Author: Tulsi Jhaveri, Product Manager, Microsoft
The long-awaited time has come! The automated tooling for lift & shift migration of the standalone Human Resources application to the finance and operations app infrastructure is now generally available for customers.
To refresh your memory, we announced Merging of HR offerings in the Fall of 2021. Since the announcement we've been working furiously to merge the infrastructure and have gained confidence in the broadened capabilities of the Human Resources solution for our customers. We have published documentation outlining in detail what this means for our customers and how it impacts various scenarios for them. You can read more about it here.
We've also analyzed customer environments to provide automated migration tooling to help customers transition their existing Human Resources environment(s) from the standalone application to the merged finance and operations infrastructure. We previewed the migration tool with customers and made improvements based on their feedback and findings. As a result, we're confident in offering the tool more broadly and look forward to getting additional feedback.
As part of the infrastructure merge, all capabilities of the Human Resources application have been made available in finance and operations environments. Customers can migrate their Human Resources environments using the migration tooling that is available in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services. They can also optionally merge their data with their existing finance and operations environment.
Customer migration and customer merge differ in the following way:
Customer migration – The automated migration tooling is used to perform a "lift-and-shift migration" (movement) of the customer database from the Human Resources infrastructure to the finance and operations infrastructure. The result is a new finance and operations environment that uses the customer's Human Resources database.
Customer merge – This additional step isn't required by Microsoft. It's done at the customer's discretion and on the customer's own timeline. During this step, customer data is moved into an existing environment, such as a Finance or Project Operations environment. It's mostly manual and can be done by using Data Management Framework (DMF) data entities.
Licensing
There are no changes to licensing for Dynamics 365 Human Resources in the following areas:
Minimum license purchase requirement.
Licenses to a production and a sandbox environment – If you have existing standalone Human Resources licenses that grants one production environment and one sandbox environment, the same number of licenses are available on the finance and operations infrastructure, at no additional cost.
Additional sandbox licenses – If you've purchased additional sandbox licenses for the standalone Human Resources application, the same number of sandbox licenses are available for a standard acceptance test (sandbox) environment on the finance and operations infrastructure, at no additional cost.
For more information on licensing, visit Microsoft Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Licensing Resources
How does this impact customers:
Who needs to migrate?
All customers on the standalone Human Resources infrastructure must migrate.
How long does it take to migrate using automated tooling?
The migration using the automated tooling may take approximately three to four hours. However, the preparation, testing and validation time required for your organization are dependent on your business processes, integrations, and complexity.
What is the deadline for migrating?
All customers are required to migrate their standalone environment(s) by December 31, 2023.
What happens to customers that don't migrate before the deadline?
The infrastructure for the standalone application is scheduled to be turned off by December 31, 2023. As a result, environments that aren't migrated will no longer be available.
For additional information and frequently asked questions, see the resources below.
Resources:
Merging of HR offerings brings capabilities together for customers - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog
Dynamics 365 Human Resources infrastructure merge overview - Human Resources | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
Dynamics 365 Human Resources customer migration to the finance and operations infrastructure - Human Resources | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
Dynamics 365 Human Resources infrastructure merge FAQ - Human Resources | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
Human Resources customer migration FAQ - Human Resources | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
Dynamics 365 Human Resources infrastructure merge known issues - Human Resources | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources Infrastructure Merge TechTalk