Hello everybody, and welcome to today's Dynamics 365 TechTalk. Today's topic is, Unified Admin Experience for Finance and Operations. My name is Andreea Bunduc and I will be your moderator today. We are broadcasting this session through Microsoft Teams Town hall. This session is being recorded on behalf of the Microsoft Corporation. Presenting for us today from Microsoft, we have Lane Swenka and Saurabh Kuchhal. Lane, over to you to get us started. Thank you very much. Hello everyone and welcome. We are so, so excited to dig into the unified admin experiences we've been building for FNO. So we will go ahead and jump right in. This is but the beginning of a series of TechTalks, obviously with today being focused on the admin experience for our customers as well as our partners, how to deploy environments and so forth. Over the next couple of sessions, we'll then double click into the developer environment experience and how those will operate with visual studio and creating customizations. Then in the third session, we'll actually dive into the whole build and release management process, from packaging to Azure DevOps and automated builds and deployments in an end to end workflow. So for today's agenda, we're going to cover just a high level overview of power platform Admin center, also known as PPAC. We'll also dig into a little bit of the license and roles and permissions required to operate within power platform Admin center, and then I'll hand it over to Saurabh, who's going to dive into environment management as well as application management. And last but certainly not least, is the whole Q and A. You know, we're, we don't just exist to build software and provide TechTalks, but really we're here to connect. It's all about getting the feedback loop and the stories and the pain points from our customers and partners so that we can make everything better and more efficient for you. So as you have questions, please again, use that q and a panel. We have a whole team from Microsoft here ready to answer your questions on the fly throughout the session. And then we'll try and leave a little bit of time for Q and A at the end as well. So with that, I'm going to just dive into a overview of Power Platform admin center. Some customers have used it before, and so I think they're used to a lot of the paradigms that we have there, but for a lot of folks, they've only ever used lifecycle services, which is the admin center today for finance and operations. And as part of this journey that we've been on. We've really been trying to reimagine the FNO environment as an application. Certainly in lcs today, it's one to one between a sandbox and a production or even a developer environment being one to one with an instance of FNO. But as you look at Power Platform admin center and the ecosystem that we have there, an environment is more of a container and it can have many different things inside of it. It's all powered by Dataverse, but you could certainly have Dynamics 365 sales, you could have marketing installed in the same environment. You could have a dozen power apps, a dozen flows and so forth, all installed in the same environment, all sharing the same data, all sharing the same integration technology. That's really where we want to move FNL into is that unified environment context, so that the life of the IT administrator is simplified. You can have one environment that you have to manage, backup, restore, and one set of applications to manage as well. There's a lot of simplicity in having a single admin portal to go to. You have one set of user interface to learn, one set of actions to understand. And this is spanning not just our business applications from Dynamics, but also all of the whole low code platform that we have as well. So great return on value. And then with all of this, we'll highlight hopefully throughout the whole talk here today, a robust ecosystem of tools for our administrators. LCS has certainly had APIs and a few Powershell modules built by the community, so thank you for those. But we're really excited to share. We have first party tooling that's supported by Microsoft and we want to meet admins where they are. Let's walk through the power platform admin center for folks who haven't used it before. And when you log in for the first time, this is essentially what you're going to see on the homepage. You'll be welcomed with a set of critical notifications. These are notifications from Message center in M 365, but they're filtered down to things that are relevant from a business application's perspective. So you may see notifications about f and O releases, hotfixes, things that are going out. You can click to read documentation and certainly give us feedback on the different notifications. There you'll see things that are urgent and require action. You'll also see things that are more informative, such as new features that have just become available that you can try out. In addition to that, we have moving down the left hand navigation menu, we have a set of options for environment management, a big departure from LCS is at the tenant level. You can see all environments across the tenant. You can actually do quite a lot of actions right from the list page, instead of having to click into every environment and then start a copy or backup and so forth. You can also, of course, click into history and see who did what at what time, and clicking into the environment to get more detail about that particular environment. And we'll dig into a lot of the environment management aspects as it pertains to FNO in this talk here today. Moving on, we have the advisor tab, and this is our AI powered recommendations engine. And effectively it's going to be scanning telemetry and various aspects of your tenant and providing recommendations either for you to make something more performant or have better value, or even just things as simple as cleanup. And so in this case, I have some applications that haven't been used in a while. That's a notification for me. I can choose to quarantine those apps, or I could choose to leverage another part of the Microsoft Stack, which is teams. I can reach out to a colleague in my company and say, hey, do you know anything about these apps? Or did the person who created this app leave the company? That kind of thing. And we could reassign those particular applications. Again, we have the UI for this. We also have automatic recommendations through an API, so you can programmatically detect these things and take action without having to log in. In addition to that, we have a billing section. This is relatively new and it allows you to have more understanding of your license utilization within power platform and Dynamics. You'll be able to see the various licenses. If somebody's missing a license, you can see that. You can see the current number of licenses that seats you have available of various types, from base licenses to teams and activity. You'll also see intelligent recommendations powered by advisor, and you can also dig into a particular environment