Automatic Update Policy for Project Service

The Project Service (PS) solution will enable system-driven, automatic updates, in alignment with other Microsoft announcements that have highlighted the improved update process for Dynamics 365 (online):

• Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365

• Dynamics 365 and Update Cadence – Business Applications Summit

• FAQ for Dynamics 365 Update Policies

New Project Service Update Policy:

• Manual updates lead to irregular and delayed updates which increase risks to the customer, support difficulties, and potentially increase downtime.
  • This required organizations to increase update planning and testing across their instances.
• Leading to longer gaps between updates and often required deeper customer investments into their upgrade planning and testing.

• PS will move to an automatic update approach.
  • Many other solutions already push minor updates into customer orgs, automatically (i.e. Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing).
• This will reduce customer risk, improve system supportability, and will make the update motion smoother and more predictable.

Project Service Version Eligibility:

• The new policy will be rolled out to instances with PS v2.4 and later as early as May 13th.
  • Microsoft will gradually exercise the new policy for instances eligible for automatic upgrade, so customers may not see any immediate impact to their eligible instances.
• Customers can still update from the Admin Center if there is an update that has not yet been applied.

• For instances with PS earlier than v2.4, customers should plan to manually upgrade the org to the latest available version, bringing them in line with the new policy.

• For customers using PS v3, the automatic update policy will be enabled in the months following enablement for PS v2.

• Stay tuned for upcoming information on the overall move from PS v2 to PS v3; however, Microsoft will not automatically upgrade any customers on PS v2 to PS v3.

Scope of the Automatic Updates:

• Project Service releases new updates of the solution roughly once a month with occasional hotfixes being released more frequently.
  • These monthly updates will include patches to resolve issues and may include minor functional, reliability, and performance improvements.

• For major updates, Project Service will follow the approach employed across Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.
  • Project Service will deliver two major updates per year, in April and October.
• These will offer new capabilities and functionality.

• Major new capabilities will be enabled in a public preview prior to this delivery period so customers can validate major updates in a sandbox environment.

Solution Upgrade Timing and Impact:

• PS updates will undergo testing to ensure the solution upgrades successfully while also safeguarding that no breaking changes are shipped through upgrade.
  • Major changes to the user interface, solution behavior, or significant new features will be shipped twice yearly after theyve been available behind a preview.
• Automatic updates will be completed during periods of low traffic for the hosting geographical region with minimal service disruption.

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