Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is recognised as a hugely powerful software solution. It’s helping companies manage business better across finance, manufacturing, sales, shipping, project management, services and more.
It’s a hugely flexible product, and in recent years, that’s only been growing more true. Since 2019, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central users have had the ability to create multiple production environments – and sandbox environments – at will.
This is a big deal because Environments are where the action happens in Business Central, both in terms of running the business day-to-day, but also expanding into new territories, testing new ideas and training new recruits.
Now, if you’re running a multinational company – and doing business across time zones, currencies or regulatory environments – you can create handy, discrete production environments for your different business divisions and subsidiaries.
This simplifies the big picture and makes scaling easier than ever before as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central scales alongside you.
Environments
So, what are environments and what are they for?
Simply put, there are two types of environments available for the business user in 365 Business Central: Production environments and Sandbox environments.
Production environments
Production environments are where you run your daily business, but you can also create production environments for other reasons, such as training and performance testing.
As companies grow and expand – across regions and across countries – their unique requirements change. New rules and regulations have to be taken into account, discrete production environments help you support the increasing size and complexity of your business in a manageable way.
You can create new production environments for every new territory you enter or generate a new environment for every regulatory regime your business is subject to.
Sandbox environments
Sandboxes are slightly different. As the name suggests, a sandbox is a ‘non-production’ environment, where users can try out ideas and run experiments without real-world business-impacting consequences.
Running on a different performance tier on Azure than production environments, many companies prefer to use sandbox environments – populated with production data – for training purposes.
In the sandbox, trainees can make mistakes in a safe environment while they learn, but, because the environment is populated with real numbers, they get the exact same experience and performance they would using your real business systems and processes in the real world.
Sandboxes also offer a handy environment for a debugging session. And if anything goes wrong, users can simply delete the sandbox and start over – no harm done.
Depending on subscription type, Business Central customers receive one production environment along with three sandbox environments at no extra charge. Each additional production environment comes with three additional sandbox environments as well as an additional 4GB of storage.
Production environments are backed up frequently. All backup data is kept for a month, managed automatically by Microsoft, so to find out more about purchasing additional new production environments, talk to Acumen Consulting.
Creating environments
Adding additional environments is a simple process. Simply navigate to the Business Central admin area, then click the ‘Environments’ tab to access Business Central production and sandbox environments – from there, you can easily create new environments as needed.
The ‘Capacity’ page shows how many environments of each type are available to the user under their current plan. There is no limit to the number of production environments that can be purchased, and environments can be added in any region where Business Central online is available.
Acumen can support you in the creation of new production and sandbox environments within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, as well as show you how you can get the most out of your business software solutions and processes. Talk to our industry leading team to discuss the unique requirements of your business.