and choose a workload to determine if something is either under licensed or over licensed. So we hope this gives you a more in product experience to determine the compliance of your licensing and if there's opportunities for truing up or truing down, as the case may be. Next up, we've got resources. This is all about capacity management. And so when you buy Dynamics or power platform licenses, those come with storage entitlements, and so those will show up here in the form of gigabytes, both for dataverse and finance and operations. You'll see what you have available at the tenant level, kind of that bird's eye view, and you can certainly then drill into various workloads or even environments and click and see where is that storage consumption happening. Back on the summary tab, we have an add on section as well. And so you can click on the Manage tab and choose an environment and assign various different kinds of add ins that we have available. Some of these add ins again come with your initial purchase of licenses. Other add ons you can actually just buy ad hoc through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Next up is help and support. Certainly an admin center needs a way for customers to reach out for help. When you're ready to create a ticket or you have an issue, the first thing we'd suggest is clicking on the known issues tab where you can search. This is very similar to the issue search in lcs. Certainly you could look at the service health as well to see are there any outages happening right now that might be impacting you. And if you're not seeing anything immediately helpful, you can just start the ticket creation process as well and pick a category. In this case I'm picking power platform administration as where the issue's happening and I've chosen an environment and I'm going to start typing my problem. And in this case I'm having some kind of a problem with copying my environment. As I start typing, I'm actually getting a list of those known issues and context in line. But if I don't see anything immediately helpful, I can still continue on and classify my problem as lifecycle related to copying environments and I can move on to trying to get a solution. And even then we'll trigger a copilot so you can actually have a natural language experience to describe the problem. This will review telemetry about your environments, see if there's anything like a known issue that's happening at that particular moment. It'll suggest documentation and things as well. So really lots of self help tools. Our goal is to allow customers and partners to self help or self heal their problem as quickly as possible. And so we're excited to have a lot of these experiences here for you. Then of course, if none of this was getting to the root of the problem, you can continue on and actually get that ticket created. Lastly, we've got this section called policies. I'm not going to go through every kind of policy, but this is all related to governance and security for your tenant. And so the first one that we'll kind of dive into here is called data policies. And this particular policy allows you to control the use of connectors within the low code apps, in this case as an admin I can say I want to block the use of some connectors, such as I'll just pick I think the top three here and say I don't want my makers or citizen developers using those, I'll just block those outright. But I also can be a little bit more granular and say for example on the planner connector they can use it. But there's a couple of actions that I don't want people to use because they might be risky, like deleting a task. And so you can turn off individual actions. You can also choose to block new actions all up. So if planner comes out with some new features tomorrow, those will be off by default until it comes and approves them. And then once you've kind of got the policy all set, you choose the environments that you want to apply to this policy. So you could imagine a policy applying to all of your developer environments, all of your sandboxes, all of your production environments, or a certain policy for by Geo. It's really up to you how you want to segment it. But that's just a taste of what we have available within policies. Here we have a rich UI and we're really excited about the opportunities that it provides our customers over what we've had in lcs. But in addition to the UI we really want to hammer home. We have quite a number of automation tools for our IT administrators. We really want to power them up. This all starts with the power platform API. That's the foundation. This is really just an aggregation of various APIs we've had from power apps, power automate within environment management as well, all bundled into one API surface. We then use that API to generate tools. We have Powershell, which is the standard, I'd say admin utility out there today a lot of admins use Powershell for managing other aspects of the Microsoft ecosystem. There's also power platform CLI or Pac. This is used typically by developers because it works with dataverse solutions as well as packaging the new X packages. But if you're an admin as well, so you can manage environments and do some development, if you're wearing multiple hats, as many admins do, that may be the tool for you. We also have connectors. These are the traditional connectors you can use in flow. We're also in logic apps that supports environment management and management of your tenant. And all of these various tools not only support service principle, but their use is encouraged. This has been a big ask for lcs over time and with the proliferation of multi factor auth having a workflow that triggers in the middle of the night and it wants to wake you up on your phone. That's just not going to work. That's where service principles shine. We want our admins to get some sleep. Please leverage those service principal capabilities and all of this is available now and documented throughout the talk. You'll see a lot of either video or ui, but if you notice the little green power platform logo there on that slide, that means we have APIs and tools for that capability as well. So hopefully you'll see we have lots of opportunity here. So with that, I'm going to transition a little bit to talk about licenses, our favorite topic, as well as roles and permissions. So with that, I think the most important thing to start off with is who can even create environments in the admin center. It has a new tenant with power platform. By default, everyone in your company can create environments. Specifically that's for low code scenarios. But what we see a lot of our Dynamics customers doing is limiting that right away to specific admins. So when you go into power platform, you can click into the tenant settings tab here. There's a whole bunch of settings we recommend you evaluate, but specifically this one. You can turn off that control so that only specific administrators can deploy environments and start consuming capacity. When you say only specific administrators, what