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Operate in the cloud with Dynamics 365

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Operating in the cloud successfully drives business value for your organization. You need the right skills and change management processes aligned to your platform to run your business smoothly and get continued value from service updates and enhancements.

Center of Excellence

You might have a partner and specialized development team help with the initial deployment. But once you're back in "business as usual" mode, does your team have the skill set to manage the platform? Can they maintain the custom components and assess and implement appropriate new features?

If you don't have the right level of expertise and guidance after you go live, you might miss out on solution advancements and the full potential of the platform. Creating a Center of Excellence (CoE) within your organization and investing in developing the skills to operate on the platform is valuable. If your organization embraces organic app development by users, you also need a well-established CoE. This center can administer, nurture, govern, and guide users to adopt the citizen development approach to business apps. This approach empowers everyone to create innovative apps with high standards by using a consistent application lifecycle management (ALM) process.

Microsoft provides a CoE starter toolkit that includes prebuilt processes:

  • Administer: Gain insights into your Power Platform adoption.
  • Govern: Establish audit, compliance, and archive processes.
  • Nurture: Accelerate your adoption with a thriving community.
  • Drive innovation: Pick the most impactful and valuable scenarios for development.
  • Consistent ALM: Apply source control strategies using GitHub.
  • Standards and theming: Create, manage, and share enterprise-branded themes and follow organizational best practices and standards.

AppSource offers a variety of independent software vendor (ISV) solutions to suit your needs. Learn more at Establishing a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence.

Usage and monitoring

Running your business on the cloud means you want the cloud to be always available, responsive, and scalable. You also want to be alerted to unexpected issues in the apps and infrastructure so you can diagnose and fix them. Additionally, you want to comply with SLAs you have with other businesses. Having a monitoring capability can prepare your business to meet these objectives.

What to monitor?

Different people in your company want to monitor different aspects of the system. Users might be more concerned with responsiveness, admins might be looking at changes, and the business might be looking at key performance indicators (KPIs) like the time taken to place an order.

When you run a software as a service (SaaS) app, you want to focus on the business, while the service vendor takes care of the solution. As a customer, you still have some control over the solution. This is especially important when you have customizations in place to fine-tune the business processes for your organization. If you introduce a new feature in production and it causes unexpected issues, you want to detect it proactively and resolve it before it becomes a problem. Using flags to control new features can help you in these situations because you can quickly turn off a faulty feature.

A proactive and reactive monitoring strategy that empowers your staff to detect and resolve issues should be part of your toolkit.

Best practices for monitoring

Keep in mind the following best practices:

  • Decide what exactly to monitor, especially the KPIs, and whether the service is meeting them.
  • Monitor your consumption, subscription, and service fees. The more cloud services you use, the more they cost.
  • Use automation to trigger actions and alert people when thresholds are reached.
  • Track user activities for accountability (including the apps, screens, and features they use), the responsiveness, and the frequency of use.

For example, you can configure Dynamics 365 and Azure Application Insights to access diagnostics data and set up alerts and dashboards to proactively monitor your Dynamics 365 environments.

Adopt and align to a product roadmap

Your cloud solution evolves and delivers on the promise of digital transformation. It delivers new capabilities that help you stay competitive in your industry. Cloud vendors do their own research and listen to customer feedback to improve the product by adding new features. Being actively engaged in this process by giving feedback, staying on top of the latest roadmap, and planning for upcoming changes is an effective way to operate in the cloud. The key stakeholders from the business also need to stay engaged and plugged in to new feature development, investments, and product direction. We recommend developing your own roadmap for business apps and aligning it to the product direction to get the most out of your investments.

Dynamics 365 has two release waves per year that make incremental enhancements and new capabilities available to customers. Adopting these mandatory changes and new features—many of which are included in existing license plans—is a fundamental aspect of operating in the cloud.

Stay engaged

Implementing the system is one thing, but getting continuous return on investment from your cloud solution requires engagement. Companies that stay passionate and curious about the solution and adopt the latest features are the ones who enjoy the most success. We urge all customers to stay engaged through conferences and events throughout the year, and stay connected by using community groups. Customers, partners, and Microsoft engineering have formed several official and unofficial communities. Take every opportunity to influence the product through active engagement with product leaders, advisory boards, table talks with product managers, preview programs, and collaborative development opportunities.

You can choose from app-specific forums at the Microsoft Dynamics Community, Yammer groups, blogs, events, and how-to videos where you can discuss ideas, learn about features and roadmaps, and ask questions.

Next steps