Professional Advantage’s Dynamics 365 Business Central Release Management service is built to manage and support our clients through the constant development and improvement cycle Microsoft is driving with Business Central and several of its applications. Today, the program supports more than 105 organisations across approximately 160 production environments—a reflection of how central proactive release management has become to our clients’ ongoing operations.
Microsoft has fundamentally changed the way it delivers updates to solutions such as Business Central. Rather than allowing an established product to follow a traditional software lifecycle with a substantial update every two to three years, incremental improvements in business processes, integrations, and other functionality are now delivered in two major update waves each year. These major updates are scheduled for April and October, although they can be delayed—up to a few weeks within reason—by both Professional Advantage (PA) and the client to better align with business practices.
To complement the two major update waves, Microsoft also releases minor updates throughout the year to resolve issues or bugs identified in the latest release. While there is a high expectation that Microsoft will ensure minor updates are error-free, this is not always guaranteed. At PA, we assist with minor updates and resolve any issues that arise from Microsoft releases when required. For example, updates in a Microsoft release may occasionally have unintended consequences in other parts of the system. As we move through the current V27 and V28 release cycle, our team remains actively engaged across all update types to protect client environments.
How does Release Management help our clients?
For the two major updates each year, the Release Management team actively works to minimise any impact on a client’s Production environment. Our process follows a structured approach:
- We create a new Sandbox environment directly from the client’s current Production environment, upgrade it, and test for any code or compatibility errors.
- If errors or issues are found, the Release Management team tests and resolves them in the Sandbox environment to create a fix that can be safely installed into Production.
- For clients using custom extensions, we update or rebuild any extensions showing errors and test their compatibility again before proceeding.
- Once all issues are resolved, we hand the Sandbox environment to the client’s team for testing and functionality verification, supported by a tailored Testing Guide.
We provide clients with structured Testing Guides designed to support self-testing of their system. This is not User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and should not take more than one to two days to complete. By the time testing reaches the client, we will have already resolved any incompatibility or code compilation errors—so functional testing of business processes should proceed without issue. This final stage is simply the client’s own confirmation that the upgraded environment behaves as expected. To support this process, we have dedicated technical and applications consultants available each day to assist with any issues that may arise.
Minor Updates
For minor updates, our team is available to assist and support clients with any issues or problems encountered during or after the upgrade. Unlike the major release process, minor updates are generally left with the client’s IT team to manage, with any issues reported back to PA as they arise.
Microsoft’s policy for smaller updates is that they represent patches and hotfixes for issues identified in its major releases. These smaller releases are expected to arrive as complete and working packages. However, clients should still be aware that these updates will run automatically unless rescheduled. When a patch release is not as complete as expected, PA will ensure Business Central resources are available to engage promptly.