does that mean? Well, that's where we have to introduce this concept of service level administrators. These are based on roles from Azure Active directory or known as Microsoft Entre now, and you can assign these from the M 365 admin center, or you can go to the Azure portal and click on your tenant and go to users and manage roles there as well. The first role that we have available is the Dynamics 365 admin role. This role can manage pretty much everything, which is trial management, sandbox production environments. You can install FNO and other Dynamics apps into these environments, you can manage their settings in dataverse, you can manage environment groups and so forth. So quite a lot of control within that role. But we also have the power platform administrator role which can do everything that D 365 admin can do, as well as manage a few more things such as developer and teams type environments and the tenant settings that we discussed, as well as governance policies and billing policies. So between these two roles, we recommend someone within your company get assigned one of these roles to manage the service. Of course the global administrator can also come into power platform admin center most often. That is a very busy person and so they typically like to delegate office 365 to an exchange administrator or teams to a teams administrator. In this case they can delegate power platform administration to a power platform administrator and assign that role. That role is also used for partners when they do delegated admin requests. And so in partner center on behalf of your customer, you can create a request to your customer for them to approve, to give you power platform administration roles. And then you could log into PPAC on their behalf and create environments or do the things necessary to help them. So that's kind of that bird's eye view. The service level admin can see everything across the entire tenant. But what about like in lcs today we have the notion of individual projects where I can only see environments in my project and not environments in another project, right? We have isolation and so we have the same kind of capability in Ppack. We just don't have the concept of a project. So what it works like here is we have environment admin role, and so you can assign the system administrator role from Dataverse. And when you do that, that user will see only those environments of which they are the admin of when they log into power platform. In this case, I'm logging in as another user. I can only see my developer environment that I have the admin role within, and I can click into that environment and do anything I want with it. I can change the settings, I can delete it, I can restore it, I can copy it. I would only be able to copy it to another environment that I'm also the admin of. So there's that split between the service level admin who can work across the tenant as well as individual environments. You could be made the administrator of. Next up, we want to talk about those environments when you're creating a new environment. In the admin center we have this concept called a template. Really a template is all about efficiency because you could just not use a template. You could deploy dataverse and say enable Dynamics, but not have any apps installed and you could build it up from the ground so you could install fno, you get install sales, you can install all these other things. That's just going to take you more time. And so the idea of a template is that we can pre bundle a bunch of those things together that we think customers will want to use in tandem and make that easier to get stood up quickly. And so with f and o, we don't just sell a finance and operations license anymore, we've broken that out by brand. And so we sell a finance license, supply chain license, commerce license and so forth. But in all of those cases we have the same f and o application that's installed. And so, for example, let's say you have a finance license. You'll have a template that's available to you called finance. It's going to include Dataverse. On top of that, the f and o application will be installed. And then we may also include a few other things like the copilot for finance or financial reporting, so that you can build your income statements and balance sheets. And that's for the finance customer. Likewise for the supply chain management customer, they will have a template called supply chain management with Dataverse, the same FnO app installed on top of it. But we may include other helpful things such as copilot for SEM and inventory visibility, add in and so forth. So that's kind of how these different templates of licenses interact. They provide a baseline for you to get started. But of course, after the environment's created, a finance customer could install copilot for SCM and vice versa. It's really, again, just an efficiency thing. There's nothing though that would prevent you from cross pollinating these various applications with your license. As I mentioned earlier, you also get something called capacity that manifests itself as gigabytes. You'll see that bird's eye view here of how many gigabytes I have of dataverse, how many gigabytes I have available of FNO. I can see where those gigabytes are getting consumed, and we have reports now to show you at the table level. You can also do some trending analysis to see exactly how things are either trending up or trending down and start to clean those things up if that's consuming more storage than you wish. The nice thing about power platform is that there's not an environment based purchasing model anymore. It's all about capacity. You can actually have any number of environments, provided you have available capacity to deploy. You need at least 1gb free of dataverse and 1gb free of operations to create a new environment. You don't have to go through a whole purchasing cycle to buy another tier two or a tier five or anything like that. We know that's very painful for our customers. Takes a long time if you have an enterprise agreement to make those adjustments. And so now, as long as you have available capacity, you can just create a new environment on the spot. And we'll talk a little bit later about the tiering. That was a common question that we had last night as well. But the long story short is that all environments are of equal performance in power platform. And that's based on the number of licenses that you've purchased. So with that, I think that covers off on capacity. At this point I'm going to hand the presentation over to Saurabh who's going to dig into a little bit about environment management. Saurabh, over to you. Awesome. Thank you Lane. So team, let's talk about the environment management. How you can create provision the new unified sandbox or developer environment in power platform admin center, how you can do the environment lifecycle operations such as copy, restore, delete, backup, all of those. Let's dive in. So to provision the new environment, it's much simpler, much easier in power platform