Engineer / Solution Architect / Dynamics 365-AX Technical Consultant / Instructor (MCT)

In this article, I will talk about what needs to be done after creating a new development environment. The first step is to log into Visual Studio. Then, I will explain how to connect to the Azure DevOps project. I intend to summarize the steps to be taken before starting development in a few articles.

In these installations, I will use the development environment we built on Azure. I explained how to deploy a development environment in my previous articles. Once the machine is deployed, you can download and connect Remote Desktop connection information via LCS. Currently Visual Studio 2015 comes installed, but there will be a migration to new versions of Visual Studio soon. Visual Studio must be opened with Run as administrator. For convenience, right click on Visual Studio and click Pin to taskbar.

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Right click on the Visual Studio icon in the task bar and click Properties

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Click Advanced from the screen that opens. Check Run as administrator and click OK. This eliminates the need to do this every time you open it. Also, if you forget this, some functions do not work, and you will waste time.

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We need to Sign in with an account authorized for Visual Studio.

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I use an account created for this project.

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Software developers like to use Dark themes, but I use the classic theme because I have difficulty reading on dark screen.

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If there is no problem with your user’s authorization, your login will be completed. Dynamics 365 menu is available. I will talk about the menus here in my next articles. Now open the Team Explorer screen.

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Open the connection page with the Manage Connections link.

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Nothing appears in the Select a Team Foundation Server section. The reason for this is that the user login I used to connect to Visual Studio is not authorized for the Azure DevOps project that we connect to LCS.

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Open the Azure DevOps project and invite the user to the project by clicking Invite.  Of course, you must log in with an authorized user in Azure DevOps. Since I have the information of the Admin account, I logged in with it.

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When I type my username from the search, it automatically appears. I select and add it.

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Also, since I want to have Admin rights in this project, I add my user to the Administrators section as shown in the picture.

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When I looked back to Visual Studio, I could see my project. To do this, you need to restart Visual Studio. Refreshing doesn’t work.

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When you click Connect, you will be connected to your Azure DevOps project. You will see the link under Visual Studio Team Services as shown below.

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In this article, I talked about the initial settings required for a new Devbox. First of all, it is very important to open Visual Studio with admin rights. It is often forgotten, so I explained how to make a definition to automate it. Then, we established the connection to our Azure DevOps project, which is required for the version control of our application. Now we can move on to the other settings. I will talk about Model, Package and Branch setups in my next articles.

Regards.

www.fatihdemirci.net

TAGs: Microsoft Life Cycle Services, LCS, Azure, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Dynamics 365, MsDyn365FO, MsDyn365CE, MsDyn365, Dynamics 365 Insights Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, what is Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 ERP, Dynamics 365 CRM

In this article, I will show you how you can open a support case via Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and access automatically-generated support records via LCS and Azure DevOps.

First, some basic setups need to be made. In my previous articles, I explained how to setup Help. If you follow the setups there, you can create a support case without having to do anything else. When you click the question mark and click Support, if you have not installed, the LCS connection screen will appear.

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You can click the link and establish the connection. It will be connected without entering any information here.

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When the connection is successful, the following screen will appear. You can now create a support case.

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Click on the question mark again and click Support.

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On the screen that opens, you can enter many details about your support case. First, enter the title and description of the issue.  You can create a task record and add it here. If there is a file log, you can add it. You can indicate if the issue prevents you from working. The more details provided here, the easier the solution will be.

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For Send to be active, you have to click Yes for the email notification. Then, when you click Send, the following screen will appear.

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The support case you created will be sent as follows.

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To view the support request you created on LCS, open your project and click Support.

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The support case you created appears in the support issues section. You can follow the actions from here. Also, a Work Item has been created in Azure DevOps. You can open Azure DevOps Work Item record by clicking directly on the support case name.

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You can also see the support case you created in Azure DevOps. From here, you can follow the necessary steps to solve it.

In this article, I tried to explain how to enter a new support case and view it via LCS and Azure DevOps. Support has always been a painful process for business applications. It’s not easy to get users who just take a screenshot of the error and post it to enter detailed support cases. However, this mechanism will reduce the IT workload and make it easier to track. For this reason, it’s best to encourage business units to use this place. For example, support cases entered here can be prioritized and resolved quickly.

