Automatic Update Policy for Field Service
The Field Service (FS) 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 Field 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.
- FS 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.
Field Service Version Eligibility:
- The new policy will be rolled out to instances with FS v7.5 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 FS earlier than v7.5, customers should plan to manually upgrade the org to the latest available version, bringing them in line with the new policy.
- For customers using FS v8, the automatic update policy will be enabled in the months following enablement for FS v7.
- Stay tuned for upcoming information on the overall move from FS v7 to FS v8; however, Microsoft will not automatically upgrade any customers on FS v7 to FS v8.
Scope of the Automatic Updates:
- Field 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, Field Service will follow the approach employed across Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.
- Field 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:
- FS 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 they’ve been available behind a preview.
- Automatic updates will be completed during periods of low traffic for the hosting geographical region with minimal service disruption.
