Restrict access to D365 Business Central Environments

We will learn how to restrict access to D365 Business Central Environments for users.

Ex: if we have a user ‘A’ and we would like to provide access to only Sandbox environments and not to Production environment.

 

First, go to Office 365 admin center

 

Go to “Active teams & groups” under “Teams & groups”

 

Click on “Add a group”

 

Select Security

 

Click Next

 

Provide a Name and Description

 

Click Next

 

Review the group details

 

Click on Create group

 

New group is created

 

Click Close

 

Go to Security tab and select the newly created Security group.

 

Click on Add group owner

 

Click on Add Owner again in next screen

 

Select user and click Add

 

Select Members tab and click on View all and manage members

 

Click Add members

 

Select user and click Add

 

Follow same steps and create new security group with name “Production” but do not add any members or do not add member whom we added in ‘Sandbox” security group.

 

Go to Dynamics 365 Business Central admin center

 

Select the environment to which you want to assign the newly created group.

 

Go to Security Group and click on Define

 

Select the newly created Security Group

 

Click Save

 

Click Yes on confirmation message

 

Go to Production environment and setup “Production” Security group.

Now login to Production environment and notice below error

 

Copying environments of different types

Copy an Environment:

1.  We can create an environment that is a copy of an existing environment, such as a sandbox that is based on production for troubleshooting.

2.  Creating production environment that is based on a sandbox, for example. When you create an environment as a copy of another environment, the new environment is created on the same application version as the environment that you are copying. 

Note: The new environment will contain all per-tenant extensions and AppSource extensions that are installed and published in the original environment that is being copied.

To copy an environment

1.     Select Environments, then select the environment that you want to copy.

2.     On the Environment Details page, choose the Copy action.

3.     In the Copy environment pane, specify the type of environment that you want to create based on the current environment.

4.     Specify a name for the new environment.

5.     Choose the Create action.

At the different stages of implementation, testing, support, and maintenance of a Business Central tenant, Business Central online now provides admins with more flexibility when they work with multiple environments.

In earlier versions, you could copy a production environment to a sandbox environment in the Business Central admin centre.

This release wave adds support for copying the environments within and across different environment types as shown in this list:

·        Sandbox to sandbox

·        Sandbox to production

·        Production to production

a.     Sandbox to Sandbox: 

          

 

 

     

b.     Sandbox to Production:

 

 

C. Production to Production

       Similarly, we can copy Production to Production

How to Restart D365 Business Central Environment

 

In NAV days, we have possibility to restart service tier and there are many reasons for the need of having restart option.

How to restart D365 Business Central environment?

Navigate to Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Click on the environment that you want to restart

Environment Details page will open

Click on Sessions

Manage sessions page will open

Click on Restart Environment.

Click yes on below confirmation message

If we go to details screen of environment then we can notice the status “Restarting”

After sometime status will be changed to “Active”

Active sessions will get below notification

I would expect a different notification than the regular notification to have clear message.

 

 

Application Insights instrumentation key to Application Insights connection string

 

Monitoring and Analyzing Telemetry is one of the powerful features of D365 Business Central.

We must enable Application Insights to Send Telemetry to Azure Application Insights.

Please go through below Microsoft Docs link for details

EnableSending Telemetry to Application Insights - Business Central | Microsoft Docs

 

I have noticed below Notification on my environment.

The environment uses an Application Insights instrumentation key. Change it to an Application Insights connection string. Go to Enable Sending Telemetry to Application Insights for more information.

 

Earlier We must have used only Application Insights instrumentation key to enable this feature to send telemetry in Dynamics 365 Business Central admin center but now we must use Application Insights connection string.

 

How and where to get this Application Insights connection string?

 

Sign in to the Azure portal

Search for Application Insights

Click on the Application Insights which we have used/created earlier.

“Connection String” will be available under the instrumentation key

Use “Copy to Clipboard” to copy full string.

 

Go back to Dynamics 365 Business Central admin portal and open the Environment which has this notification

Click on Modify link of Application Insights connection string

Make sure that Enable Application Insights is enabled.

Enter the Connection string that we copied from Azure portal.

Click on Save

Now the notification will be gone after refreshing the environment.

Save report dataset to Excel from the request page (BC18.3+)

 

How to see dataset in Business Central reports

 

We used to have “About this Report” option to export the dataset of the report to inspect the data that is generated by a report dataset in earlier Dynamics NAV versions. This was very useful to filter the reports and optimize the dataset performance.

 

Microsoft included new feature that does similar to above functionality from D365 Business Central version 18.3 onwards. This new feature exports report dataset to Excel.

Step 1: Open the feature management page.

Step 2: By default, all the features are not enabled. Select the feature (Export report dataset to Microsoft Excel document)

 

 

Step 3: We need to enable the feature by changing the value of Enabled for from None – All users

 

Step 4: Refresh the environment for reflecting the new changes.

 

  

Step 5: Now, open Posted Sales Invoices page and then try to print the report for any posted document.

 

 

Step 6: In the request option page select “Send to…” option

 

 

Step 7: In the given “Choose file type…”, select “Microsoft Excel Document (data only) option and click “OK” to download the dataset to Excel document.

Step 8: Now, open the downloaded excel document to view the dataset.

Step 9: To view the developed layout with the data select another option “Microsoft Excel Document (data and layout)” and click OK.

Step 10: Open the downloaded excel file to see the report output with the developed RDL layout.

 

Start your free Dynamics 365 Business Central trial

Do you want to try, learn and explore Business Central?

Please follow below steps on how to set up a free Business Central trial environment.

 

1. Browse

     https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-365/enterprise/office-365-e3

 

2. Click on Free Trial

 

3. Enter Email address and click Next

 

4. Click on Set up account

 

5. Enter details and click Next

 

6. Select either Text me or Call me and click on Send Verification code

 

7. Enter verification code that you have received and click Verify

 

8. Now we must select our domain

 

9. Enter the domain name and click “Check availability”.

 

10. Click Next

11. Enter a Username and password

12. Click Sign up

 

13. Click Get Started

14. Download Office apps if you want otherwise click Continue

 

15. Select “No, use default for now” option and click “Use this domain”

16. Add new users if you want otherwise click “Do it later”

17. Click continue

18. Click continue

 

19. Provide your feedback and submit and then click “Go to admin center”

20. Now we are in Microsoft 365 admin center.

 

21. In the same browser, open http://businesscentral.dynamics.com/ to sign up for Dynamics 365 Business Central

22. Click Sign In

23. Select or enter the account which we have created in above steps

24. Enter the password and click Sign In

25. You can select yes/no in below screen. 

 

26. Then it will start setting the Dynamics 365 Business Central environment in back end. Will take couple of minutes.

27. If you by any chance get below screen, then please keep waiting.

28. Click on Get started

29. Click Skip & go to Dynamics 365 Business Central

30. Click on Get Started.

31. Now we are in Dynamics 365 Business Central environment.

 

In next post, I will explain how to manage different environments from Dynamics 365 Business Central Admin center.