admin center than lcs. Of course you can also use from the UI. There is also a way where if you need to delegate it to partners, if there is a partner, admin center partner can request to be the admin for particular tenant or particular customer. And it's called delegated administration privileges. With delegated administration privileges, it enables partner to manage customer service or subscription on their behalf. Customer must grant the partner permission before partner can use delegated administration privileges. And as lane mentioned earlier, all in one environment, right? So it's not just FNO and Dataverse are two separate environments. Think of Dataverse as one environment. And under that you can install any of the apps, let's say sales or power apps or power platforms, or even the finance or supply chain, any of those apps. And automation is first party now, right? With lcs, of course there was some limitations. Mostly it was through UI, but with power platform into admin center, it's out of box. It has multiple tools to automate here. The scenario is, let's say you have starting a project you need ten developer environments. You can use a Powershell and have that ten unified dev environments created at your own time, all in parallel. So you can also use service principles if you don't want to use the individual accounts for service accounts. So. And you can also use it DevOps processes also here. So we'll also show multiple options on the side here for automations here. So just to bring that awareness that yes, unlike lcs, you can do lot more automation here. Let's go one more level down. How do you create the trial environment? In past in lcs, administrators, partners or isvs historically had to use cloud hosted environment in lcs to create demo trial environments for finance and operations. This was to demonstrate software capabilities and to try out new features, right? But to improve this experience now, Microsoft has made available pre subscription based trial environments for finance and operations, including Dynamics 365, finance, supply chain, project ops, and commerce applications. All we admin need to do go to M 365 marketplace and acquire the free trial license. And deploying is much easier in power platform admin center with these steps here given and admin can create the trial environments within few minutes here. Okay, so if you are looking for implementation the real environment, let's say sandbox environment or a developer environment, this is the slide for you. First, as Lane mentioned earlier, you need to make sure that admin has the right role and the license. From role perspective, it's two roles, primarily Dynamics 365 administrator or power platform administrator. And from the license side, in M 365 user should have that. Admin user should have a product license, let's say supply chain finance projects or any of those licenses. And one more thing is required to before you deploy is capacity. So there is no more tier concept as Lane mentioned earlier too, right? It's not like you need to buy tier five, tier four, tier two, you may need to buy capacity or you do get capacity based on user license and based on that capacity you can create these environments here. So we are aligning, converging this whole experience, how that works in power platform admin center and moving to this model. Now from deploying side, we do have options from UI which we'll cover later in this session, but Powershell make it much easier. With Powershell you can create multiple environments all in fly. You can have the JSON where you can mention this flag is really important. Devtools enabled equal to false or true. This is what drives you are creating the sandbox or a developer environment. Please note this is not interchangeable. So if you want to create a sandbox, make it false if you want to make it. If you are looking to have a developer environment, then make it true. You cannot interchange them once it's created. There are a bunch of templates based on the license. You can choose finance, supply chain projects and commerce will also come here. Domain name is another flag in the command when you give the new power platform admin and with this you can have the unique environment name. So display name may not guarantee the URL you are looking for. And location name is also key, right? You need to provide the region where you want to deploy this environment to. If you are looking what are the names of those regions? Through Powershell you can run this command, get admin powerapp environment locations and that will give you the list of all the regions in Azure where you can deploy this environment. One last thing on this option, if you create the environment via Powershell is it will always deploy on latest service and quality update. So right now let's say it's 10.0.39 PU five. It will, it will deploy on that latest version here. If you are looking to deploy, let's say, oh no, I need my sandbox or developer environment on 10.0.37 or for whatever reason, we will cover that option also in the application management session. So stay tuned. That will come later in this session here. Okay, let's have a quick demo of how do we create really on the fly here, right? The unified sandbox or a developer environment via Powershell. So let's create this environment. First we open the Windows PowerShell in the admin mode with Powershell, as I mentioned earlier, you can have environment with FNO apps, demo data, developer or sandbox selection all at once. The only one caveat or good part is it will create the environment with the latest version. Now the first command is install the Power apps module. You say all, yes to all, for all components installed. After that, the session creation with power platform API to be used. This command is basically adding the admin account which will be used to deploy this environment. This is the account which should have the role, one of the role which I mentioned earlier, Dynamics 365 administrator or power platform administrator and have product license and also capacity checks. So once these are done, the next is defining the JSON object. So please pay attention on this one because this is key. Where dev tools enabled equal to true or false determines is it developer or sandbox environment and you need demo data or not on this. Once you have defined the JSON object, this is the final command, new admin powerapp environment. And here you can provide bunch of parameters. The environment name, the type template, JSon object and all. It will take around 40 minutes, 50 minutes to deploy. And once it's done, it will show the confirmation page like this. Okay, now let's also verify this environment from the UI side, right? So I will, I can search the name, environment name here with the name I created recently. And now I can see find out. Okay, great. It has my environment URL which is my CRM URL. I also have my FNO URL, it shows my region type all those here. I can also find out what are the users here. So this user is nothing but showing all the dataverse