This is part two in a series of posts, you can find the first one here. You might have heard of One Dynamics One Platform. Until we are there, we live with F&O in LCS and in order to utilize the Power Platform integration and e.g. dual-write, we need to handle the linking parts ourselves. In this post I will share my findings related to linking environments into pairs, F&O and Dataverse.
Note! Managing F&O environments is about to move from LCS to PPAC (Power Platform Admin Center), i.e. the environment provisioning part will change. This post is written based on how the setup has been done “the old way” with F&O still in LCS.
Findings
Below are general findings related to linking environments together.
- Read the system requirements and make sure you follow them.
- Today for each (sandbox and production) F&O environment there is a dedicated Power Platform environment.
- You can use that auto-generated Power Platform environment or create a new environment in PPAC to be used instead.
- You will have greater control over Base Language and Currency if you set up your own environment to be used.
- Dataverse with Dynamics 365 apps is a requirement for running dual-write.
- If using the auto-generated environment, Base language and Currency will be taken from the physical location of your tenant.
- The URL of the Dataverse environment can’t be changed after linking F&O and Dataverse.
- Linking is irreversible, you can’t link to another Dataverse environment afterwards.
- There is a link to be used to verify the connection F&O and Dataverse.
Linking environments
In my previous post, I showed an example of what environments and in particular sets of environments that could be used in a ERP + CRM project with dual-write enabled. When you have decided on an environment strategy for our project, it’s time to setup the environments.
Linking environments – What you should be aware of
You can read about system requirements for dual-write in Microsoft Learn. Good to know is that live sync has a limit of 250 legal entities, init sync 40 legal entities. F&O and Dataverse must be in the same Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant. These are just a few examples. Have a look at the whole list of requirements.
Other good-to-know info is that Dual-write is available in the following regions: What regions are available? The user who enables and configure dual-write needs to be a System Administrator in both F&O and Dataverse.
Dual-write requires a Dataverse environment with Dynamics 365 apps enabled. That means you cannot use it for Dataverse only environments. Most likely you will want to start using dual-write because you have both Dynamics 365 as ERP system (F&O) and you use or intend to use Dynamics 365 CE apps (e.g. Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, what we used to call “CRM”).
Through a wizard you will be asked to link the F&O environment either to an auto-generated Power Platform environment or to an own created environment. A Power Platform environment is automatically created for an F&O environment and you will find it in Power Platform Admin Center. If you want full control over Base Language and Base Currency, then I would suggest to create an own environment to be used instead.
It says in Microsoft Learn. “The language and currency values in Dataverse will be entered by default, based on your Azure AD tenant’s physical address“. That means you might want English as Base Language in Dataverse but you will get a local language if you go for the auto-generated Power Platform environment.
Another thing to watch out for is the URL of the Dataverse environment. As it is today, you cannot change URL after linking F&O and Dataverse environments. If you create an environment yourself with the purpose to link to an F&O environment, don’t forget to set your own environment URL. Hopefully we will have better possibilities in the future when the One Dynamics One Admin experience is here.
Linking F&O to a Dataverse environment is irreversible. Before we had the choice to create a support ticket if we wanted to change to another environment, that is not possible anymore.
Verify F&O + Dataverse link
This is how you can verify that the linking has been done correctly. Start with your Dataverse URL and add /api/data/v9.1/RetrieveFinanceAndOperationsIntegrationDetails i.e.
https://{yourOwnPartOfURL}.crm4.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/RetrieveFinanceAndOperationsIntegrationDetails
It will give you the F&O URL and Environment ID as well as the Tenant ID if linked correctly.
You will also see in LCS under Power Platform integration for the F&O environment what it is linked to and in Admin Center you will find that for a certain Dataverse environment there is a corresponding F&O environment.
From LCS to PPAC
Below is a picture from the Tech Talk One Dynamics One Platform. It illustrates how we today have the OLD way and the NEW will be when F&O environments are managed in PPAC, together with our other environments in which we have Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, Service, custom Power Apps and Power Automate cloud flows.
What experience do you have from linking environments? Feel free to share it in the comments to this post!
Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash
Carina M. Claesson 