These days, subscription and licence fees are just a fact of life that we have all come to accept. However, when it comes to D365 F&O licence fees, you are not just, for example, paying to be able to watch the final of “Strictly Come Dancing” without the risk of a hefty fine through your letter box – you are actually buying into a continuously evolving and improving product feature set.
What are One Version Service Updates?
One Version Service updates are D365 F&O’s equivalent to Evergreen updates to D365 CECustomer Engagement is the collective title of D365 first party apps built on CRM technology (Sales, Service, Marketing, etc). and Power Platform. They reflect Microsoft’s commitment to delivering regular product enhancements (new features, security improvements, patches, etc) in a manageable way with minimal business disruption. It’s just one of the many benefits customers experience as part of the SaaSSoftware-as-a-Service is a subscription-based model for accessing software applications over the internet, hosted on remote servers. ERPEnterprise Resource Planning software is used by businesses to manage day-to-day activities. offering, included in the licence fees they already pay. For example, the (not so) new subscription billing features and related modules were a whole new feature added to the D365 F&O which may have originally required the use of 3rd party tools/ISVs, i.e. additional licence fees!
So what’s changed?
Microsoft’s commitment certainly hasn’t. However, the way in which these updates are now released has. It wasn’t long ago that 8 updates a year used to be the norm. This was dropped to 7, albeit with the twice yearly ‘major’ releases maintained, but now it’s changed again.
From the 19th February 2024, Microsoft will revise the update cadence from 7 times per calendar year down to 4. These will take place quarterly in February, April, July and October. A new, more intuitive naming convention will also be applied to updates to make them more prescriptive to users; going forward release versions will be prefixed with the year and quarter to which they relate e.g. 10.0.38 is now CY24Q1: 10.0.38. In addition to this Microsoft have substantially extended the service window of each service update, to between 186 and 214 days.
What does this mean to me?
“Hooray less regression testing”. Well, this depends… Before users begin celebrating too much, there is a another key change that has been applied when it comes to pausing the automatic platform updates. As part of the new cadence, the number of times an update can be paused before it is enforced is down from 3 to 1. This means that those customers who maximised the update pauses previously will not see any change as the minimum number of annual updates required will remain at 2. A reduction in the frequency of regression testing may be seen where the updates were regularly taken. Less updates implies that, in theory, there will be less business, or project, interruption/disruption. However, it should be noted that although the frequency has reduced, the content has not. A review/revision of any existing regression testing packs and processes may be required to ensure they still provide the assurance required under the new cadence.
More details on the release changes and the planned update schedule can be found here.