users. Plus from ad what I can do. Now the scenario is let's say admin who created this environment and now he need to assign users or developers to this environment, right? So what he can do, he can find out the users or developers here and assign the required roles from the data were side. So this is done in dataverse, but in FNO right now it does not sync this data. The admin roles we are working on a feature where automatically from Dataverse, whoever the system admins roles are, it will automatically sync them into finance and operations as well. For now all you need to do is add that user in finance and operations as well. So this concludes the demo for creating the environment, for provisioning the environment to sandbox or developer type via Powershell. Let's switch gears, let's talk about the copy, right? So as we do our implementations, we many times need to copy, right? And again we have options of UI and automations, right? So and LCs, the challenge was it was only copying the database, right? So it was never copying the code. So if you have a let's say bring the data from production to your sandbox or to your developer environment, you obviously get the data, but you still need to apply the packages, your code isvs, all of that to align where the beauty with the power platform admin centers. It copies code as well as the data. It supports the scenarios of lcs to PPAC. So we did work behind the scene where we made changes in lcs where all the environments they do support from copying from lcs to PPAC or within power platform admin center to PPAC. So it does not support the scenario where you have a PPAC environment only and you are copying it back to lcs. So that is not supported here. Another advantage, big advantage we will also talk about. This is where you need to bring the production environment, let's say to a developer environment, right? So that has been much easier now with this copy and it's much simpler UI on the right and we'll double click into this as well. On the right side we are trying to show the automation again, right as so this is the theme and throughout this tech you will see where we are using. In this one we are using DevOps, where you through DevOps you can automate, let's say you have a scenario here, right where I am production, I am in production and I need to copy my data, snow data nightly or weekly or monthly, whatever the references. With that I can automate it end to end easily where I can copy my environment to my developer or sandbox environment and I don't even need to use my individual account. I can use service principle with minimal setup here and have that fully automated. I'm sure we all will relate to it. This is how the LCS copy is, right? If you need to bring the data from sandbox to let's say developer environment for development or most likely for troubleshooting, these are the number of steps, right? And it's very time consuming. It takes days in doing this depending on the size. Also many time issues because of size limits. And also it's very error prone and it only copies the data. As I said earlier, it does not bring the code. So you still need to apply that same code if you are looking to debug or troubleshoot any issue here. The whole thing is changing now, right? So now we have the option in power platform admin center, we call it full copy. Much simpler, right? It brings not just the data, it also brings the code as well. So within few hours, as soon as you copy the data, let's say from prod to a developer environment which is also Microsoft managed through this process. So all it stays within same Microsoft boundaries. It's ready to troubleshoot within hours. So it saves huge amount of time and total cost of ownership is much low. Here it comes as exact replica. So it will also bring the, not just the FNO release version service updates, it will also bring all the add ins you have installed on the source isvs or customizations. All those things will be replicated here. It will still consider the, the truncation we do during lcs copy, let's say the email parameters or those values. So it will still consider those as well. Here too. It copies not just the FNoDB, it will copy across all data stores. So it will just not like FNo. It will bring dataverse file database, XDW, all the copies here. So you, you get full thing to troubleshoot if you need to. So this is really helpful if you're building the solutions which spans both areas in Dataverse and FNO. So you can have one environment where you can easily develop solutions across the apps. Here, let's do demo a full copy here, which we call it the regular copy and we are doing it via UI. Of course you can do via automation too. But yes, let's look at it from the UI. This is my target environment. And if you look at here, this does not have demo data, it has only dat company and it's right now on 1038 version. Now let me find my source. This is my source environment. It's lcs managed. And if I go to this environment, this is on 10.0.39 and it has demo data. I can see it has USMF legal entity and I can also see, okay, it has some demo data customers also here now let me go to power platform admin center and also make sure that what is my environment region. So 1st first of all from the lcs I need to go to power platform integration tab and find out what is my power platform environment name. So if I go here, search with the same name and I can find it, make sure the region are same in the source and target. So in the copy it will work in the same region. If it's different region, it will not allow that copy involved from admin center. So you have that, all you need to do is go to that source environment and click on this copy button. It will open the dialog in the right. It has options here and you choose everything. This everything will bring not just code, customizations and data, everything together. You provide the target environment name and you click copy and confirm it. This process will run through and it will basically put the environment in admin mode. After that, once the copy is done, it will complete validation, prepare and run phase for the demo. I will fast forward it and let's just wait for it to complete and we'll go to next step here. Okay, so now the copy is completed and I'm on my target environment now, right on sandbox two. Now let's go to finance and operations and see what we see here. Let's check the version of this environment it was earlier on 1038. Wow. Now it's updated to 1039 with the copy now also check does it have demo data now or the data from my source? Wait, it did bring all those legal entities. So let me go to USMF and see did it really have the data on those customer master now or sales order anything? Great, so it bring my sales orders here too. So this concludes the demo for full copy via power platform admin center UI. Another cool feature which we are really happy about and we are seeing great buzz in the preview. Whoever has used it so highly, recommend it. We call it transactionless copy. Our earlier name was advanced copy. So team, as