The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the LCS June 2018, release 2.
Update to Cloud-hosted environments page
We have recently made some improvements to the Cloud-hosted environments page in LCS. This page provides a list of all environments hosted by the customer or the partner in their own Azure subscription. For customers who have multiple cloud-hosted environments (20+), it becomes cumbersome to search through the environments. We previously added the ability to filter the environment list. However, with this release we are augmenting that experience by giving the LCS user the option to the export the list of environments as a .csv file, which includes details such as Deployed by, Deployed on, Environment status, Environment name, and Topology type. To use this feature, go to your LCS project and open the Cloud-hosted environments page. In the tool bar, click Export to export the environments list as a .csv file.
Reduced downtime when updating the Production environment
With this release of Lifecycle Services, we have reduced the time needed to apply updates in your Production environment to less than one hour. Additionally:
- This improvement is applicable to all application and platform versions. This means that after this release, all customers will start seeing these improvements.
- This applies to all types of packages, including application deployable packages, binary updates, or merged packages that are applied through the Apply updates flow in LCS.
- Other than applying the code updates, the majority of the downtime is used to synchronize changes to the database. This means that the total downtime might vary based on the size of the database and can take anywhere from 20 minutes to just under an hour.
Note that there is no change to the experience of scheduling the update in your Production environment or to the experience of viewing the progress of the updates. At this time, these improvements only apply to customer-initiated updates. We are planning to bring these improvements to Microsoft initiated code updates (such as Platform and Financial Reporting updates), reduce the required lead time and the downtime window needed when scheduling updates in an upcoming release of LCS.