Dynamics 365 for Finance and OperationsGo-live planning

About this Tech Talk

What it doesn’t cover

Go-live planning: agenda1. Glossary and key concepts2. Go-live assessment process3. Go-live checklist4. Important implementation considerations5. Resources

Tech Talk: Go-live planning

Go-live planning: agenda1. Glossary and key concepts2. Go-live assessment process3. Go-live checklist4. Important implementation considerations5. Resources

Tech Talk: Go-live planning

Glossary and key concepts

The time period and activities when the customer transitions from their legacy system to D365FO

Usually performed over a weekend, the ‘cutover weekend’

A trial run of the cutover activities after Production is available but before actual cutover

Confirming that the solution works as expected on Production environment

Executing the solution with the goal to find and fix gaps and issues

This is done on DEV/TEST and UAT environments

Glossary and key concepts, ctd.

The date when the customer will start using Production for live business transactions

Date when deployment of Production has completedDepending on solution complexity, a couple weeks or months before go-live

Go-live planning: agenda1. Glossary and key concepts2. Go-live assessment process3. Go-live checklist4. Important implementation considerations5. Resources

Tech Talk: Go-live planning

Go-live assessment in a nutshell

Why?

Ensure a smooth go-live

Reduce number of escalations later

When?

We send you an email about 8 weeks before your go-live date

You should send the Checklist when you are (almost) done with User Acceptance Test (UAT)

At least 1 to 2 weeks before you plan to request production

How?

Via workshop or email, based on your FastTrack service level

Assessment report with ample guidance specific to your project

Go-live assessment process

*If applicable

Production

Deployment

Request

DB copy

from Sandbox

Request*

Deployable

Package

Installation

Request*

Sizing Deployment Install Copy

Production

ready

Finalize cut over

Update Go-live

date in LCS

FastTrack

architect

review

1

Go-live

Complete and send

Pre-Go-live checklist

Go-live

Assessment/Workshop

Release for

Production

Deployment

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Take action: Please set your estimated Go-live date as soon as possibleYour go-live can be impacted by not updating your go-live date in LCS and by

not following this process

Learn More: Prepare for Go-live and Go-live FAQ

Go-live planning: agenda1. Glossary and key concepts2. Go-live assessment process3. Go-live checklist4. Important implementation considerations5. Resources

Tech Talk: Go-live planning

Go-live checklist

Keep go-live milestone date updated throughout your implementation

Keep LCS users updated –add real email accounts

We send email from Dynamics 365 Pre Go-livego-live@microsoft.comabout 8 weeks before your go-live date

You can also download the Go-live checklist and send it to go-live@microsoft.com –always download the latest version

Tech Talk: Go-live planning

• Per email or as part of a workshop (based on FastTrack service level)

• Must be completed before Production can be deployed

• Mitigations might be required and need to be addressed

Go-live planning: agenda1. Glossary and key concepts2. Go-live assessment process3. Go-live checklist4. Important implementation considerations5. Resources

Tech Talk: Go-live planning

Tenant strategy

What is an Azure AD tenant

• How to make sure the licenses end up on the right tenant• Work with your customer to understand which other Microsoft cloud

services they already have and on which tenant they are running

• CSP: make sure you use the correct path in PartnerCenter to either create a new tenant or place subscriptions onto an existing tenant (“Request reseller relationship”)

• VL: make sure your reseller knows which tenant the subscriptions should be placed on

Subscriptions, licenses, accounts, and tenants for Microsoft's cloud offerings

• What to do if the implementation was started on the wrong tenant?Move an LCS Implementation project to another Azure Active Directory tenant

customer.com

License management

• Why is it important to purchase all licenses before the start of implementation?

• FastTrack programService level based on license count (threshold 150 enterprise-equivalent licenses)

Microsoft FastTrack for Finance and Operations

• Production SizingProduction will be sized as per user licenses shown on the active subscription estimate

If you changed the number of licenses after you created the currently active subscription estimate, it is important to create and activate a new estimate prior to requesting Production

If you increase license count after going-live (future roll-outs) it is important to create and activate new subscription estimate.

Solution scope and roll-outs

• FastTrack accompanies you during the first roll-out

• Why do we want to know your scope and rollout plan?

• Plan your incremental rollouts and license needs

• Incremental go-lives and environment management

Need DEV and UAT environments to service Production

Need DEV and UAT environment for new functionality

Watch the Environment PlanningTechTalk

Lifecycle Services (LCS)

Keep your milestones updated

Keep your users updated

Complete the methodology

Stay up to date

Solution acceptance

• Test on the right environment – UAT must be performed on Tier-2 (or higher)

• Test the real thing

• Concurrency

• Data volumes

• Batch jobs

• Printing, emailing, integrations, workflow, etc.

• Don’t implement outside of the subscription

• The topology of the environments that are local or in your private cloud is not like the ones in the subscription and hence may not be similar to production environment as well

• The performance of the system cannot be measured when you do the UAT on local or private hosted VMs

• In case of integrations, it is important to test this on the tier 2 sandbox environment as the environment configurations could be different on your local environment

• It is important that the team experiences the servicing in LCS (like applying updates, creating service requests and others) during the implementation. This makes sure that the customer is familiar with the servicing process upfront.