we move to cloud storage, capacity has emerged as a top concern from customers and they need to manage their overall tenant capacity well to make sure that they are under capacity and under compliance. Here customers can copy from production to sandbox multiple copies and that really makes the copy of storage total consumption double, triple, quadruple many times, right. So what you can do now with this transaction, let's copy. You can copy the minimal amount of data which is just configurations, masters and references. Transaction is the major chunk where in the database where it takes the majority of space. So with this transaction. Let's copy. All you are doing is basically bringing the key items, which is configurations, masters and references, let's say your AR setup, account, receivable setup parameters. You are bringing your customers, your products, you're also bringing your references, let's say payment terms, but you are not bringing the transactions, let's say sales orders or custom restaurants, those kind of details in the target. So it does help a lot to maintain your storage consumption, right? Especially on all the sandboxes. You may still need maybe one full copy for production troubleshooting if you are looking for data troubleshoot. But we believe that this will really help if you have a storage concern, capacity concerns, and this can really reduce that concern and have that even on test or developer environments that unnecessary block, you can automate it. Again, as lane mentioned earlier, there are multiple tools, right? This transactionless copy is today supported via Powershell. We will have a demo right after this slide, how that works. And also obviously you can leverage those automations. As I said earlier, in early results and during preview we saw with customers who tried it, we saw great, great amount of reductions, up to 90% storage reductions. So the larger the source, the larger the saving potential here for sure. So please give it a try. If you have a scenario where you need to bring the storage capacity under control, this is one of the way here. Let's look at one more thing, right the how it works via Powershell. So make sure they are validate, right? Like your source and target is in the same region. And second is the table group metadata. If you recall, this property does exist in ax and FNo world from long time, right? And this is the property we are leveraging to determine what are my transition tables. Table group metadata is used to dynamically determine the list of tables which will be not copied to your target environment by default. These are the table groups, transaction, transaction header, transaction line, worksheet, worksheet header, sheet line and staging. These are the ones which will not get copied over to your target environment. So one request here, we are doing that for our first party tables as well. If you have, if you are ISV or if you are a customer, you have your custom tables or any of your tables which you created, right? Not out of box ones. Please look at this property and update it. If you would like to use this feature and consider, okay, I don't want my custom table to copy or copy you. Please mark this property accordingly on your custom tables. This will really help because whenever you try this, it will automatically determine based on the property that you need to use this table in this target or not? You don't want it? We will do it via Powershell. So. And I will have a demo also. But the key thing I want to highlight is execute advanced copy for finance operation equal to true. This is what this flag is what determines that I want to do a transition. Let's copy or not. Let's have a demo of this transition list copy via Powershell. This is my target environment. Sandbox two, which I have. And if I go to my finance and operations. And as I saw, we saw earlier. Let's take a look quickly, the AR, since all sales orders, it does have the transactions now. Now what will I do? I will go to my source, right? Which is adopt linked and also try to find out it has the, it has the transitions too. Wonderful. Now let's open the Powershell in the windows, in the admin mode. So once you have opened the Powershell in the administration mode, I just copied all the commands here on the right in the notepad for easiness, for demo, so that you can review it, right. We will obviously install the power apps module. Just like for creating new environment, we will need three variables. Tenant id, source environment id, target environment id. We will create the session, we will create. Add the admin account just like in production we did. And this is the copy request which I had, right. So this, this is the flag which makes it. And the last command is the main command for copy. So let's run these commands one by one and go through this, this experience I have given the module. I'm creating the power apps session now. I'm adding the account, the admin account which will be used to run this copy. And this is the JSON request where I'm providing. Yes, I want to do the transition copy after this is done. This is the final command, which is basically actually doing the copy. Once it says, it will say accepted. So as it can take time. So you can see that. So now if you go to power platform admin center and go to that environment, you will see this page where it will show in progress for fast forward. Once it's done, you will see the message here, it's successfully completed. And if I go to my target environment now, there are no service orders anymore, so there is no transaction. But if I look at my masters on my references data, I still have my master data here. The customers I also. So yeah, this concludes the demo for the transaction list. Copy here via Powershell. Okay, few more things I'm sure you all familiar with maintenance mode in power in finance and operations via lcs. The new name for that is administration mode in power platform admin center. This is an existing thing in power platform admin center administration mode. We are leveraging the same unifying that here with Dataverse. So all you need to do is the same thing. You go to environment, click edit, administration mode enables and it will leave only admin to do the license configuration changes or any changes which you are looking in this mode here. And once you are done you disable it same way too. You can take backups here, so you can take manual backup. So here it's not like lcs where it's keeping the backpack and something in the set library. It's just the annotation of a timestamp where if you're marking it okay, I'm taking a manual backup here. Of course there will be system backups still, right? Being in Azure. So it will take the backup in production for the last 28 days and percent box last seven days. And if you mark, let's say, I mean I have an environment, my test environment, I'm starting the copy testing and I want to just make sure that I annotate my time stamp that after this I'm starting the copy my testing. Sorry. So you can go back and have that restore