Understand the functionality and tools of Lifecycle Services

  • 20 minutes

Lifecycles Services is the central repository for most of the tools that you use to prepare and deploy a project for finance and operations apps. Lifecycle Services is a cloud-based collaboration workspace where all the key information about a project is stored. This information can include information about project phases and a collective repository named the Asset library. All this information can be made available to project members.

The Lifecycle Services Project workspace provides an outlined methodology showing each phase of your project and provides high-level milestones that are used to track deliverables and project goals.

As the project progresses, environments can be deployed from within Lifecycle Services. The project deployment tools allow environments of different sizes to be deployed and controlled from within the project.

The unified control of cloud-based environments within Lifecycle Services allows environments deployed from within Lifecycle Services to be monitored and controlled. Lifecycle Services provides environment-aware tools to search for issues that may be occurring within the environment, search for knowledge base issues with known fixes, and apply the fixes to the environments in a controlled manner.

Types of Lifecycle Services projects

The implementation is performed by the Customer and the Partner. Depending on the role, you have different types of views of the Lifecycle Services project, but the functionality remains the same.

Below is an overview of the differences.

Partner Lifecycle Services project:

  • They have all services enabled.
  • Lifecycle Services solutions
  • Open methodology
  • Partner-led trials
  • Bring your own subscription.

Customer Lifecycle Services project:

  • Created as part of the offer
  • Offer-based feature light-up
  • Microsoft subscription
  • Cannot be deleted (from User interface (UI))

Tools that are provided in Lifecycle Services

Let’s get familiar with tools available in Lifecycle Services. These tools assist you to manage the lifecycle of a finance and operations apps implementation. The following list highlights the tools that are provided in Lifecycle Services and a description of the phases that each tool applies to.

  • Projects - Projects are the key organizer for your experience in Lifecycle Services and let you invite your colleagues, partners, and customers to collaborate with you, and they also let you track progress.

    Screenshot asking what is this project for.

    When the required project requirements are defined in Lifecycle Services methodology, it will help team members to understand expected deliverables at different phases of implementation. Every phase must have a milestone before it moves to the next phase, and its achievement should be measured by the deliverables that resulted in the phase.

  • Methodologies - Methodologies provide a tool that you can use to ensure more repeatable, predictable implementation projects. You can use one of our methodologies or create your own. By using a methodology, you can easily track and report on your progress.

    A methodology is a systematic analysis of methods applied to achieve one or many goals. There are many methodologies available in Lifecycle Services that you can benefit from, such as cloud and on-premises implementation, and upgrade to the latest release versions of finance and operations apps.

    Screenshot of Lifecycle Services implementation methodology.

    You can create your own methodologies and use them in a project in Lifecycle Services to streamline the tasks and activities throughout the implementation life cycle. A methodology should be refined over the course of the cycle to ensure that it adapts to any changes in the finance and operations environment.

    A methodology comprises various tools, such as phased workflows, individual process workflows, process procedures, templates, samples, aids, instructions, responsibility, accountability, authority, risks, and issues, all carried out to deliver the product or service.

    By using a methodology that covers all the important goals of the implementation phase, your team gains efficiency, works smarter, and can build an environment of continuous process improvement. It also provides clear expectations and increases the probability and likelihood of a successful implementation of finance and operations apps.

  • Preview feature management - Previews are intended to be used for development and testing purposes only. Public previews are enabled by default for users who want to evaluate them.

  • Organization users - Users can access organization-specific information such as business process libraries and methodologies. Organization users do not have access to specific projects until they have been invited to join them.

  • Solution management - This is a collection of different artifacts, such as deployable software packages, logos, and custom reports, that can be applied to a new project, so when the environment will be deployed it will include all the artifacts.

  • Shared asset library: This is a repository of packages and database backups that can be applied to a deployed environment such as Cortana intelligence application, Software deployable package, and Power BI report model.

  • Manage incidents - By using this tool you can view and export all incidents for a selected Lifecycle Services project.

  • Set up Visual Studio Team Services - Connects Azure DevOps (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services, or Visual Studio Codespace) to a lifecycle service project. This allows a development environment to connect to a central repository for code and software deployable packages, and creates incidents for the team or submits an incident to the Microsoft support team.

  • Business process modeler - Business process modeler (BPM) lets you create, view, and modify standard process flows. By using BPM, you can achieve the following goals:

    • Standardize process flows.
    • Align your business processes with industry-standard processes, as described by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC).
    • Identify fit and gaps between user requirements and the default functionality that Microsoft Dynamics products provide.

  • Cloud-hosted environments - Cloud-hosted environments is a tool that you can use to deploy Microsoft Dynamics environments on Microsoft Azure. When you use cloud-hosted environments, you must select the type of environment to deploy, such as a demo, developer/test, or production environment.

