January plans: Get ready to schedule your Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM v9 update

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM customers should be on the lookout in January for the chance to schedule their version 9.0 cloud updates.

That announcement came recently from the Dynamics 365 team, who advised that they aim to start the scheduling process in January and run the updates to v9 from February 2018 to August 2018. Customers running Dynamics 2016 versions 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2 can upgrade.

As Microsoft explains in its update documentation, customers on 8.0 or 8.1 today will likely face a mandatory update to 9.0 in order to adhere to the service's policies on staying current. Check out the documentation for a range of scenarios for managing an update against production and sandbox instances.

Version 9 of Dynamic 365 customer engagement apps was first revealed in mid 2017 and was made available for new instances in October. V9 has major implications for the future of the solution, impacting everything from the XRM framework and the future of the user interface to the cloud hosting model (a modern Azure server infrastructure), introduction of Virtual Entities, and more native support for Flow and PowerApps.