here too. How the restore works is much simpler. You click on that restore or manage in the system. One is more like a point in time restore. It will take the last system backups based on system managed. But if you have manual backups which is on the next hub manual, you can pick that annotated date time which you had labeled and it will restore to that particular date time again. Like copy, it will bring the both code as well as the data. So whatever you had at that time stamp, it will bring both as restore in that one. Delete is much simpler too. All you need to do go to environment, click delete, provide environment name and that that will be deleted. It will go into recently deleted environment so you can see that. So please do not create the environment with same name immediately because that URL will be assigned and it takes some time. It takes at least 24 hours or more to make sure if you want to reuse the same environment URL. So we did cover the environment management piece. So how you can manage the overall environment now, as we discussed since beginning, right? Think of finance hygiene as an app. How do you manage these apps in power platform Admin center? Let's double click into that too. Now assume you have an environment in power platform admin center. It's a Dataverse environment, right? And you need to install finance and operations app on top of the dataverse environment. It could be an environment with sales, it could be with field service or just customer service. But you want to use FNO app as well. On that, what you need to do, you need to install two apps. One is called Dynamics 365 Finance Operations platform tools first and the another one is the provisioning app. It will give the option to enable same thing developer tools. So if you want to have a unified developer, you mark it. Yes. Otherwise it will create as unified sandbox. You can also do in. This is the option which I mentioned earlier, right? In Powershell, it's not there. You can select the version to be about to be installed. So if you are not looking for the latest version, this is the area you need to go to and where you can select the previous versions of the product to install. Let's have a quick demo here via UI how you do it. So just for the demo purpose, I'm creating first the dataverse environment, right? I'm creating of type sandbox, giving the purpose the name. Basically what will be the environment, use it. I will say add data versus I will choose the region. I will have add data versus store which should be required. Yes. Give the right security group based on your access and enable D 365 apps. I'm not selecting any app to deploy because my main goal is to deploy the DOS finance and operations app. I save it. Within few minutes my environment will be available. I take this environment and let me search it. It's preparing, it's ready now I fast forward it and now I go to Dynamics 365 install apps. So here I need to go and find my finance and operations platform Tools app. You may see multiple versions. Please. You can pick any, it does not matter. And once you pick that install and it will go through it. Once that is done, you can go back and again. Check. Okay, this is installing now. And once it's installed, you can install the next one. And the next one is provisioning app. So you search again finance and operations and in the list you can pick that finance and operations provisioning app. And this is the main thing. This is basically the app page which is recently developed, brand new thing where it will give you the option as soon as you agree to the terms. That same experience. You enable developer tools, you make it demo data. If you need it and you select the version, it will show the last three versions based on that and on top of it. Once you have done it, you can install it. I also want to highlight one more thing is add ins, right? So if you need to install, let's say add in on this, you still use same dynamic 365 app and click install app and you will see a bunch of add ins over there to install on that. Once you do this, there is a bug right now you may not see the FNO URL. So what you need to do is click add it and just add any purpose or any detail and then save. Now it will show that. So we will fix that bug soon. And now it will start showing the FNO URL. Once you have deployed that FNO bits, let's check the version. So I deployed it on my latest 10.0.39, it created that environment and it also brought the demo data over here. So this concludes the demo for installing the FNO on existing or new dataverse environment where I can also select the version and go for it. This option is not there right now in all geos, but by this in next two weeks, by May 2024 we are looking to roll out to all the regions so you can try it very soon. Another thing after this one, this is also coming soon is quality update or service updates applying on the environment. So you created the environment, you install the app, let's say, but now you need to update it to the latest. You go to same thing. You go to Dynamics 365 apps under resources and you find your provisioning app. Once you go provision there is a new button manage. So this is important. Once you see that manage button it will start showing you. Okay, you click on that manage. Yep. And once you click manage it will load that page, another page which is a single page and you click and you will be able to select the next versions to install on it. So earlier that environment is on 1037. Now I'm updating it to 1038 and seven is showing the platform update available on that latest one. So this is a new way to update service updates or quality updates on the existing environment. There is also one more cool thing I want to show. If you go to here CRM URL and there is a new app which is named as finance and operations package manager. Under that, once you open it, you will see a button called Operation history under management. This will list down your environment or not environment app history for finance and operations app. So here I let's say I updated my environment to 1038. It will show me that and you can also see the detailed logs how that update goes here. Okay, so we are coming towards the end. This is the resource slide. It has bunch of links here we have a yammer group, active yammer groups. Please join Yammer. If you are looking for more conversation questions from community, I can answer. We can also answer them there. We do have weekly office hours as well, every Wednesday. So you can join that as well and ask your questions to there. Thank you. Saurabh we still have a couple of minutes. Maybe we can take a question or two from the audience. Or one question we see repeated in various forms relates to the tiering concept and also related to the development experience and development virtual machines and how they change. Maybe Lane, would you like us just to recap a bit the whole story? Yeah, absolutely. So from a tiering perspective, there will not be tiers anymore. You can deploy as many environments as you have available