I previously showed how a sandbox environment can be created from within Dynamics BC, but this type of sandbox will only contain the Cronus development company.
Navigate to the Dynamics BC Admin Center (https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/{guid}/admin where the highlighted {guid} is your AAD Tenant ID), which will open with the Environments page open:
There are some tasks in Dynamics BC which require you to use the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Administration Center. The link for this is not (as far as I am aware), available through the Dynamics BC site itself. I did some searching online and found that it is available at the following link https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/{guid}/admin where the highlighted {guid} is your AAD Tenant ID.
The easiest way to find this is to sign into Dynamics BC as normal and then navigate to https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/admin; it will fail to find the admin centre, but as you are signed in, the resulting error page will display your AAD tenant ID which you can then add to the address:
In the above example, I have blocked out my AAD tenant ID, but the GID string will be available in that position when you try the above.
There are two ways that a sandbox environment can be created in Dynamics BC. The first way, and the way I’m going to show in this post, will only create a sandbox environment containing the Cronus sample company; the second way is to make a copy of the production environment which I’ll show in a later post in this series.
To create the sandbox with Cronus, Click the “Tell me what you want to do” magnifying glass in the top right corner and type environment; click on Sandbox Environment:
Once you’re using Dynamics BC and have created a new company or copied one you will be working in a multi-company environment and will need to switch between them. As someone new to Dynamics BC, how to do this was not readily apparent to me.
To switch between companies in Dynamics BC, click the Settings cog button in the top right corner to open the Settings pane and click My Settings:
In the last post, in this series, I showed how a new company can be created; which is fine if you’re creating a new company or deploying a new sample company, but sometimes you might want to create a copy of an existing company. This can be easily done through the Companies list. Click the “Tell me what you want to do” magnifying glass in the top right corner and type companies:
I am just over half way through my working life (24 years post university and 22 years until I reach the state retirement age) and after doing some serious thinking earlier this year, I decided that it was time to reassess what I was doing now and what I wanted/needed to be doing in future.
The result, as the title says, is that I am changing jobs and will, from today onwards, be working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and will no longer be working with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
This is a big change for me as I have been working with Dynamics GP for 19 years now, but it feels like the right time to make the change. It also means that I will no longer be the expert in the room and will need to get some serious learning done to get up to speed with Dynamics BC, which I have only lightly used so far.
Why the change? Well, as I say, I am half way through my working life and, while I still think that Dynamics GP is a great product, the future of SME ERP from Microsoft is Dynamics BC. While new features are introduced to Dynamics GP with the Fall release each year, these are now always minor functionality and I have concerns that as technology moves on that GP will get left behind. With 22 years of working life ahead of me, I don’t want to get stuck working only with older software applications.
I did consider moving outside of the Microsoft sphere, but ultimately decided that pretty much all of the software I use professionally is Microsoft. So it made sense to look for a Microsoft ERP in the SME market; Dynamics BC is that product from Microsoft which is actively maintained and integrated with new technologies and therefore provides me with the brightest future.
So having decided that I need to look at moving across to and cross-training into Dynamics BC, I decided that the best way of doing this was to move on from ISC Software. The company I am joining, as of today, is a triple Gold Microsoft Partner (Enterprise Resource Planning, Cloud Platform (Azure) and Application Development) and multiple-award winning company with 20 years experience with both Dynamics BC/NAV and in their sectors of operation. That company is 4PS UK which specialises in Dynamics BC for construction, civil engineering and related sectors.
In terms of this site, posts on Dynamics GP will pretty much stop in the coming weeks and I have already started posting about Dynamics 365 BC and have those posts syndicated to the Microsoft Dynamics Community; existing posts will continue to be available and will not be changed or redirected. I do have a small backlog of posts which I will work through over the next few weeks, so you will see some posts still appearing for a time on Dynamics GP; I am also going to go through my library of SQL scripts and see what I have which hasn’t been posted previously and which I think people may find useful.
The Microsoft Dynamics GP Table Reference site has recently been updated to the Fall 2021 Release and like the blog posts will continue to be available. I will not be taking the site down, but am unlikely to do any further updates to it as new versions are released; however, tables don’t change much in Dynamics GP any more so I’d expect the site to remain relevant for quite some time to come. As always, if you need table information for your specific version of Dynamics GP this is available in the GP Power Tools module available from, and actively maintained by, Winthrop DC.
As I leave the Dynamics GP Community, hopefully I will find a welcome and a place in the Dynamics BC community.
I leave you with a song, “Farewell”, from one of my favourite Irish folk-punk bands, The O’Reilly’s & the Paddyhats.
In an earlier post, I thought it important to clarify terminology around companies and environments in Dynamics BC. In a later post, I will show how to create a new environment, but in this one I am going to focus on creating a new company.
When we signed up for a free trial of Dynamics BC, an environment was created which contained the Cronus tst company and a second company called My Company which could be used for a live company, but I’d prefer to start from scratch so I know exactly what has been done.
So, I want to create a new company. Do this by clicking the “Tell me what you want to do” magnifying glass in the top right and type companies; under Go to Pages and Tasks, select Companies:
When you sign up Dynamics BC you are also signing up to Microsoft 365 which comes with an Administration Center, some elements of which are used to maintain Dynamics BC. The Microsoft 365 Admin center is not available for use until you can prove you have ownership of the domain of the email with which you signed up to Dynamics BC.
Navigate to Admin Portal Home and log in if prompted. When asked if you are ready to be the admin for the domain, clikc the Next button:
I’ve started working Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for a short time now and have been using both the on-premise and cloud versions and have encountered my first uninformative error message.
I got used to these when working with Microsoft Dynamics GP, and especially the Integration Manager tool, but had hoped that Dynamics BC might have been better in this respect. I am a little late posting this as I’ve been working through a backlog of posts.
This particular error came up when I tried to log into the on-premise version of Dynamics BC:
This post is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
