The value of sandbox environments in Business Central
When you’re using a system for things so important as accounting and order fulfillment, you want to vet that any changes you make to the system—whether it be new features or processes, or even changes to your role centers or pages—will not detract from your system’s functionality.
We’ve had discussions about licensing in the past to better understand full-user licenses versus limited-user licenses and the details of Team Member, Essentials, and Premium license inclusions. Plus, we highlighted that organizations can only have one type of Full User Licensing – if you need some users to have premium, all users will have that license type. Jump over to our previous blog on licensing to learn more! →
Now, let’s talk about a different aspect of the system that goes hand-in-hand with system administration and licensing: using sandbox environments, which are like test environments for all the things you want to eventually change or add to your production environment.
Sandbox environments
When you work in Business Central, you are working from a web link that is connected to an environment. This environment will either be a production environment that holds your real-time live financial data records or a sandbox environment you can test within. You have one production environment and up to three sandboxes that can hold any copies of financial data records or areas that are built for testing and implementation. It is best to clearly identify your sandboxes by titling them something like “Test Example Company” to avoid any confusion when working in these environments.
You can request a sandbox to be created at any time, but it’s important to consider that there must be data capacity in your Microsoft provisions for your sandbox to be created.
Though an admin or other user with proper permissions can create sandboxes, your partner can also do this for you, especially in these instances:
Software Installs: Testing things like add-ons and extensions must be done when installing software before you begin using it in production. This is a very common use of a sandbox!
Custom Development: If your partner is custom developing changes to your system, they have to develop and test in a sandbox of your environment.
Microsoft updates: Release Waves are twice-yearly, and because they often include large and/or numerous changes, it’s advisable to test out your processes with the newest updates before they are pushed to your live production environment. Partners like Syvantis can also help you figure out if new features and functionalities will work well for you, train you on them, and help you implement them into your processes.
Admin can open the Dynamics 365 Business Central Admin Center to view details of your environment. In the Environment list, you’ll see an overview of your production and sandbox environments:
Image courtesy of Microsoft.
Select the Name of the environment and you’ll be able to see its details.
Image courtesy of Microsoft.
Within an environment itself is where admin can see all feature updates available, see enabled/disabled features, and apply updates within Feature Management. This is an excellent place to identify what you want to test out in your sandboxes and what you already have enabled in your production environment.
Feature Management list in Business Central.
The licenses you provide the users system should be geared toward the tasks they should be responsible for. Most users within your system will likely be Essentials/Premium licenses, but for users who need limited capabilities, this is where a Team Member license comes in.
With production and sandbox environments, you have a separation between your live and test spaces. These are pretty easy to provision, but too many copy companies or environments may eat into your database capacity provided by Microsoft. We strongly recommend training and testing be done in sandboxes, which are meant for that exact purpose and don’t impact your ability to use the system for regular business processes at all. You can replicate transaction scenarios, try out new features, and more in these sandboxes, then bring them to your production environment when you’re sure they won’t impact your current system uses.