Regards.

www.fatihdemirci.net

TAGs: Microsoft Life Cycle Services, LCS, Azure, Azure DevOps, Support Case, Microsoft Dynamics 365, MsDyn365FO, MsDyn365CE, MsDyn365, Dynamics 365 Insights Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, what is Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 ERP, Dynamics 365 CRM

In this article, I will talk about the Mobile app feature that comes with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. With Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, there are many mobile applications that come as standard. You can create new applications, and you can make the existing forms suitable for mobile. I will also explain new mobile application creation process in the following articles. In this article, I will publish a few applications and try to show them through the application I installed on my Android phone.

First, log in to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. Click Mobile app from the settings.

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Available mobile apps will be listed.  You can select the ones you want and Publish.

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For Android, search for Microsoft Finance and Operations (Dynamics 365) in the Google Play Store, search for Finance and Operations (Dynamics 365) in the App Store for Apple and install the application. I installed it on Android.

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After the installation is complete, open the application. Enter the link of the environment you want to connect to and click Connect.

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Here you need to grant permissions.

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You have to check I Understand and tap Connect. You will need to enter the user and password on the screen that appears.

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The application is ready. First let’s select a company. Click on Change company from the hamburger menu.

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Companies will be listed here. Dat is not used because it is the default company. Here you can select the company you want to work with.

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When you go to the workspace, you will see the applications you Published. You can now start using it. I opened the Project Time Entry application.

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Once you enter it, a new login page link appears.

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When you click it, the date selection screen opens. I opened the screen for creating a new record with New Entry below.

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This is the new record entry screen. Records entered here will appear directly in your Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations environment. Since I do not want to corrupt the data in the environment I use, I did not log in.

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In this article, we made an introduction to the Mobile App. I tried to explain how we can start publishing and using the installation and standard mobile applications. In my next articles I will try to explain how you can make your own mobile applications.

Regards.

www.fatihdemirci.net

TAGs: Microsoft Life Cycle Services, LCS, Azure, Azure DevOps, Mobile App, Microsoft Dynamics 365, MsDyn365FO, MsDyn365CE, MsDyn365, Dynamics 365 Insights Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apss, Power Virtual Agents, what is Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 ERP, Dynamics 365 CRM

In this article, I will describe step by step how to authorize Dynamics Deployment Services Account, which is necessary to deploy a new environment via LCS. First, log into Azure Portal with the Admin account. Open Cost Management +Billing > Subscriptions.

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Select the subscription you want to authorize and click on Access control (IAM) from the screen that opens.

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Open the new role definition window by clicking on Add> Add role assignment.

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In the window that opens, select Contributor as Role. In the Assign Access to section, select Azure AD user, group, or service principal. When you type Dynamics in the Select section, the options will be automatically available. From there, select Dynamics Deployment Services [wsfed-enabled] and click save.

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When the process is completed, you will see the information below.

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In this article, I tried to explain how the Dynamics Deployment Services Account is authorized over Azure, which is one of the necessary steps to deploy a new environment. This step is usually skipped and an error is received in the Deploy operation over LCS. It is useful to give this authorization beforehand.

Regards.

www.fatihdemirci.net

TAGs: Microsoft Life Cycle Services, Dynamics Deployment Services Account, LCS, Azure, Azure DevOps, Project onboarding, Microsoft Dynamics 365, MsDyn365FO, MsDyn365CE, MsDyn365, Dynamics 365 Insights Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, what is Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 ERP, Dynamics 365 CRM

In this article, I will try to tell you the steps required to start the adaptation project after the sale of a new license for Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management or Dynamics 365 Commerce.

First of all, the activation process should be performed in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) with the company’s Tenant Administrator account by following the steps below:

1. Create a new session as InPrivate / Incognito and open the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
2. Log in with the Tenant Administrator account.
3. Go to Billing> Products & services and make sure the product you purchased is there. If not, contact your business partner.
4. If the Subscription is active, login to LCS to trigger the Implementation Project creation.
5. Log in to the LCS with a Tenant Administrator account on a new page.
6. Confirm the boxes that appear and the project will be created.
7. Tenant Administrator is automatically assigned to the Project Owner role. You can then view the project in LCS.

After completing the above steps, if there is no problem, the Implementation project will be created as shown in Image-1.

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When you click and enter the project, you will see a menu on the right as shown in Image-2. The first thing to do is to click on Project onboarding and start making the necessary definitions. When you click it, a wizard will open and steps will appear. You can skip the steps. You can return to them later.

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After completing the steps, you will have a project screen similar to Image-3. I will try to explain the Environments section on the right in detail in another article.

