From the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central blogs: SaaS tenant; External accountant access; Deprecated features; App maintenance

In this week's Dynamics 365 Business Central blog roundup:

• Tips for handling a Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant
• How to grant external accountant access with Business Central
• Deprecated features and fields
• Why app maintenance matters, and how to do it correctly

Tips for handling a Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant

Writing on the Simplanova blog, Stefano Demiliani explained that handling a Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant in a cloud environment isn't quite the same as in an on-premises installation. In his blog post, Demiliani provided 15 tips that you should check, and adopt when possible, so you can provide a great SaaS tenant experience and service to your D365BC customers in the cloud.

He then divided these tips into the following categories: environment, performance, coding and deployment, and automation, offering information about each of them.

How to grant external accountant access with Business Central

On his blog, Roberto Stefanetti noted that one of the license types for D365BC is the external accountant license, which lets you invite an external accountant who's managing your books to your D365BC so they can work with you on your fiscal data.

This license type . . . means that you do not have to buy an extra seat in your current Active Directory or use one of your existing Business Central user accounts on your external accountant.

Stefanetti then explained how to give your external account access to your D365BC.

Deprecated features and fields

On That NAV Guy blog, Teddy Herryanto wrote about the features and fields that have been moved, removed, or replaced in the W1 version of D365BC.

He explained that these feature won't be available in future versions of D365BC. He then noted that the reasons these features might not be available and what you might need to do if you use such features.

In his blog post, Herryanto briefly described some of the deprecated features, explaining what happened to them and why.

Why app maintenance matters, and how to do it correctly

Business Central consultant and trainer Arend Jan Kauffmann explored the implications of Microsoft's new and more strict policies around BC app maintenance and per-tenant extensions. While the new rules are harder to comply with in terms of level of effort required, they make sense, he believes. 

Now, one could say that future releases always should be backward compatible so that older apps still do work. And to a certain extent that is right. It doesn’t work if Business Central updates come with a lot of breaking changes causing apps to fail easily. On the contrary, to improve the application and platform, it’s sometimes necessary to introduce new technologies and code changes that are not backward compatible.

Kauffman explains how to stay updated on deprecated features, obsolete objects, breaking changes. While Microsoft will always provide partners with some amount of time to react to changes, catching them as early as possible is key. And, he writes, there is only one good solution to this challenge, which he discusses in more detail.