capacity and all of those environments will be of equal size. So sandbox and production will have the same auto scale limit. And that limit is set based on power platform requests. This is something that you get from the purchase of user licenses as well as you can just go buy power platform requests by themselves. That will sum up at your tenant and then that will tell us you can have five AOS's per environment or this much ram and so forth. Right? And if you buy more user licenses overnight or by tomorrow every night, we would reevaluate your current tenant purchase and reset those auto scale limits. So all environments are of equal performance. If you needed to just temporarily boost things for a perf test, you can just buy those power platform requests on a month to month basis and let them expire. But they're all equal. And then you can convert your sandbox directly into a production at go live instead of having to copy it to something else. Has different infrastructure from a developer environment perspective. Again, these are all hosted in the cloud, just like a sandbox or production environment. So the FNO application and dataverse is all in our cloud and you would just install visual studio in the tools on your own machine and connect to it. All of the X code changes, DB sync. All of that's actually orchestrated through Dataverse now, but again, I don't want to steal too much thunder. That's actually the topic of our next couple of sessions, as we mentioned as part of the series. So please come back to the next couple of TechTalks and we'll dive deeper on those. Thank you lane. Another question is, how will partners be able to access PPAC and manage multiple customers? Absolutely. So everything goes through partner center. So as the partner record for a customer, you can send them what's called a delegated admin request and you can choose as part of that request what role you want from entre. So you can say I want exchange administrator, I want teams administrator, you can say I want power platform administrator role. The customer gets that request and they can accept it. And then the partner can choose a security group from their own tenant, maybe a list of consultants working for that particular customer, and then those consultants can log into PPAC on behalf of that customer. You do all of that through partner center. You find your customer in the list, you click on PPAC link from there and it will log you into their tenant even though you're using your own partner email address and password. But then you can log into PPAC and create environments and do all of the tenant level management there. If you need to access data in dataverse or do any kind of development like x customizations or low code dataverse solutions, you cannot do that through delegated admin. You have to actually have a guest account created on the customer tenant. So depending on if you're just doing environment management, application updates and so forth, you do that through delegated admin. If you're doing development for the customer as well, then you would need guest accounts created on their tenant. Thank you, Lane. Another question, more of an ask is data only copy option? Do you mind? Yeah, and that's another main departure from lcs where the only option was to copy data. We never copied code. Power platform is the exact opposite. We always copy code and then you can choose how much data do you want to come with that? Whether it's the whole database or now we have this transactionless copy option. If you just want to move data around, the answer is I think data management DIXF. So there is no database only copy between environments without code. Thank you. And I know we are at the hour, but maybe one last question about multi instance management. We have customers that have multiple production environments and they usually sit in their own LCS project. How would that be moving forward? Yeah, a power platform administrator gets that tenant level view so they can see across all environments in the list. For a project level admin, like let's say you had a european project, an LCS and a North America project, you can assign system admin role to just those environments so that the european it team can log in and they'll only see their environments to manage and the north american team will log in, just see their environments and then the power platform admin can see all of the above. There was also a question about environment groups that's actually just in preview and I think we're going GA this Friday. So with environment groups you can bucket environments together for the purposes right now of applying low code policies to them. Eventually we'll have more and more Dynamics and FNO related policies you can apply. But if you're just looking to group environments together as well, very similar to an LCS project, you could use groups for that function as well. Lane, just one question, I think on the environment monitoring side, like what capabilities does the PPAC provide and in general how they can monitor their production? Yes, from an environment monitoring perspective, the answer across the board now is application insights dataverse power apps power automate fno commerce everyone uses app insights now to send telemetry in near real time to your app insights resource. We're actually looking to have parity between all the various logs and capabilities in lcs through app insights, including SQL utilization, ram, a number of a OSS crashes, you name it. Everything that you used to be able to look up in lcs, albeit a little bit delayed, you'll be able to get that in near real time using app insights. Great questions, awesome. And maybe one last more on roadmap. What can we look forward to? Yes, and so throughout the talk today there were several different slides that had a banner that said available now or coming soon. So anything that says available now you can just immediately start to use. We have links and I believe the deck and this recording will be shared with everyone so you can get to the links. You can also just look this up on our learn documentation and start playing around with it. Anything that's said coming soon will be available in the next few weeks. So from managing these developer environments and udes, all of that is either fully available now in public preview and will be ga soon with all of those features landing. So in terms of the long term roadmap, when is lcs going to get turned off and so forth? We don't have public dates that we're committing to at the moment, but of course that's not going to be something that happens overnight and you'll wake up in power platform admin center. So there will be lots and lots of communication and feature mapping documents and so forth. So, you know, oh, this is how I used to use something. This is how I use it now. So rest assured we will have more more to come on that. Awesome. Thank you. So here we are, folks. Thanks to our presenters and to you, our audience, for attending our TechTalk today. We hope you have a great rest of the day ahead.