Aligning license checks between sandbox and production environments
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
| Enabled for | Public preview | General availability |
|---|---|---|
| Users by admins, makers, or analysts | 
Sep 11, 2020 |
Oct 1, 2020 |
Business value
By catching issues during the test process in sandbox environments, customers will see fewer issues that are related to access or permissions in production environments.
Feature details
With 2020 release wave 2, we are enabling a check for entitlements in sandbox environments to provide a consistent experience when you test extensions.
A bit of background: The product capabilities that a user has access to in Business Central depend on the subscription that the organization has purchased. Business Central supports several types of subscriptions, such as Essential, Premium, or Team Member. The type of subscription determines the entitlements to capabilities in Business Central. For more information about subscriptions and entitlements, go to Licensing in Dynamics 365 Business Central.
In versions earlier than 2020 release wave 2 (17.0), entitlements were only enforced in production environments. The check for entitlements was originally disabled for sandbox environments. That way, prospective and existing customers could explore the functionality of the Premium subscription in a sandbox environment without having to purchase a Premium license.
However, you can explore such functionality by creating an evaluation company in either a production or a sandbox environment using the free evaluation subscription that is available on the Business Central site. Alternatively, you can use the Business Central Premium - Trial subscription that is available through the CSP program as described at The Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium Trial. By using these subscription types, customers and partners can explore the capabilities included with the Premium subscription.
However, because the license checks for entitlements were not enforced in the sandbox environments, the partners who create and test their extensions using environments of that type could miss errors in their code that would be related to entitlements or access, so that those issues would not be found until they deployed their extensions to the production environments. With this release, this will no longer be the case.