Self-service deployment for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

We are excited to announce the availability of self-service deployment for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations for Sandbox Tier 2-5 cloud environments for new customers only. Self-service deployment enables easier deployment and significantly reduced deployment times.

This update will be released incrementally, based on your Azure country/region. At this time, this experience is only available for new customers signing up for Finance and Operations. There is no change to the experience current customers have with existing environments.

Note that not all new customers signing up for Finance and Operations will see the experience. We will gradually increase the number of new customers seeing this experience.

What’s new or changed

Customers with the self-service capabilities will see the following changes in their LCS experience.

  • Deployment is self-service and can be completed within an average time of 30 minutes. There are no longer lead times and wait times for deployment. You can control when you deploy and verify that the environment is deployed. This experience is the same as the current experience. Please see the self-service deployment FAQ for additional questions.

  • You will no longer have Remote desktop access to the Tier 2+ Sandbox environments. All operations that need Remote desktop access are now available as self-service actions. The following image shows some of the operations in the environment’s Maintain > Move database menu option. The maintenance operations article has additional details.

  • The diagnostics capabilities will remain the same, which enables troubleshooting without remote desktop access. Additional details on diagnostics is available in the help topic.
  • You will be able to deploy Tier 2 Standard Acceptance Test environment (Sandbox) only after you complete project configuration. To complete project configuration and unblock deployment of the Sandbox environment, check the notification in the Action Center on the Project Dashboard page.
  • You will not have SQL Server access on Tier 2+. You will continue to have SQL database access using just-in-time access. The maintenance operations article access database topic has additional details.
  • All custom extension packages, including ISV packages, must be deployed as a single software deployable package. You will NOT be able to deploy one module at a time.This was always a recommended best practice and is now enforced.

Additional resources

Please see the Self-Service Deployment topic for more information.