Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services

  • 12 minutes

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Lifecycle Services is the central repository for most tools that you’ll use to prepare and deploy a project for finance and operations apps. Lifecycle Services is a cloud-based collaboration workspace where all key information about a project is stored. This workspace can include information about project phases and a collective repository named the Asset library. You can make this information available to project members.

The Lifecycle Services Project workspace provides an outlined methodology that shows each phase of your project and provides high-level milestones that you can use to track deliverables and project goals.

As the project progresses, you can deploy environments from within Lifecycle Services. The project deployment tools allow you to deploy and control environments of different sizes from within the project.

The unified control of cloud-based environments within Lifecycle Services allows you to monitor and control environments that are deployed from within Lifecycle Services. Lifecycle Services provides environment-aware tools to search for issues that might 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 customer and the partner will perform the implementation. Depending on the role, you’ll have different types of views of the Lifecycle Services project, but the functionality will remain the same.

The following sections provide an overview of the differences.

Partner Lifecycle Services projects have:

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

Customer Lifecycle Services projects:

  • Are created as part of the offer.
  • Have offer-based feature light-up.
  • Are on a Microsoft subscription.
  • Can’t be deleted (from the user interface, or UI).

Lifecycle Services tools

Lifecycle Services provides tools that can assist you in managing the life cycle of a finance and operations apps implementation. The following sections highlight the tools that are provided in Lifecycle Services and a description of the phases that each tool applies to.

Projects

Projects are key organizers for your experience in Lifecycle Services and let you invite your colleagues, partners, and customers to collaborate with you. Additionally, they let you track progress.

When the project requirements are defined in Lifecycle Services, 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 from the phase.

Methodologies

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

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

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. Make sure that you refine the methodology over the course of the cycle to ensure that it adapts to changes in the finance and operations apps 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 important goals of the implementation phase, your team will gain efficiency, work smarter, and build an environment of continuous process improvement.

A methodology also provides clear expectations and increases the probability 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 don’t have access to specific projects until they’ve been invited to join them.
  • Solution management - A collection of different artifacts, such as deployable software packages, logos, and custom reports, that you can apply to a new project. As a result, when the environment is deployed, it will include all artifacts.
  • Shared asset library – A repository of packages and database backups that you can apply to a deployed environment such as Cortana Intelligence application, a software deployable package, and Microsoft 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 Microsoft Azure DevOps (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services or Visual Studio Codespace) to a Lifecycle Services project. This tool allows a development environment to connect to a central repository for code and software deployable packages, and it creates incidents for the team or submits an incident to the Microsoft support team.
  • Business process modeler - Lets you create, view, and modify standard process flows. By using the business process modeler, you can achieve the following goals:
    • Standardize process flows.
    • Identify fits and gaps between user requirements and the default functionality that Microsoft Dynamics 365 products provide.

The Report production outage feature provides a quick and effective channel to escalate issues to Microsoft Support if the services in a production environment are degraded or become unavailable. It allows users to report service degradation or performance issues in the production environment.

  • Configuration and data manager
  • Code upgrade
  • Issue search
  • Translation service
  • RFP responses
  • Upgrade analysis
  • Work items
  • Azure DevOps
  • Subscription
  • JIT access (just in time)
  • Update settings
  • Project onboarding tool

You must use Lifecycle Services to deploy and update an instance of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance + Operations (on-premises). For more information, see Understand the functionality and tools of Lifecycle Services.