We recently hosted a webinar as part of our ongoing Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations webinar series. Walkerscott’s expert team explored some of the updates and new features available in the latest October 2024 release. For those who missed this informative session, we have summarised what our team discussed in this post.

Let’s look at the latest update which introduces a unified administration experience for Finance & Operations apps and the Power Platform. This move represents a major shift, where administration transitions from Lifecycle Services (LCS) to the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC), creating a centralised hub for managing all Dynamics 365 environments. We discuss how this update may impact administration, deployment, and compliance in the Dynamics 365 ecosystem. 

Shifting from LCS to Power Platform: What’s is the new Unified Administration Experience in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations? 

For many years, managing Finance & Operations environments relied on LCS. While it served its purpose, the separation of platforms for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform created inefficiencies. Now, with the unified administration experience, Microsoft brings all Dynamics 365 environment management into Power Platform, simplifying the process and improving consistency across different applications. 

What are the key features of the new Unified Administration Experience? 

  1. Centralised Management: The Power Platform Admin Center centralises all administration functions, enabling users to manage environments for multiple Dynamics 365 products (including Finance & Operations, Customer Engagement apps, and more) from a single interface. This approach ensures that teams can handle backups, restores, updates, and scaling more efficiently.  A notable advantage is the introduction of a container-based model, allowing a single environment to house multiple applications, such as Dynamics 365 apps and Power Apps, all sharing the same underlying infrastructure. This move towards consolidation reduces complexity and enhances scalability, allowing for more flexible management of environments. 
  1. Streamlined Operations: With the shift to the Power Platform, Microsoft has standardised the operations for backups, restores, and provisioning across all Dynamics 365 environments. This consistency simplifies administration and helps to prevent errors caused by having different processes for different applications. 
  1. Capacity-Based Environment Creation: One of the major advantages of the new model is the shift to a capacity-based approach for managing sandbox environments. Previously, administrators had to purchase additional slots in LCS for development or testing environments. Now, if you have available capacity, you can spin up new environments on-demand directly from the Power Platform admin centre. This flexibility makes it easier to scale without purchasing additional licenses and ensures that environments can be created dynamically based on actual usage and needs. 
  1. Continuous Deployment and Automation: Another exciting feature introduced with this update is the support for continuous deployment through Azure DevOps and Power Platform tools. In the past, deploying changes into production required manual steps through LCS. Now, the Power Platform Admin Center allows organisations to automate the entire deployment pipeline from development to production, eliminating the need for manual interventions. This automation helps organisations reduce deployment times and avoid errors during critical updates. 
  1. AI-Powered Insights: The Power Platform Admin Center introduces AI-powered insights to help administrators proactively manage environments. These insights offer recommendations for optimising performance, enhancing security, and managing capacity. By analysing telemetry data, administrators can prevent potential issues before they escalate. 

Improved compliance and security for Dynamics 365 with the unified admin experience 

As organisations face increasing regulatory requirements around data security and privacy, the unified admin experience introduces significant benefits for compliance

  • Regional Data Residency: One of the key advantages of this transition is the enhanced support for regional data residency. With LCS, environments were often managed across multiple regions, making compliance with local regulations challenging. Now, Power Platform offers region-specific data residency options, including support for countries like Australia, ensuring that all environment management activities adhere to local regulations. 
  • Enhanced Security: Power Platform provides improved security for environment backups by ensuring that backups remain within the platform. Unlike LCS, which allowed exports of full backups (e.g., .bak or .bacpac files), the new approach ensures that all backups are stored securely within the platform, minimising the risk of unauthorised access. 
  • Federated Credential Management: Administrators can now leverage federated credentials for managing service connections within Azure DevOps, reducing the complexity of managing secrets and improving security. This feature allows for seamless, secure authentication when setting up service connections, eliminating the need for renewing secrets regularly. 

Unified development environments in Power Platform 

The new administration experience also brings improvements for developers by supporting shared development environments within Power Platform. This allows developers to work on the same environment without the need for multiple cloud-hosted setups. However, if needed, individual environments can still be provisioned for larger projects or more complex scenarios.

Additionally, the ability to perform full environment copies is another significant improvement. In LCS, administrators could only copy the database. Now, in Power Platform, both the data and code are copied, providing an exact replica of the source environment. This is invaluable for testing and troubleshooting. 

Key considerations using the new unified admin experience 

As with any significant transition, there are a few considerations to keep in mind: 

  • No Export Option: The new model no longer supports exporting environment data as backups are strictly managed within Power Platform. 
  • Naming Conventions: When creating environments, administrators need to be mindful of naming conventions, especially if subdomains are already in use. Power Platform’s admin center will add unique identifiers to subdomains if the name is already taken 

Final thoughts the unified administration experience for Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations apps and Power Platform 

This update marks a significant step forward in simplifying environment management and improving compliance. By centralising all administrative functions, Microsoft is helping organisations reduce complexity, enhance security, and scale their environments more easily.