Inspire 2018: Microsoft prepares Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations partners for new update cadence, LCS management tools

When Microsoft general manager for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO) and Retail Muhammad Alam took partner questions at Inspire 2018 after an update on the product's growth, the audience led with the topic of Microsoft's support of production environments.

The issue of improving and scaling production support, which Alam told the audience that Microsoft has been focused on internally, requires a range of measures, from staffing the support engineering team to changing systems administration practices to new policies around delivery of product updates in the cloud.

As D365FO go-lives began, Microsoft did not anticipate how quickly they would need to grow their front line engineering team, said Alam. When customers went into production quickly, the company had to push to continuously hire suitable support engineers.

One of the biggest lessons he has learned leading D365FO engineering is how challenging it is to deliver the product as a cloud service rather than shipping DVDs. It may seem obvious in theory, but practical matters like improving the AOS architecture - to support 700 customer systems in the first year and over 2,000 today - and introducing automated monitoring and self-healing mechanisms have become priorities. He explained:

And make no mistake we're making those hard fixes and improvements, moving [D365FO] architecturally to a much more scalable cloud platform and putting in the right telemetry and monitoring and self-healing to be able to do that at scale because our intent is not to just hire hundreds or thousands of people to be able to support those customers. That does us no good. So significant investments from that perspective on making the service truly better and more resilient.

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