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Business Central forum

Environment upgrades into production prior to sandbox & API failures: Why are releases automatic and not backwards compatible?

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Posted on by 25

Hello, 

Our firm recently implemented D365 Business Central for Finance and Operations under the development, implementation and guidance of a Microsoft Gold ERP Partner and have been shocked and disappointed to experience rudimentary, business-impacting failures with every new release of D365 BC. I fear what the April release will bring and the impact it will have to our business, and productivity of the Finance and Technology team. 

  • We have experienced changes to our production prior to our sandbox environment. (November/December 2018)
  • We have experienced forced/automatic upgrades to our sandbox environment and subsequently to our production environment within one-business and two-business days respectively of a new release coming available. (Most recently in February, 2019)
  • We have experienced integration job failures after upgrades where mismatches between the API fields were discovered. 
    • February release failures produced "BadRequest_NotFound" error messages in Item-Card and Purchase-Order APIs. 

Am I to understand that our company is the only one experiencing these issues? 

We have escalated these issues through the "Gold' implementation partner and Partner of Record --> through their reseller --> through to Microsoft and have not received a satisfactory response or resolution to our issues. We never would have anticipated such an experience from Microsoft. 

Why are releases automatic and not backwards compatible?

I have the same question (0)
  • Tharanga Chandrasekara Profile Picture
    23,118 on at

    Hi,

    That is very sad and also strange. We are using BC API's for couple of our cusomers and we did not face any issues during the upgrades. About the automatic updates, Isn't it a reason why people like to go for a SaaS and I believe Microsoft send an notification before they do the upgrade.

  • Justcruzinthru Profile Picture
    25 on at

    Thank you for your comment, Tharanga.

    Indeed, automatic upgrades are a benefit of SaaS products, however, not when they don't follow the rules of backward compatibility. As SaaS systems have become integral to core systems architectures, data integration using custom API with other SaaS, hosted, and legacy custom systems has become the most complex and weakest links, ripe for failures. The ability to test the data flowing between these systems is crucial to data integrity, systems reliability, and overall trust in technology.

    As for notification, one business day notice does not allow any IT team sufficient time to validate a release. Other SaaS systems offer weeks to months to firms to schedule upgrades before forcing an upgrade upon clients. Notification arrived regarding release availability Friday, 1-Feb via email, our sandbox environment was upgraded in the wee hours of the morning Monday, 4-Feb and by Tuesday, 5-Feb our production environment had been upgraded, both without any further notification. Additionally, upon initial implementation, we were not receiving notifications whatsoever and only after escalation through our POR and reseller, were we added to the notification distribution. This may very well have been an implementation partner miss.

  • Tharanga Chandrasekara Profile Picture
    23,118 on at

    Hi,

    You can set the notifications through admin portal. I know sometimes it's frustrating when things go wrong because of an upgrade. I think easiest way to resolve this is by discussing this with Microsoft team.

  • Justcruzinthru Profile Picture
    25 on at

    Thank you for your response, Tharanga. We are being notified hours prior to the upgrade now, but not always sufficiently to prepare. We also made attempts to have a discussion with Microsoft directly, but those attempts have consistently been redirected to our POR and resellers, whom have yet to provide sufficient resolution. I appreciate your engagement in my post and am hopeful the April release will provide clients greater control over updates in the future.

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