes (My Workplaces), federated in the Microsoft cloud for a single, global enterprise view, which is a first for business applications.  By Summer 2017, we will support a single “My Workplace”, followed by federation of “My Workplace” instances in releases beyond. We are excited to offer this deployment option, “cloud and edge”, a true differentiated option that combines the power of cloud and on-premises in a unique way to offer scale, continuity, and intelligence.

Keeping business data local

Meanwhile, some organizations simply are not ready to store their company’s mission critical data in the cloud. This requirement, in many cases, is due to industry regulations, country or geographic cloud adoption, recent data center investments, or an organization’s enterprise standards. For these customers, we are excited to announce a new deployment option that will not require their business data to be stored in the cloud. This deployment option, “local business data,” will support running your business processes on-premises, supporting local transactions and storage of local business data, without replication of your business data to the Microsoft cloud. In these cases, the typical replication of business data in the Microsoft cloud (referenced in the cloud and edge scenario) is simply switched off. Cloud synchronization of data enables us to embed intelligence into business processes – embedded analytics, machine learning, and a vast range of capabilities are best served from the Microsoft cloud. With this option, customers now have choice – an option to turn ON or turn OFF cloud synchronization of their business data. If customers turn OFF cloud synchronization, no business data leaves their trustee’s boundaries. Also, functions like, embedded Power BI, Aggregated Views and Azure Machine Learning services based efficiencies are not available when Cloud Data synchronization is turned OFF. Customers can choose to take advantage of the embedded intelligence functions by simply turning ON data synchronization to the cloud.

Our cloud-based Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) functions, including diagnostics, monitoring, usage telemetry, and production updates, are provided through Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS). LCS is required for efficient upkeep and operation of your Dynamics 365 for Operations solutions in all our deployment options. In nearly a year of operating the cloud service, we have seen that LCS based management leads to more predictable deployments and provides customers with a much better support and service experience.  All deployment options for Dynamics 365 for Operations require LCS for their operation.

For the “local business data” deployment scenario, the application servers and SQL database will run in a customer’s (or its partner’s) data center. Customers and partners will manage the application lifecycle through LCS in the Microsoft Cloud, including designing the business processes, creating and deploying the software image to deploy onto the on-premises nodes, monitoring the on-premises nodes in a system health dashboard, and keeping up with innovation from Microsoft.

Choosing the right deployment option

We want organizations to be able to select the deployment scenario that makes sense now but also have the flexibility to change later, with choices ranging from full cloud to cloud and edge to local business data. You can move in either direction depending on your business needs. For example, you might start with a local data center and move to the cloud when it’s time for your hardware refresh.

From both a technology and licensing perspective, we strive to provide choice and flexibility. Some guidance on how we are offering these deployment choices:

• New and existing customers will have paths forward to license both local business data and cloud and edge deployments. Existing investments will continue to be accounted for in our licensing.
• Customers can license local business data deployments via a Dynamics 365 for Operations license with Software Assurance/Enhancement Plan or a subscription model.
• Customers with active Microsoft Dynamics Enhancement Plans or Software Assurance, may upgrade to local business data as they remain entitled to access new versions and updates.
• Transitions to Dynamics 365 cloud subscriptions are available to customers with active Microsoft Dynamics Enhancement Plans or Software Assurance.
• Cloud and edge software and services will be licensed under the existing Dynamics 365 cloud subscription licensing model.

The following table shows a side-by-side comparison of the planned scenarios, including use cases, components, and strengths:

The scenarios “cloud and edge” and “local business data” are planned for release in the summer of 2017. While we are working on these new deployment scenarios, we plan to disclose more details about them at the Technical Conference scheduled for March 12 through 15^th at WSSC, Seattle, Washington. We look forward to meeting you at this conference. Please register here. You can read further details about our exciting plans for Dynamics 365 for Operations on our roadmap site.

All dates and features are preliminary and subject to change without notice.  Use of the word “partner” refers solely to marketing relationships and do not refer to or imply a partnership or any other legal relationship.

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