Create Sandbox based on the production environment in Business Central Online

Create Sandbox based on the production environment in Business Central Online

Administrators can use the new Business Central Admin Center to create a Sandbox based on the production environment. This feature is not available using the original way of creating the Sandboxes – take a look to my old post here: https://robertostefanettinavblog.com/2018/06/25/how-to-business-central-sandbox-environments/

Once you have the sandbox created, you can connect your VSCode environment to it and publish your extension to be tested.

Restrictions for a Sandbox created from the production environment:
– The job queue is automatically stopped.
– Any base application integration settings are disabled or cleared. Caution should be taken to not integrate with production services unless intended.
– Users will be copied as well, with same permissions as in production.
– Outbound HTTP calls from extensions are blocked by default and must be approved per extension. When an extension makes an outbound call a dialogue to the user appears.
– Any GDPR action must be handled separately and repeated for the sandbox, there is no synchronization with the production environment after the sandbox has been created.

“Business Central Admin Center” link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/tenant-admin-center

 

SOME TESTS

#0 – LOGIN TO BUSINESS CENTRAL ADMIN CENTER

You can login directly from https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/<Tenant ID>/admin

or from CSP Partner portal https://partner.microsoft.com/it-it/cloud-solution-provider/

#1 – DELETE EXISTING SANDBOX

#2 – CREATE A NEW SANDBOX

If the environment is not created with production data, it will have default demo data. The sandbox environment will not be accessible until the State shows Active.

.. AND YOU ARE WELCOME!

#3 – 3 NEW GREAT SERVICES:

• Telemetry
• Notifications
• Upgrade Windows

1-TELEMETRY!

The Business Central administration center provides telemetry for the tenant environments to enable troubleshooting and support for the tenant.

2-NOTIFICATIONS

When either a major or minor update of Business Central has been applied to an environment, an email notification is sent to notify recipients that the upgrade has completed successfully. The notification is sent to all email addresses listed in the Notification recipients list of the Business Central administration center. The list is managed manually by adding and removing recipients to ensure the right individuals are notified of the event.

3-UPGRADE WINDOW

The upgrade window for an environment defines a window of time during the day in which the environment is allowed to be upgraded. When major and minor updates are rolled out to Business Central tenants, the update will only be applied to an environment within the time frame defined for the upgrade window, helping ensure that updates are applied outside of the customer’s business hours.

GREAT!