One of the reasons that so many organizations invest in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is that all of the management to keep the system updated and operational is managed for them behind the scenes.

However, there are some tasks that customers can and should complete to administer their tenant, and these can all be done in an easy to use Admin Centre. The main activities customers can complete in the Business Central Admin Centre are:

• Set up notifications recipients
• Schedule environment update windows
• Create new environments

At the very least we strongly encourage everyone with a Business Central tenant to set up notification recipients and the update window for your production environment. This can all be done from the Admin Centre.

Accessing the Business Central Admin Centre

As a global administrator, a user can access the Business Central Admin Centre via the Business Central client. Access is from the “settings” cog at the top right-hand corner of the screen and selecting “Admin Centre”

Set Up Notifications Recipients

Microsoft has a fixed schedule for updating all the Business Central environments. Twice a year (approximately April and October) a major release is rolled out, and in between the major releases a cumulative update is applied. All of this is completed by Microsoft in the background but to be notified of these updates to your environments customers need to set themselves up to receive the notifications.

To do so, in the Business Central Admin Centre, select “Notification Recipients” from the left-hand side and then add recipient from the main window. This will open an “Add Recipient” window allowing customers to enter a name and an email address.

Schedule Environment Update Windows

As mentioned above Microsoft rolls out a major update twice a year and cumulative updates monthly.

As this is completed automatically in the background customers are encouraged to provide a window in which the update can take place; Microsoft requires this window to be a minimum of 6 consecutive hours. The update window is specified per environment and not per tenant. For the major updates, customers can also schedule a specific date to have the update applied.

To set the update window or schedule a major update, the customer can select the environment and then click the Update drop down from the main window, from there they can select set update window or schedule update.

To set an update window, the customer can select a start and end time (6hr duration min):

To schedule an update the customer can select a specific date and the update window will be used for timing:

Creating New Environments

Customers of Business Central can create multiple environments within their tenant. Whether that be multiple production environments when they need environments in different countries or sandboxes to test previews of new releases or to copy their production environments and try things out.

To manage the tenant environments in the admin centre, the customer can click Environments in the left-hand menu, this will list any existing environments. From here the customer can delete an existing or add a new environment. There is a maximum of 3 sandbox environments per tenant.

To add a new environment the customer can click “New” in the main window.

This opens the “New Environment” window. Each environment must have a unique Environment Name. The types available are Production or Sandbox.

If selecting Production, the customer can choose a country code as well as the version to use.

If selecting Sandbox, the customer can decide if they want to copy an existing environment. If the customer is copying an existing environment the language code and version will default to the source environments values.

If the customer is not copying an existing environment, then they can select their desired country code and version including previews of upcoming releases.

Taking these simple steps will give you some peace of mind knowing that you will be informed when changes are going to be made to your system. Know that the changes will take place when you choose, usually overnight, so that they will be completed before the start of the next business day. Creating a new environment can be useful to try out the new functionality or to run some testing without destroying your production data.

Taking these steps will help you to feel more in control with what is going on in your environment and with your data. If you have any questions about Dynamics 365 Business Central, please connect with us.