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I had already defined the steps for this project and had not taken a picture. So I clicked on Project Onboarding from the hamburger menu and reopened it and took the pictures.  It is not exactly the same as the first form, but the definitions are the same.

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Welcome page. It is useful to read all the explanations in the steps carefully.

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There are some important fields on this page. First of all, a name and a description are required for the project. It is useful for everything to be in English. Because Microsoft employees who will assist you need to be able to understand the information about your project. Here you choose the business partner you will work with on the project.

Industry: The field of activity of the company is important because the FastTrack engineer to be assigned to you is selected according to the industry expertise here. For example, if the project is a retail project, an engineer specialized in retail is assigned to you.

Implementation team country/region: The location of the main project team.

Legacy system: If there is a migration from an older version or a different ERP, you can select it here.

Preferred Azure region for production: Currently the optimal choice for Turkey is Data Center West Europe. Generally we choose this in projects.

Future user licenses: If you expect an increase in the number of languages when the whole project goes live, you can specify it here. It is useful to do this because the live server configurations are set according to your license and some information you provide.

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In this section, we select the modules to be used for the project and the necessary settings. We marked warehouse management and MRP, since they will be used in this project. Also, we mark any of the other Dynamics 365 products that will be used. We marked Power Platform, since only that will be used in our project.

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In this section, we define the project team. You do not need to enter the whole team at the first stage. It is useful to define Project Manager and Architect roles especially for the FastTrack team to communicate.  Those starting with Microsoft come automatically, you don’t need to do anything for them.

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Project dates are required to be entered at the first stage.  A separate window opens for that. The dates can be changed later, but you need to enter the correct dates at the first stage. The whole project plan is created according to these dates and the FastTrack team supports you according to these dates.

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This is one of the most important steps. Dynamics 365 projects are now managed through Azure DevOps. First, you need to set up Azure DevOps with the given Admin account and create a TFVC type project. Unfortunately Git is not yet supported. I’ve come across Git uses in some articles, but haven’t tried it yet.  You will then establish the relationship between LCS and Azure DevOps here. There are a lot of details on Azure DevOps, which I will cover in another article.

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After connecting the project, you should establish a link between LCS and Azure DevOps steps. I leave this part as it is. In the future, there may be projects that we change according to the project needs.

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FastTrack introduction and related links are available on this page. Especially TechTalks has very good content, you should definitely watch it before the project.

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This section provides general information about the project steps and useful links.

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In the last step, we complete the project start.

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One of the most important settings you need to set after you finish is to add Azure Connection. If the company does not have an Azure account, you must start a membership through the Azure Portal with an Admin account. Here there are a few steps you need to follow. To connect LCS with the Azure you have opened, you must download the certificate and upload it to the Azure Portal. You must also authorize Dynamics 365 application installation via the Azure Portal. I will prepare a separate article for this section.

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After completing all these steps, you are ready to set up the media. Depending on the license you purchased, Microsoft gives 3 media rights shown in Image-16. There is no charge in these media. You pay according to the pay-as-you-go method for each additional environment you want to set up. Often additional environments are needed for DevBox and Test. You can install these machines from the Cloud-hosted environments menu.

PRODUCTION: It is deployed by Microsoft in the final phase of the Project.

SANDBOX: STANDARD ACCEPTANCE TEST: This machine is Tier-2 and is mainly used for Testing. We setup this environment. By setup, I mean we adjust the settings, determine its type and Microsoft prepares it for us.

SANDBOX: DEVELOP AND TEST: We usually set this machine as the Build machine. They have removed connecting to these machines with the Admin account, so you shouldn’t use this machine for development.

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In this article, I tried to explain the necessary steps for starting the project after licensing. It is necessary to consider many different options depending on the size and complexity of the project. There are now three indispensable places for an ERP project and you should know them well. LCS, Azure and Azure DevOps. Knowing the basic features of these three products, each of which is a separate world, makes it easier to project and reduce costs. I have made an introduction to the LCS and I will continue to explain the details.

Regards.

www.fatihdemirci.net

TAGs: Microsoft Life Cycle Services, LCS, Azure, Azure DevOps, Project onboarding, Microsoft Dynamics 365, MsDyn365FO, MsDyn365CE, MsDyn365, Dynamics 365 Insights Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apss, Power Virtual Agents, what is Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 ERP, Dynamics 365 CRM