Customers at User Group Summit Europe this week listened intently to guidance on updates delivered by Microsoft MVP Andre Arnaud de Calavon who explained the One Version approach. He suspects that while some customers have a good understanding, others still do not, both in terms of Microsoft’s policies and the responsibilities they will put on the customer as opposed to the partner.

“If you look at DevOps and split it, there is the development part operations part. The partner can do the development part and then hand it over. The customer has to do verification, the acceptance tests, and when you have done that then you will decide when and if you are going to apply [updates] in production.”

His message to AX and D365FO users was to prepare to own the operations of their own systems, especially as it relates to evaluating, preparing for, and deploying updates on a monthly or at least quarterly basis.

Historically customers have been unwilling to make frequent updates when they knew a system was working well enough. One Version forces them to do just that. The new paradigm is agile response to disruptive digital change. However, many have moved to the cloud in order to ‘outsource it’ not to be a software testing site. The move to extensions has eliminated the problems of code merges, but it does not mean that updates will be lights out and painless.,

Microsoft continues to converge its planning across Dynamics 365, PowerApps, Flow, and the Common Data Service. It has an Application Platform as a Services (APaaS) approach. industry accelerators will be delivered to these guidelines:
• Microsoft will provide the components that are the most universally applicable to a vertical. Country-specific, or micro-vertical, and other niche capabilities will be left as white space for customers t build a competitive edge with their partners/
• The architectural model will build on the state of the art for Microsoft today and will include the Power Platform, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, and other Azure service use cases thatinclude even more Microsoft products like Teams and Office 365 and Linked in features.

Flow will become the workflow engine of choice over time for D365CE. A Microsoft presenter spoke against the idea of continuing with processing-intensive workflows that queue up within a relational CRM database, and slow down the cloud service. reality of this change – customers will pay for the privilege of making Flow a core component of their CRM architecture, as with Dynamics Finance and Operations for any serious volume of use, and as is the case with Power BI once you want to use it seriously.
Its an Enterprise solution that comes at an Enterprise cost and it with azure it has the enterprise architecture to deliver.

Because access to the production instance is controlled by Microsoft analytics for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO) analytics had to use Entity Store and BYOD data sources. Expect a move to azure data lakes and the use of ADLS Gen2. The approach will replace today’s options, while putting more importance on PowerBI.com. This means customers will be required to buy seats of PowerBI.com Pro or Premium for all report consumers, plus renting their own ADLS Gen2 service. Pricing for data lakes will vary. Microsoft introduces a new class of enterprises to the use of cloud data lakes for their data optimization and reporting needs. As with the case above of Customer Engagement’s use of Flow, eliminating the expense of the Entity Store databases may not result in any comparable direct savings to offset the added expense of ADLS Gen2. Its m ore about the potential for value add of enhanced analytics.