• Get business sign-off

Configuration data management

• Data packages

• To export and import data into Dynamics 365 for Finance and operations

• Thoroughly test your data packages on UAT

• Golden configuration database

• Tier-1 add-on: cost effective, but more work for you to copy the database to Tier-2

• Tier-2 add-on: higher cost, but supports direct refresh to Production

How to get the configuration data onto Production

• Database Refresh

• Copy your golden configuration data from any Tier-2 environment to Production

• If database is on a Tier-2 environment already: service request

• If database is on a Tier-1 environment: first bacpac to Tier-2, then service request for database refresh

Copy a Finance and Operations database from SQL Server to a production Azure SQL Database environment

• Point in time restore

• Supports rollback of your data on an Azure SQL database to a specific date and time in the past (no more than 35 days back)

Restore a database on a non-production environment

• Do not manually configure Production from scratch

Performance

• Why should I worry about performance? Isn’t that Microsoft’s responsibility?

• Performance is a combined effort since performance can be affected by variables outside of Microsoft’s influence, including but not limited to your customizations, ISV code, system configurations, timing of batch jobs and integrations

• Where and how much performance testing do I need to do?

• Environment can range from Tier-2 to Tier-5 (Premium Performance Test)

• Concurrency

• Test with realistic data volumes

• Test your customizations, take traces

• Test all your integrations on UAT

• Select the right data center

• Validate connection latency from where the user will be connecting to Dynamics using http://www.azurespeed.com/.

• If your latency result is under 300ms you are in the safe range.

• Watch the Performance Testing ApproachTechTalk

Integrations

• Choose the appropriate Integration patterns and practices for your data and scenario

• Make sure that all integrations are using supported endpoints as described in Services Home Page

• Configure and test your integrations in Sandbox: Standard Acceptance Test environment. Validate with real life data volumes and frequencyof recurrence to confirm that integrations will succeed and meet required performance targets.

• Watch the Integration TechTalks:

Integration Frameworks within Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations (DYN385PAL)

Azure Integration Tools for Dynamics 3654 for Finance & Operations (DYN386PAL)

Code management

• Set up Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) for source control

• Use a build environment to build your deployable packages

• Minimize the number of deployable code packages – get to 1

Manage third-party models and runtime packages by using source control

Apply a deployable package

• Understand code promotion from BUILD to UAT and Production

• On Production, code deployment is a scheduled service request with a lead time

• DEV, UAT, and Production must be on same platform and application versions

• Finalize your release candidate - code stability pre Go-live

User and security setup

• Test with the right roles

• Know how to move security setup between environments

All your custom roles and roles association to users can be moved between environments using data entities. The data entities to use are:

Security duty metadata customizations entity

Security privilege metadata customizations entity

Security role metadata customizations entity

Security segregation of duties conflict

Security segregation of duties rule

Security user role association

• The importance of the admin user

• First log-on after initial deployment to any environment – in that case the Admin is the only user that can access the environment

• First log-on to a sandbox environment after a database refresh from Production – in that case all user accounts except for the Admin account are disabled

Cutover

• Have a signed-off cutover plan – down to the minute

• The benefit of a mock cutoverHelps establish the timings for cutover

Gives the team confidence

• Validate the solution in ProductionUse database refresh and point-in-time restore to your advantage

c

Golden Configs

Restore complete

DB

restore

Golden Configs

CompleteMaster Data

Import complete

Opening Balances

Import complete

Mock cutover

Complete

Testing /

Validation

Cutover

Complete

LiveGolden

Gold Env

CutoverData

Packages/

Manually

Configured

Data Packages/

IntegrationsData Entities

1st

Milestone

Cycle

2nd

Milestone3rd Milestone 4th Milestone

Golden Configs

Golden Configs

+

Master Data

Golden Configs

+

Master Data +

Beginning

Balances

First go-live

Production Environment

Monitoring and Support

• How you can monitor your environmentMonitoring and Diagnostics

• Understand support plans and teamsMicrosoft Dynamics 365 Support

• Know how to submit support tickets through LCS Find support for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition and Dynamics Lifecycle Services

• What if Production is down?New process to report a production outage through Lifecycle Services

Getting Production

1. Request

Production

2. Set up

Production

3. Validate

Production

• Configure Production

environment – self-service

request

• Use a generic account for the

Environment administrator

• Select the correct data center,

app and platform version,

package to slipstream

• Allow up to 2 business days for

deployment

• You are responsible to get code

and data onto Production through

service requests

• Allow for lead times

• Minimize number of packages

• Have data ready on a Tier-2

environment

• Validate on Production – Test on

Sandbox

• You can request Point-in-time

restore or database refresh during

cutover phase

Go-live planning: agenda1. Glossary and key concepts2. Go-live assessment process3. Go-live checklist4. Important implementation considerations5. Resources

Tech Talk: Go-live planning

Additional resources

Understand the Implementation Lifecycle

Microsoft Finance and Operations TechTalks

FastTrack Finance and Operations

TechTalksDocs

Community

Thank you!We wish you a successful go-live!