  • Support - Cloud-powered support helps you manage support incidents.

  • Code upgrade - Customization analysis validates model files against best practices and provides a report of potential areas for improvement.

  • Issue search - Issue search helps you find existing solutions and workarounds for known issues in Microsoft Dynamics products. You can see which issues have been fixed, which issues remain open, and which issues have been resolved as “won’t fix". There are two types of monitoring to view the health of an environment through Lifecycle Services via availability and health monitoring:

    • Environment monitoring - Telemetry data helps build a storyboard view that shows what that user and other users were doing when the issue was reported. It gives you information about the state spanning user load, activity load, SQL, server utilization, and so on spread across a configurable time scale.
    • Full system diagnostics: Monitors the deployed finance and operations apps environments for messages, status of jobs, report views. It also collects statistics of the collectors agents from finance and operations apps to analyze performance detail.

  • Translation service - Use Dynamics Translation Service to translate your solutions or add a new language for supported Dynamics products.

  • Upgrade analysis - Upgrade analysis helps you plan your upgrade to the latest version of finance and operations apps by analyzing code artifacts from Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, Dynamics AX 2009, Dynamics AX 2012, or even earlier versions.

  • Azure DevOps - Azure DevOps is also known as VSTS. You must create a Visual Studio Codespace project, then in Lifecycle Services select Set up Visual Studio Team Services to connect and authorize the Lifecycle Services to connect to your Visual Studio project. This is necessary to create work items and to allow a development environment to connect to a central repository for code and software deployable packages. It also creates incidents for the team, or submits an incident to the Microsoft support team.

  • Subscription Estimator – Provides an automated estimate of the subscription that is required for your finance and operations instance in the cloud. Subscription estimator uses the user license details and transaction count to infer the subscription needs. Although you can have multiple estimates, you must mark one estimate as Active. It is key information to determine the right production environment specifications by Microsoft.

  • JIT access (just in time) – The JIT access to sandbox database will allow the user to get temporary access to the database, meaning that they have around eight hours to access with a dynamic user and password. This is to limit the access to the database, and use it only for main purposes such as finance and operations and Management Reporter troubleshooting, performance tuning for finance and operations, or troubleshooting and tuning an Entity Store.

  • Update settings – Customers can set up a maintenance window in Update settings at Project settings page in Lifecycle Services, to keep up to date the version of the Production environment. They can plan the cadence based on the calendar that Microsoft has published for One version releases.

  • Project onboarding - Is a step-by-step tool to configure the main Lifecycle Services settings needed to kick off your Lifecycle Services project. Once you complete it, you will be able to deploy your development and sandbox environments.

On-premises deployment

You must use Lifecycle Services to deploy and update an instance of Dynamics 365 Finance + Operations (on-premises). After you purchase a server and user license through the Volume Licensing flow or the Dynamics Price List flow, see Finance + Operations (on-premises), to create a Microsoft Entra account or use an existing Microsoft Entra account, and then complete all the sign-up steps. You will be redirected to Lifecycle Services, where an on-premises implementation project will be provisioned for you.

Screenshot showing a screenshot of an on-premises implementation project.

The on-premises project has all the tools that you require in order to implement, maintain, and operate an on-premises solution. Here are some of the tools that are available in the on-premises project:

  • Methodology – The on-premises methodology provides best practices that will help customers implement and manage on-premises projects.
  • Business process modeler – Business process modeler (BPM) is used to capture requirements and do fit gap analysis.
  • Cloud-hosted environments – Cloud-hosted environments are used to deploy developer and build topologies, and to complete Dev Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for on-premises solutions.
  • Code upgrade – These tools will help you upgrade code to a newer release.
  • Issue search – Search for published KBs that are related to application and platform issues.
  • Localization and translation – Localize and translate assets.
  • Support – File and track support incidents.
  • Project users – Assign users to a project.
  • Project settings – Edit project-level settings, such as connectors, the project name, organization users, and the license number.
  • Asset library – The Asset library is a library for various assets, such as packages.
  • SharePoint online library – Connect to an online Microsoft SharePoint library.

To start your on-premises implementation, you must follow the steps in the methodology to correctly set up the project, deploy the developer and build environments, and then deploy sandbox and production environments. To help you with deployments, two environment slots are pre-allocated to the on-premises project. One slot is for a sandbox environment, and the other slot is for a production environment. These slots will be used during the Servicing flow to help guarantee that packages are tested in the sandbox environment before they are applied in the production environment.

Globalization

To learn about local and regional deployments of finance and operations apps, and localization and regulatory features, see Globalization resources