The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS (November 2017, release 1).

Support for data templates

You can use the Configuration and Data Manager in Lifecycle Services to apply data packages that are in your project's Asset library to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations environments (or Dynamics 365 for Retail). With this release of LCS, you can use the Configuration and Data manager to apply data templates to your environments directly from LCS.
Periodically, Microsoft releases data templates to the Shared Asset library. These data templates help you create reliable configurations, or data packages, for faster and more repeatable implementations. For more information on configurations, see Configuration data projects.

The most recent maintenance operation (November 7, 2017) included cleanup activities that may have unintentionally removed your whitelisted IP addresses configured to access the remote desktop (RDP) port for all Microsoft managed non-production Sandbox (Tier 1 & Tier 2+) environments. If you have lost RDP access to your virtual machines, you will need to whitelist them again through LCS by navigating to the Environment page (Maintain -> Enable access). Please see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/dev-itpro/deployment/cloud-deployment-overview#features-of-the-finance-and-operations-production-instance for information on how to whitelist. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Because Dynamics AX 2012 is no longer on the Microsoft price list we are discontinuing deployments of any new Dynamics AX 2012 demo virtual machines through Lifecyle Services (LCS).  This means that after November 27, 2017 it will not be possible to deploy demo topologies for Dynamics AX 2012 R3. All existing demo virtual machines that were previously deployed will continue to exist because they were deployed in customer/partner subscriptions.

Demo virtual machine (VM) alternatives:

There are dev/test topologies available in Lifecycle Services (LCS) that can be deployed using the developer topology. These require a few additional setup steps to load demo data or a different dataset that you may have created. The additional steps required to make the topology work like demo VM  are as follows.

1. Log in to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 as the DynamicsInstallUser with the credentials from LCS.
2. Complete the steps in the Initialization checklist. You must follow the steps in the Initialization checklist through the Synchronize database phase.

After the synchronization is complete, the demo data is loaded using the Data Transfer tool. The data transfer tool and demo data are both available on the dev/test topologies under the G:\ and F:\ drives respectively. Part of the Initialization Checklist is to provide license information and with this VM, the choices will be to use a demo license that can be obtained from PartnerSource or MSDN or to use your own license file and import it as a part of the Initialization checklist.

Import demo data on dev/test topologies

Complete the following steps to import demo data on dev/test topologies

1.Log in to a Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 virtual machine and navigate to G:\TestTransferTool(dev VM) or F:\TestTransferTool(test VM) and install the MSI.

2. Next, navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Test Data Transfer Tool (Beta) and find MetadataXMLGenerator.xpo.

3. Open the Microsoft Dynamics AX client, open the AOT, and select to import the MetadataXMLGenerator.xpo. The .xpo will be listed in the Jobs section in the AOT.

4. Execute the job, which will display an infolog with the MetaData.xml file path.

5. Copy the file from the path back into C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Test Data Transfer Tool (Beta)\[Lists] and overwrite the existing file.

6. Open a command prompt, go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Test Data Transfer Tool (Beta), and based on your demo data location, do one of the following:

• execute dp.exe import "G:\demodata\CU8" MicrosoftDynamicsAx
• execute dp.exe import "F:\demodata\CU8" MicrosoftDynamicsAx

You can load data based on the same factor.

7. After the command finishes, restart AOS. The demo data should be loaded.

8. Run the following script to add user Admin to other partitions if you are using demo data out-of-the-box.

USE [MicrosoftDynamicsAx]

GO

INSERT [dbo].[USERINFO] ([ID], [NAME], [ENABLE], [DEL_STARTUPMENU], [STATUSLINEINFO], [TOOLBARINFO], [DEBUGINFO], [AUTOINFO], [AUTOUPDATE], [GARBAGECOLLECTLIMIT], [HISTORYLIMIT], [MESSAGELIMIT], [GENERALINFO], [SHOWSTATUSLINE], [SHOWTOOLBAR], [DEBUGGERPOPUP], [SHOWAOTLAYER], [DEL_PASSWORD], [DEL_OSACCOUNTNAME], [STARTUPPROJECT], [CONFIRMDELETE], [CONFIRMUPDATE], [REPORTFONTNAME], [REPORTFONTSIZE], [FORMFONTNAME], [FORMFONTSIZE], [PROPERTYFONTNAME], [PROPERTYFONTSIZE], [INFOLOGLEVEL], [COMPANY], [AUTOLOGOFF], [QUERYTIMELIMIT], [TRACEINFO], [REPORTTOPMARGIN], [REPORTBOTTOMMARGIN], [REPORTLEFTMARGIN], [REPORTRIGHTMARGIN], [COMPILERWARNINGLEVEL], [SID], [NETWORKDOMAIN], [NETWORKALIAS], [ENABLEDONCE], [EXTERNALUSER], [LANGUAGE], [HELPLANGUAGE], [PREFERREDTIMEZONE], [PREFERREDCALENDAR], [HOMEPAGEREFRESHDURATION], [NOTIFYTIMEZONEMISMATCH], [FILTERBYGRIDONBYDEFAULT], [GLOBALFORMOPENMODE], [DEL_DEFAULTMODELID], [SHOWMODELNAMEINAOT], [ACCOUNTTYPE], [ISSUERRECID], [CREDENTIALRECID], [GLOBALLISTPAGELINKMODE], [GLOBALEXCELEXPORTMODE], [GLOBALEXCELEXPORTLOCATION], [CLIENTACCESSLOGLEVEL], [DEFAULTPARTITION], [GLOBALEXCELEXPORTFILEPATH], [RECVERSION], [PARTITION], [RECID]) VALUES (N'Admin', N'', 1, N'', -538365, -1, 12, -1, 6, 20, 5, 1000, -8209, 1, 1, 0, 4, N'', N'', N'', -1, 0, N'', 9, N'', 9, N'', 9, 0, N'DAT', 0, 0, 0, N'', N'', N'', N'', 3, N'S-1-5-21-2695551178-503613781-3438119305-1106', N'contoso', N'DynamicsInstallUser', 0, 0, N'en-us', N'en-us', 89, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, N'', 1791229002, 5637144577, 5637145326)

INSERT [dbo].[USERINFO] ([ID], [NAME], [ENABLE], [DEL_STARTUPMENU], [STATUSLINEINFO], [TOOLBARINFO], [DEBUGINFO], [AUTOINFO], [AUTOUPDATE], [GARBAGECOLLECTLIMIT], [HISTORYLIMIT], [MESSAGELIMIT], [GENERALINFO], [SHOWSTATUSLINE], [SHOWTOOLBAR], [DEBUGGERPOPUP], [SHOWAOTLAYER], [DEL_PASSWORD], [DEL_OSACCOUNTNAME], [STARTUPPROJECT], [CONFIRMDELETE], [CONFIRMUPDATE], [REPORTFONTNAME], [REPORTFONTSIZE], [FORMFONTNAME], [FORMFONTSIZE], [PROPERTYFONTNAME], [PROPERTYFONTSIZE], [INFOLOGLEVEL], [COMPANY], [AUTOLOGOFF], [QUERYTIMELIMIT], [TRACEINFO], [REPORTTOPMARGIN], [REPORTBOTTOMMARGIN], [REPORTLEFTMARGIN], [REPORTRIGHTMARGIN], [COMPILERWARNINGLEVEL], [SID], [NETWORKDOMAIN], [NETWORKALIAS], [ENABLEDONCE], [EXTERNALUSER], [LANGUAGE], [HELPLANGUAGE], [PREFERREDTIMEZONE], [PREFERREDCALENDAR], [HOMEPAGEREFRESHDURATION], [NOTIFYTIMEZONEMISMATCH], [FILTERBYGRIDONBYDEFAULT], [GLOBALFORMOPENMODE], [DEL_DEFAULTMODELID], [SHOWMODELNAMEINAOT], [ACCOUNTTYPE], [ISSUERRECID], [CREDENTIALRECID], [GLOBALLISTPAGELINKMODE], [GLOBALEXCELEXPORTMODE], [GLOBALEXCELEXPORTLOCATION], [CLIENTACCESSLOGLEVEL], [DEFAULTPARTITION], [GLOBALEXCELEXPORTFILEPATH], [RECVERSION], [PARTITION], [RECID]) VALUES (N'Admin', N'', 1, N'', -538365, -1, 12, -1, 6, 20, 5, 1000, -8209, 1, 1, 0, 4, N'', N'', N'', -1, 0, N'', 9, N'', 9, N'', 9, 0, N'DAT', 0, 0, 0, N'', N'', N'', N'', 3, N'S-1-5-21-2695551178-503613781-3438119305-1106', N'contoso', N'DynamicsInstallUser', 0, 0, N'en-us', N'en-us', 89, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, N'', 1, 5637144578, 5637144577)

9. Go to System Administration > Checklists to upgrade business data and run data upgrade using the Data Upgrade checklist for In-Place Upgrade.

Customers are now able to deploy Platform update 11 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition on their on-premises environments. For information about how to deploy Platform update 11, see Deploy your Finance and Operations (on-premises) environment. For information about how to update your existing on-premises deployment to Platform update 11, see Redeploy an on-premises environment.

To download the setup and deployment document that applies to the release prior to Platform update 11, sign in to LCS. Click the Shared asset library tile, and on the Model tab, locate and download the document, Setup and deploy on-premises environments - Oct 2017.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS (November 2017, release 2).

Download platform binary updates

For environments on Platform Update 4 and above, you will have the option to download All binary updates and Platform binary updates from the update tiles on LCS Environment page.

• All binary updates:  Includes a combined package of application and platform binary updates.
• Platform binary updates: Includes the latest platform only updates or hotfixes.

For more information on Download updates, please see Download updates from Lifecycle Services.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS (December 2017, release 1). 

Package rollback updates 

In this release of LCS, the following changes were made to the package rollback experience: 

• During rollback, the environment status will show Servicing status: Rollback in progress instead of Rollback status: In progress. 
• When roll back completes successfully and is signed off, the update status on the History page will show Rollback signed off.  

Environment upgrade scheduler 

Based on previous conflicts when scheduling environment upgrades, this release of LCS provides more visibility into the availability of the Service Engineering team for upgrades and allows you to pick from available time slots. When you click Maintain and Upgrade from your Environment details page, you’ll be able to select a date and time from a list of available timeslots. All times are shown in your local time zone. 

Solution package with global (restricted) scope can be imported into Asset library by users with solution permission  

With the LCS September release, you could create and publish solution packages that have a global (restricted) scope and have access to the packages managed at solution level. With this release of LCS, you can now import of the solution package into the Asset library and include a prompt for the user to accept the solution package owner's SLA & privacy policy. 

The Solution package creator includes the following as a part of the solution package creation process: 

• Service license agreement 
• Privacy policy 

Links to the required information are added to the Solution license agreement and Privacy policy section in the Package contents pane. 

When you import the solution, you are prompted with the following slider to accept the solution package owners SLA & privacy policy.

Solution package with global (restricted) scope can be deactivated by solution owner 

 A solution owner can deactivate a solution package with scope 'global (restricted)' that they have created. The solution users (persons invited at solution level) will be notified by email and the solution package and associated assets will be deactivated in their Asset library. 

 To deactivate the solution package, click Deactivate on the Solution management form. 

The solution package user will receive an email notification that the solution is being deactivated. Assets in the Asset library will be marked as deactivated at the solution package and individual asset level. 

•  Receive email notification that the solution package is being deactivated.
• Assets will be marked as Deactivated in their Asset library at both the solution package and individual asset levels.

Reconfigure your Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition environment 

You can now reconfigure your existing environments to update your environment from LCS with a new configuration or take a new platform update or topology. For more information about how to do this, see Reconfigure your environment. 

This is available to all on-premises environments that have a local agent on or above version 1.1.1.0. For more information about taking the latest  update, see Update the local agent. 

LCS support experience

In the December release of LCS, we have updated the Cloud-powered support UI and the process for submitting an incident to Microsoft from the LCS support portal.

1. In LCS, click the Support tile or click the drop down menu and select Support. To submit issues directly to Microsoft, go to Support in your LCS project.
2. On the Work items page, on the Submitted to Microsoft tab, click Submit an incident.
3. Before you submit an incident, use Issue Search to search for existing solutions. Enter a description, object path, or other information related to the issue and click the search icon.
4. If you can’t find an existing solution to your issue, click Create incident to create a new incident.
5. On the Submit an incident page, select an issue category and then select an issue area.
6. In the Describe your issue window, enter the following information:
   • Toggle Yes if the issue occurred in an environment and select the environment name.
   • In the Title field, enter a short description of your issue.
   • Provide details and repro steps for the issue.
   • If applicable, enter any error messages you received.
   • If possible, attach screenshots that illustrate the problem. To do this, click Attach file from computer.
7. Enter the primary contact information. This information will be used by the customer support team to contact you about the incident.
8. Select the support contract and the severity level.
   • On-premises products have limited incident counts. If you have an on-premises product and you have multiple support tier contracts, select which support option to use.
   • Cloud products have unlimited incidents. Because of this, we will provide you with the best available support plan.
9. Click Submit.

Search for project work items in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

The Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) administrator can publish project work items to your organization users by tagging the work items with #SearchableInFinanceAndOperations. The tagged work items will be searchable for users from the client-support search box. The search result includes tagged VSTS work items and Microsoft published updates and fixes.

When you access the published VSTS work items from the support search box, the work item's type, title, state, and description will be shown in a new browser tab with view mode. Users with specific permissions can edit the work item in VSTS.

Note: Published VSTS work items are only visible to the users in your organization.

We are skipping the second December release of LCS. The next release of LCS is will be available January 8., 2018.

As of Thursday, December 14, 2017, customers that have purchased Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition on-premises will see the message “Unable to load environment" next to the on-premises environments listed in Lifecycle Services. This warning message is displayed for each environment, whether it has been deployed, in a Dynamics 365 on-premises project. This is strictly a user-interface issue and there is no impact to any deployed on-premises environment. You can continue to use the on-premises as usual. We will release a hotfix when the issue has been resolved.

Starting yesterday 14th December 2017 at 04:59:52.3581549 UTC, customers began experiencing failures for environment and package deployment requests submitted through Lifecycle Services for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition environments. We have identified and fixed the issue that was causing the deployments to fail. We are actively monitoring the status of the deployments and can confirm that we have successfully mitigated the issue. Because the issue has been mitigated, please Resume package deployments and Retry environment deployments through LCS. We appreciate your patience as we worked to resolve and resume the deployments. For any further questions, please contact Microsoft Support.

On January 15th,  customers that have purchased Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition (D365FFO) and Dynamics 365 for Retail will no longer have administrative access to the Azure SQL server associated with their Tiers 2, 3, 4, and 5 sandbox environments deployed in a Microsoft subscription. Customers and partners can still connect to individual databases using the database admin accounts shown in LCS. The database-level admin accounts have been retained so that customers can continue with diagnostics and run validations on these sandbox environments. This change will add stability and reliability to the operations performed on these sandbox environments. This change impacts new and existing deployments, but does not impact any Tier 1 Sandbox environments deployed in Microsoft or in Customer/Partner subscriptions. For operations that require SQL Server administrative access, we will provide self-serve data management features in Lifecycle services over the next few months. How you perform certain operations may change with this lockdown. We will provide more detailed guidance on how to complete these operations as we come closer the January 15th, 2018 date.

Today, we enabled a new feature in Lifecycle Services (LCS) called 'Report production outage'. This feature is available to all customers that have purchased Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition and have implementation projects with a production environment deployed in LCS. This feature provides a quick and effective channel to escalate issues to Microsoft Support in the event that the services in a production environment are degraded or become unavailable.
Following mutually inclusive conditions, a production outage can be defined as one or more system-wide issues on a live production environment that impact multiple users and prevent your business from performing daily operations.

Reporting flow

1. In a live production environment, a customer experiences an outage or other situation with prevents business from continuing.
2. The customer reports a production outage issue by using the LCS Support portal.
3. The customer selects a production outage issue and provides additional information.
4. A Microsoft support engineer acknowledges the production outage ticket within 30 minutes of submission and begins to immediately collaborate with stakeholders to investigate and resolve the issue.
5. A support engineer contacts the customer to provide a status update.

Access and availability

All users that been added to a customer's implementation project have access to this feature. This includes project owners, organization admins, team members, and environment managers.

This feature is available to:

• Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operation, Enterprise edition
• Environments managed by Microsoft
• A production environment in the LCS Project
• All support plans

Report a production outage

1. 1. Log in to your LCS Project.  
   2. From the hamburger menu, click Support. 
      
   3. On the Submitted To Microsoft tab, click Report production outage.
      
   4. Confirm the production outage, select the outage scenario from the drop-down list, and then click Continue.
      
   5. Add a title and details about the outage, and then click Next.
      
   6. Provide contact information, and then click Next.
      
   7. Click Done. 
      

Note: If you don't see your situation listed in the outage scenarios, enter a support incident through LCS.  If, during the initial investigation by a Microsoft support engineer, it is found the situation does not meet the current list of production outage scenarios, the support incident will be transferred to the correct support team and SLA  based on your current support plan

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for (Lifecycle Services) LCS (January 2018, release 1).

Publish solution packages as a new version and notify customers

In this release of LCS, you can publish solution packages as a new version and then customers will be notified that a new version is available for update. To do this:

1. Using the existing edit functionality, a solution owner creates an updated version of the solution package and then publishes the package with a Global scope.
   For more information about scope, see the LCS (September 2017, release 2) - release notes.
2. When prompted, the solution provider attaches release notes to the solution package.
   Note: Release notes should highlight the changes between the solution package versions, which is needed to help users understand whether to upgrade to this solution package.
3. After the new solution package is published, users who have been granted access at solution level will be sent an email informing them that an updated version of the solution is available.
4. Users who have already imported the solution will also receive a notification that an update is available in their asset library.
   
   When they select the asset and click Versions, they can review the release before they select Get version.
   

Updates to on-premises environment deployment flow in LCS

In this release of LCS we've resolved the issue of a missing Delete button and a Configure button displaying correctly. Going forward, the Delete button will always be visible for an on-premises environment. We have also resolved the issue of the environment showing an Unknown state regardless if the connector running correctly.

Updates to Environment details page

In this release of LCS, we've added environment deployment date and time information to the Environment details page.

You are invited to participate in a survey about Business process modeler (BPM) in Lifecycle Services. We are looking for feedback about your experience with BPM and would appreciate your responses. This survey is now available here, and will be posted until 03/01/2018.

In late 2017, we began investigating multiple reports that Business process modeler (BPM) search and Task guide Help were not working as expected. Based on our research, we determined that we needed to completely rewrite the indexing implementation. One of the requirements for the new implementation was to re-index over 60 million libraries. As of January 22, 2018, the re-indexing is complete. We appreciate your patience as we completed this process. Going forward, if you experience issues with search, follow the standard process for reporting an issue in LCS.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for Lifecycle Services (LCS) (January 2018, release 2).

Dynamics 365 – Translation Service updates

You can now use the Dynamics 365 – Translation Service (DTS) to create a new translation request or run the Align feature for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 product.  

DTS also supports the new file format, XLIFF that Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 introduced for Extensions v2 as native resources. Partners and customers can upload an XLIFF file in .zip format as a source to translate in NAV 2018.

Integrated issue search

When you create a support case, instead of searching for existing solutions, LCS Support now populates the top 10 "Possible issue solutions" using issue search results based on your selection and input. The results are dynamically refreshed as the support case is created and more details are provided.  

Stand-alone issue search remains accessible by using the drop-down menu or Issue search tile.   

New indexing in Business process modeler (BPM) libraries  

In late 2017, we began investigating multiple reports that Business process modeler (BPM) search and Task guide Help were not working as expected. Based on our research, we determined that we needed to rewrite the indexing implementation. One of the requirements for the new implementation was to re-index over 60 million libraries. As of January 22, 2018, the re-indexing is complete. We appreciate your patience as we completed this process. Going forward, if you experience issues with search, follow the standard process for reporting an issue in LCS.

Deployment updates

When you deploy a Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition environment, you will notice that a new tab, Environment administrator, has been added. On this tab, you can add a project user to the Environment administrator role. The user's email address domain is used as the environment's tenant. For example, if you select Alicia@contoso.com, then the environment will be under the @contoso.com tenant. The environment administrator is the only person who has access to the environment after it is deployed. This means that the user will have to log in and add other users as needed. Only users who are in the same organization as the project and are assigned the role of Environment manager or Project owner are available to be added.

 Feedback updates

In this release of LCS, the Feedback form is no longer available. To comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements, when you click the Feedback button, you will be directed to Ideas where you can provide feedback on any of the various forums.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for Lifecycle Services (LCS) (February 2018, release 1).

Downloadable VHDs available directly through LCS 

You can now get downloadable virtual hard disks (VHDs) directly through the LCS Shared Asset Library instead of downloading the VHDs from the Connect site. To get a new VHD, click the Download VHDs tab in the Shared Asset library or the Project Asset library. This functionality is available for both Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and Dynamics 365 for Retail projects.  

Updates to subscription estimator 

With this release of LCS, users no longer need to provide purchased license counts in the Excel template. Instead, the estimator will extract those counts from the organization’s purchased licenses as shown in Purchase History. Any new estimates must be created using the new sample Usage Profile template. For older estimates that have not been marked as active, you will need to create a new estimate using the new sample Usage Profile template and then mark it as active. 

Upgrade your database directly from LCS on development environments 

With this release of LCS, you can initiate and complete the data upgrade process on a development environment directly from LCS. This supports the end-to-end process of upgrading to the latest major release of the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations application. 

The overall upgrade process is described in Scenario 3 in the Process for moving to the latest update of Finance and Operations topic. You can also refer to the Upgrade data in development, demo, or sandbox environments topic for additional details.

After you copy the preview release database to your development environment, and you're ready to upgrade the database, upgrade the database from LCS using the same process of applying updates on an environment. 

1. Go to the Environment page in LCS.
2. Select Maintain > Apply updates.
3. In the list of available deployable packages, select the appropriate data upgrade package (Package type = Data upgrade) based on the release that you are upgrading to.
4. Select Apply to start the data upgrade.

If you receive an error during the upgrade process, use the provided logs to investigate the issue. You can then resume the process from LCS after you have fixed or worked around the error. During this process, the development virtual machine is available by using Remote Desktop.

The following information applies to those using personalized product recommendations in Dynamics 365 for Retail and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition.

Starting on February 15, 2018, retailers will no longer be able to display intelligent product recommendations on a point of sale (POS) device. For more information, see Personalized product recommendations overview.

Reason for deprecation/removal

We are removing the current version of product recommendation service as we re-design this feature with a better algorithm and newer retail-oriented capabilities.

Replaced by another feature?

No. However, after the Spring 2018, we plan to bring back this feature to leverage a new recommendation service.

Product areas affected

Personalized product recommendations in POS.

Deployment option

All

Status

Removed as of February 15, 2018. This affects customers running:

• Dynamics 365 for Retail 7.2 and later
• Dynamics 365 for Operations 1611 and later

Recommended actions

• Go to Retail Parameters > Machine Learning. Disable POS Recommendations and run the 1070 Channel configuration job on the Distribution schedule page.
• Optional: If you have customized the transaction screen to show product recommendations, update the screen layout designer.

A recent change is causing package deployments to fail during the preparation phase when trying to download a package on the BI machine associated with sandbox environments deployed in Microsoft subscriptions. When this error is encountered, the environment state in LCS displays Preparation failed. This issue is currently impacting some, but not all, Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4 and Tier 5 sandbox environments. The error is impacting deployments of all package types when applying updates in LCS.

If the error occurs, the following appears in the log files in the BI folder that can be downloaded from LCS:

[2018-02-19 21:55:07] Downloading servicingtools.zip with download link https://test.blob.core.windows.net/servicingpackages/AX/7/servicingtools/1.0.30/servicingtools.zip?sv=2015-04-05&sr=b&sig=W5b0G85Qp8Q7Y1sxJbhqkkBwWa1v%2Bx1%2B9aSd5k0WeQE%3D&se=2018-02-20T21%3A54%3A53Z&sp=r to Server XYZ
[2018-02-19 21:55:07] Failed to download servicingtools.zip to Server 'XYZ'
[2018-02-19 21:55:07] Sleeping for 30 seconds before retrying

We are actively investigating this issue and will update this blog post as soon as we have released a fix.

In the next few months, customers who have purchased Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition (D365FFO) and Dynamics 365 for Retail will no longer have RDP access to the Tiers 2, 3, 4, and 5 Standard Acceptance Test environments deployed in a Microsoft subscription. Today, customers and partners do not have RDP access to the Production environment but are able to have remote access to the Tier 2+ Standard Acceptance Test environments deployed in a Microsoft subscription. Going forward, to improve the stability and reliability of the operations performed in Production environments and to ensure that Tier 2+ Sandbox environments mimic the Production environment, we will be restricting complete RDP access to these environments. We will automate all the processes that require customers to use remote access for these environments before restricting access. Please note that this change does not impact the non-administrator access that is enabled for Tier 1 Sandbox (or Develop and Test) environments deployed in a Microsoft subscription. We will publish another blog post with an FAQ that has details such as the kind of processes that will be automated, type of access that will be allowed after the lockdown, so it helps customers assess the impact of this change. Also, as the proposed release date gets closer, we will release more detailed timelines and guidance on the new features available through Lifecycle Services (LCS).

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS (February 2018, release 2). 

Download Critical X++ updates 

For Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition, you will have a Critical X++ updates tile available in your production environment.   

To prevent issues that may cause system downtime or service degradation, Microsoft is taking proactive efforts to monitor and service your production environment. Critical X++ updates are recommended KBs that are based on the telemetry data in your production environment. These updates are specific to your production environment, and can be downloaded only for your production environment.   

To apply the critical X++ updates, you need to download the updates from the production environment, then apply it in the development environment to build the deployable package before deploying it to your production environment. For more information about deploying updates, see Apply updates to a cloud environment. 

• All X++ updates tile includes all application X++ updates that are available for an environment.  
• Critical X++ updates tile is only available in the production environment. It includes recommended application X++ updates that are available specifically for your production environment.
  

Dynamics 365 – Translation Service (DTS) User Interface changes  

With this release of Lifecycle Services (LCS), a new field, Request Type has been added to the new translation request in DTS. In the Request Type field, select User Interface for all new requests. Additional request types will be added in future releases.

Additionally, the Files upload page and Request status and output view page have been updated to improve the user interface experience. For questions or feedback regarding these changes, contact dtssup@microsoft.com.

Dynamics 365 - Translation Service known issue

If you try to create a new LCS project or return to an existing project, you may not be able to find the Translation Service tile on the project dashboard. We are aware of this issue and are working to resolve it. For now, to work around this issue, use the project menu to select Translation service.

On the Translation service dashboard, when you select the project name, the project dashboard will refresh, and the tile should appear.