Our commitment to customers to help ensure business continuity
As organizations respond to the ongoing, unprecedented situation and grapple with disruptions across their workforce due to the evolving global health crisis, we want to share the steps we’re taking to help ensure our customers’ business continuity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.
Our priority is the seamless delivery of Business Applications services for our customers. This begins with the global response plan for our Azure cloud, designed to help ensure the continuous, reliable operation of our cloud services. We are building from that, ensuring that our Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform incident response teams are available, and equipped with all the tools they need. Consistent with COVID-19 response plans across Microsoft, we will continue pushing critical updates to our Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform services. We’re humbled and honored to support government agencies, hospitals, first responders, food and life sciences companies, and many local nonprofits on the front lines dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. Our services are essential to their ability to quickly respond and continuing critical updates will help keep our services safe, stable, and available for them.
During this critical time, we want to reduce pressure on our customers and partners to absorb updates driven by end of support or deprecation deadlines. The details will vary by specific service, for example, we’re relaxing the deadlines for deprecating the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement legacy web client by two months to December and simplifying the ability for Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce customers to pause updates for an extended period. The product specific FAQs provide details and if you have additional questions, please post them to our official forum.
We will continue to deliver on our innovation roadmap and leverage our safe deployment models, but will provide allowances for uptake of the 2020 wave 1 release. Our April and, in some cases, May updates are already progressing through our readiness phases according to the published Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans. We expect that those will be available as planned.
However, we will defer the mandatory uptake of the 2020 wave 1 update For Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement by one month to May, instead of April, and enable one additional update deferral for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. This should allow customers to take the 2020 wave 1 updates when it is most convenient—either in the month of April, as originally planned, or deferred to May.
The work we’ve driven over the last two years to empower rapid innovation and protect quality is built on two key factors:
- First, the signals and feedback from our partner early access programs, release validation programs, previews, and first customer deployments are essential to our delivery for general availability with high quality. As our customers and partners must prioritize running their organizations and protecting people in response to COVID-19, we will be monitoring all channels to ensure that we are still getting the right level of feedback.
- The second key factor is reducing the number of versions in distribution—a critical component of driving service quality and reliability. We will also be monitoring the pace of our customers’ ability to move off older versions. As we’ve seen with the response to the pandemic across the world, it is important to keep monitoring conditions and adjust plans dynamically. We will continue to drive innovation and achieve the right balance between innovation and safe deployment to our customers.
One of the cultural pillars for the Microsoft Business Applications team is that “we are all in this together.” Please know that “we” extends to our entire ecosystem—from our global team devoted to your success to our partner community to everyone in your organization. These are challenging times. Working together, we’ll all emerge stronger.
If you have questions about Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform services, please check the FAQs, as we are continuously updating the content with the very latest guidance and information. Again, if you don’t find what you need, please post your questions at our official forum, our team will be working to answer questions and address concerns as quickly as possible.
Please be safe and stay healthy.
