This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

One of my early thoughts when starting to work with Business Central was how to refresh a sandbox environment. It’s all very well to create one, but at some point you’ll want it to reflect the up-to-date production environment, so that any testing or development you do is against how the system is now being used.

This is one area where I think Business Central could do with some improvement; you cannot refresh an environment.

Instead you need to delete the current sandbox environment and create a new one with a copy of production.

This seems a little ore work than is needed and will also mean that you will need to make any necessary adjustments to user logins and permissions to make sure only the right people have access to the sandbox.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

If something catastrophic happens with your Business Central system, then it is possible to do a point in time restore of the environment; this does seem to be limited to the environment level rather than the company level.

This is a feature of how Business Central stores the data for companies; basically an environment is a database and the tables for all of the companies are in the database, prefixed with the company name.

You can do this by logging into the Business Central admin center, select the environment and click the Restore button:

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When you delete an environment, it is first soft deleted for a fourteen day period in which you can restore it, after which it is permanently deleted. If more than fourteen days old, you will need to open a service request with Microsoft.

To restore a soft deleted environment, access the Business Central Admin Center and click the Restore deleted environments button to see the environments which are available for restoration.

I have an IESandbox environment which can be restored; you’ll notice below, that it has a year and time appended to the name. This happens automatically when an environment is deleted, to make sure that every deleted environment has a unique name.

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This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

When you sign up for a Business Central trial, a production environment is created for you; if you sign up in other ways, you will have to create the first environment yourself.

You can also create sandbox environments with a copy of production or the CRONUS sample company data.

Through time, you will end up with a few environments; commonly I deal with clients who have production, development and testing environments on the system. At some point you will need to delete an environment, which is fairly easy to do.

To do this, log into your Business Central admin center, which you can access by clicking the settings cog in Business Central and then Admin Center.

Once in the admin center drill into the environment you want to delete and click the Delete button:

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This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Deleting companies in Business Central is quite easy to do and reinforces why security in Business Central should limit users access to pages to only those pages they need. Deleting companies is done through the Companies (357) page.

Select the company, or companies, you want to delete and click the Delete button:

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I am doing some work implementing Business Central for a company which will be changing their name before too long and there was a short debate about whether the environment was to be created using their current name or the new name, in advance of the name changing. However, this isn’t actually too important a point as it is pose to rename environments in Business Central.

To do this, you need to open your Admin Panel, which you can do from within Business Central by clicking the settings cog and then Admin Panel. when the admin panel opens, drill into the environment to be renamed and click the Rename button:

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This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

One thing I wasn’t initially aware of when you create a company in Business Central, is that the company actually has two names; there is the Name and the Display Name. When you create a company, you specify the name and the display name is set to the same value.

I was talking to someone about a Business Central company the other day and something came up which made me wonder about changing the name of the company.

When I looked into it, I found three relevant pieces of information:

1. The Name cannot be changed once a company has been created, as this is used in the table names in the database. If you want to change this, then you would need to make a copy of the company and delete the original.
2. The Display Name can be changed, through the Companies (357) list page (more on this below).
3. The name used on the document outputs in Business Central is neither of these and must be defined in the Company Information (1) page (more on this below, too).

To change the Display Name of a company, search for and open the Companies page; click the Edit List button and change the name of the company in the Display Name column:

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This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

A while ago, in this series, I covered how to use list pages in Business Central and also posted some links to advanced filtering techniques; one thing oyu can do with list pages is save your filter options so you don’t need to set them up again, time after time.

I also demonstrated this in the articles on creating goods received not invoiced and goods shipped not invoiced reports.

The issue is that when you save those filters, you are saving them only for yourself; no-one else can see them.

There is a solution to this issue though, and it is as simple as sharing the link to the report; when another user opens the link you’ve sent them, the filters, contained within the link, are applied and they can save the filtered list themselves.

To do this, configure the filters you want and click the Share button in the top right and select Copy link:

This places the link on your Windows clipboard, allowing you to share it in anyway that you want, although it has to be noted, the link will not give people access to a page to which they don’t have access in Business Central.

You can also do a Share to teams: