The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the May release of Lifecycle Services which shipped successfully over the weekend using uninterrupted deployment framework.

NEW FEATURES

•  A new AX 2012 R3 update experience is now publicly available on the Environments page. You can find additional information here.
•  AxUtil build validation has been removed from Customization analysis. Customization analysis can now process any model files regardless of the exported AxUtil version.
•  If Cloud-powered support cannot infer the kernel version when creating a VM, a VM with the latest kernel version that’s available will be provisioned.
•  Several new features are available for Cloud-hosted environments: 

• Infrastructure estimator can now include the following in estimations: Remote Desktop Services servers, Help servers, and G- series VMs.
• The Azure VM Agent is now automatically deployed with every VM deployed via LCS.
• Deployment times for topologies have been reduced by 20-40%* due to the following changes:
• Azure gallery images: All pre-req VHDs are distributed via the Azure worldwide network.
• VMs of a like type in a topology are now configured at the same time.
• Storage commitments have been reduced due to the following changes:
• Copies of VHD files (which were used to create the VMs in your environment) are no longer saved in your storage account.
• Previously, AX 2012 installation files and demo data files were stored on separate disk drives in SQL Server deployments. They are now stored on the same disk drive, which frees up a disk for your use.
• Storage accounts are now Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) accounts, rather than Geographically Redundant Storage (GRS) accounts. 
• We’ve aligned to SQL Server best practices of 64k cluster size. This results in up to a 20% increase in performance.

    *Does not include Demo VMs 

• Issue search now:
• Displays details that indicate when a fix applies to the application, kernel, or both.
• Has received significant performance upgrades. 

• Enhancements have been made to the System diagnostic service. We recommend that you install the latest version of the System diagnostic on-premises component.

The new AX 2012 R3 update experience is available on Lifecycle Services starting in the May release.

In order to use this experience, you must have System diagnostics enabled for your AX 2012 R3 environment. Select your AX 2012 R3 environment in Lifecycle Services.

On the Environment page, the Recommended updates tiles make it easy to assess whether your environment is current. Each tile displays the number of updates that are applicable to the selected environment for the specified view. Updates or hotfixes that have already been applied to your environment are not counted.

The updates tiles include:

• Important updates
• All updates
• Re-released updates– This tile enables you to see whether any of your currently installed updates have been re-released by Microsoft.
• Regulatory updates
• Binary updates
• Cumulative update– This tile provides access to the latest cumulative update.
• Download history– Use this tile to select a package that you previously downloaded, and view the list of hotfixes that were included in it. 

Updates tiles

Click Updates to go to Add hotfixes. You can select an update and see the title, problem description, fix description and affected objects.

You can use search functionality to narrow the list of hotfixes further. For example, a search for performance resulted in the following list.

 You can use filters to narrow the results as well.  For example, filtering on Canada resulted in a single update.

You can select an update and click the Impact analysis tab to see the impact of each hotfix on your customizations. For example, if a class has been customized in your environment and if a hotfix affects that class, one class is listed as impacted.

Select one or more hotfixes, or select all hotfixes and add them to your cart. The system automatically adds any dependent hotfixes, so number in the cart may be more than the number of hotfixes you chose.

Click Download cart to see the Review page. This page also provides a cumulative view of the impacts from the selected hotfixes on your customizations. You can select and remove updates before downloading an update package.

Click download, and then click Save package.

Copy the package to your environment, unzip it and then run OneClickAxUpdate.exe to install it.

Accept the Software supplemental license terms.

You can again review conflicts and run through the Impact analysis wizard (similar to the experience in the Update installer).

Click Install.

Download history

1. After you have downloaded a package, the Download history tile shows at least 1 download package.

2. On the Download history page, select the date of a package to see the hotfixes that were included in it.

We are currently aware of an intermittent service unavailable error for update tile, recommended updates on environment page and cloud-powered support . These are related to the heavy traffic we are experiencing as a result of Dynamics AX 2012 R3 CU9 downloads. We are currently working on a fix to address this issue on priority. 

Update: We have resolved the issue. The service is back online and we are closely monitoring the service for any anomalies. 

The Online Services Agreement (OSA) for Lifecycle Services will be updated in June with the next release of Lifecycle Services.  You will be asked to accept the new OSA.  If you do not accept the new OSA you will not be allowed to access Lifecycle Services.  Contact Microsoft support if you have any questions about the OSA.

With last month’s update, we put out a preview capability for submitting regulatory alerts – i.e. changes in country legislation that impacts Microsoft supported localized country solution (link) - in Cloud Powered Support (CPS). If there is an upcoming regulatory change in your MS supported country that you are aware of you can now flag it to Microsoft by submitting a regulatory alert.

How to enable this beta?

After you login to LCS, go to “Preview Feature Management” tile in LCS and enable “Regulatory alert” in the preview feature list

Once you enable this preview and you go through CPS tile, you will see a new tab called “Regulatory alerts.”

By selecting the new regulatory alert icon (+) - you can enter regulatory alerts through the 4 step submission wizard provided.

1. Search for an existing item – enter search term for the feature/alert - to see if the feature already exists & has been released:

If you don’t find what you are looking for you can proceed with the alert by selecting the ‘Submit regulatory alert’ button:

2. Attach related business processes - You can select business process libraries from the ‘global business process libraries’ drop down box & then drag/drop the related processes to the box on the left. Then select continue.

If you want to skip this step as you don’t know what business process will be effected by the change you can select skip button.

3. Describe the regulatory alert - Enter information for the alert in the appropriate fields - All required fields are marked with red asterix ^(*)

4. Submission confirmation -On completion of all the necessary fields the user needs to provide appropriate consent by ticking the consent checkbox. After you do this you will receive confirmation that your alert has been submitted.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the availability of the June release of Lifecycle Services starting 6/26.

 NEW FEATURES

 General

• Upgraded UX and enhanced navigation experience including introduction of direct navigation between services.
• Organization administrators can now view a list of all projects belonging to that organization. Administrators can also add themselves to any project in that list.
• You can now submit regulatory alerts to Microsoft directly from LCS. You can find additional details on this feature here. (This is a Preview Feature.)

 Business process modeler

• You can now create hierarchies that have more than 5 levels.

 Cloud-hosted environments

• NetBIOS support has been added. To use these options, click Advanced settings > Customize domain settings when deploying your environment. 

• Enterprise Portal reliability improvements have been made. 

• When deleting an environment, deployed resources on Azure are now deleted. Keep the following points in mind: 

• This new feature applies to all environments, including AX 2012 R3, ‘AX 7’, and CRM environments. 

• The deletion process has two phases. Warnings and recommendations are made during each phase to ensure you have backed up necessary data. 

Phase 1:  This phase stops and de-allocates (so there are no usage charges) all VM resources. No other resources, such as networks, VIPS, endpoints, storage, SQL Azure databases, are impacted. 

If you happen to make a mistake, you can recover after this phase is complete. To do so, click Start on the environment. 

Phase 2: This phase deletes all deployed resources. To complete this phase, phase 1 must first be completed, and you must enter the name of the environment that you want to delete. 

• When deploying an environment, you can add the environment to an existing Active Director/virtual network.  Deleting an environment does NOT delete any resource that the Cloud-hosted environment tool did not deploy.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 deployments through LCS will default to CU9 starting next week. Support for CU8 and RTM will continue to be available through “Advanced Settings”, “Supported Versions“. 

Single VM Demo environments will also support RTM, CU8 and CU9.

No other changes to the deployment procedures for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 have been made resulting from CU9 introduction.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 users will not be able to create Repro VMs while filing a support incident using Cloud-powered support service in LCS.

We are actively working on addressing this issue and will post an update once this is fixed.

As part of the July release, we will be making some framework changes to SharePoint integration in LCS on 7/31. Each project user will be promoted to re-authorize your account in LCS for SharePoint access to continue using SharePoint with LCS. 

The Dynamics ERP Translation Solution is designed to improve the Microsoft Dynamics channel partners experience when translating Microsoft Dynamics ERP software into existing or additional languages. The ERP Translation Solution can also be used to translate custom features developed by the Dynamics channel partners. You can read more information on the solution here.

With last month’s LCS update, we released a new tool that allows you to submit an ERP translation support request for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 through LCS. By accessing and signing up to the solution through LCS, you can also monitor your request status and directly communicate with the support team.  

Where you can access this solution

After you login to LCS and enter your project, go to “More tools” section and select “Localization and translation support” tile. Click Enter to proceed from the overview screen.

For first time users or if you don’t have any requests submitted, clicking Enter will prompt you to create a new translation support request. Once a request is submitted to LCS, you will be moved to a dashboard where you can view all of your requests and the details. You can continue to add more requests from the dashboard too.  

Additional features available on the solution dashboard

From the dashboard, you can do the following.

-     View the details of each of your requests.

-     Follow the instructions for your request.

-     Filter the list with any text value in your requests list.

-     Add additional requests.

-     Attach reference materials so Microsoft can help troubleshoot your scenarios.

-     Submit a comment to communicate with Microsoft support team on the solution.

In the dashboard, you will see only the requests submitted through the current LCS project by the project users. Requests submitted through PartnerSource will not be available through the LCS dashboard.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the July release of Lifecycle Services.

 NEW FEATURES

General

• You can now submit an ERP translation support request for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Details on how you can use this feature can be found here. (This is a Preview Feature.)
• You can now deploy Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 CU9 evaluation version from Azure marketplace. 

Business process modeler

At a parent level, you can now combine all child flow charts to make a consolidated view of all child process lines by clicking Compose child lines.

You can revert  this change by clicking Clear composed line.

  Cloud-hosted environments

• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 topologies now default to deploying Dynamics AX 2012 CU9. To deploy prior versions of Dynamics AX, click Advanced Settings> Supported Versions.
• Dynamics AX 2012 R3 topologies, excluding Demo, now support SQL Server Disk customizations where #disks and disk sizes can be customized in Advanced Settings.

Update Experience

The new update experience which was made available during the May update for Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is now available for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2. In order to use this experience, you must have System diagnostics enabled for your AX 2012 R2 environment and this experience is best designed for customers who are on R2 CU7 or R2 CU8.

Private Preview Features - Known issues:

In the Microsoft Dynamics 'AX 7' Technical Preview, you will experience issues when trying to save a task recording output to LCS. At this time, there is no workaround for the issue.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the August release of Lifecycle Services.

NEW FEATURES

General

• Six LCS solutions are live in Azure marketplace for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.
• LCS solutions are curated industry/vertical-specific content including but not limited to, business processes, code, and data and bundled with a consistent execution methodology which helps steer towards repeatable & predictable implementations. If you are a partner/ISV and would like to work with Microsoft for creating solutions for 'AX 7', please complete the survey found here by August 27th, 2015.
• Re-engineered notification framework is in preview this month. This framework will pave the way to light up enhanced notification experiences in LCS in the coming months. Immediate improvements include additional details such as project name and inviting organization details in the project invite emails.

 Business process modeler

Library uploads in Business process modeler to have improved error handling and error reporting in case of failure/error conditions.

 Cloud-hosted environments

• The ability to set SQL Server disk configuration options has now been extended to all topologies that contain multiple VMs. These options enable you to specify the number of disks and the size of each disk to be deployed.

 Public Preview Features

In this release, the 'Localization & Translation support' tool tile has been given the shorter tile name, 'Localization and Translation' to support the internationalization of LCS tooling.

 Service now contains:

• Dynamics Regulatory Alert submission. This was previously located under the Cloud Powered support (CPS) tile.
• Dynamics ERP Translation solution.

 For more information on how you can use these services - see Dynamics regulatory alert submission  and Dynamics ERP translation solution. 

 What's next in LCS - survey

We are always working towards improving your LCS experience and we would like to understand how you use LCS for your projects and what other tools and services you use in conjugation with LCS to meet your ERP project implementation/upgrade needs. The data we receive when you complete this survey will help us prioritize the efforts and the investment in LCS for the coming months.

Microsoft Dynamics AX on Microsoft Azure is enabling great new opportunity for customers and partners to achieve incredible business agility. One of the key areas of future investment for Microsoft Dynamics AX is to deliver solutions through Microsoft Dynamics LifeCycle Services(LCS) that harness the power of Microsoft Azure elasticity. Specifically providing customers and partners tools and services to manage their environments efficiently in Microsoft Azure through simple capabilities through LCS. Because customer and partner feedback is important to us we are initially providing a set of powershell scripts that leverage Azure Automation through Runbooks capabilities as the first step in this journey. The scripts tackle as set of scenarios around more efficiently managing compute resources in Demo, Develop and Test topologies.

The Scripts are as follows;

• Start-AllAzureVMDevTest.ps1 -  Connects to Azure and starts all VMs in the specified Azure subscription and deallocates their cloud services (For DEV/Test Topologies).
• Stop-AllAzureVMTestDev.ps1 - Connects to Azure and shuts down all VMs in the specified Azure subscription and deallocates their cloud services (For DEV/Test Topologies).
• StartExSet.ps1 - Connects to Azure and starts Specific VMs excluding the VM's in the specified AV Set.
• StopExSet.ps1 - Connects to Azure and shuts down all VMs excluding the ones in the specified AV set
• StartExVM.ps1 - Connects to Azure and starts Specific VMs not within the specified exception list in the specified Azure subscription.
• StopExVM.ps1 - Connects to Azure and shuts down all VMs excluding the defined in the List.

We are always working towards improving your LCS experience. We would like to understand how you use LCS for your projects and what other tools and services you use in conjugation with LCS to meet your ERP project implementation/upgrade needs.

The data we receive when you complete this survey will help us prioritize the efforts and the investment in LCS for the coming months.

This is your opportunity to influence the future of LCS. 

Final Status: The LCS service was impacted by a service interruption from Azure impacting Azure Active Directory (AD). The service was fully restored by 6:30 AM UTC. We sincerely apologize if you were
affected by this service interruption.

User Experience: Users could not authenticate with Azure Active Directory (AD) credentials. Authentication via Windows Live ID or Microsoft corporate ID were not affected.

Customer Impact: All LCS customers using Azure AD for authentication were impacted.

Incident Start Time: Thursday, August 27, 2015, 2:50 AM UTC

Incident End Time: Thursday, August 27, 2015, 6:30 AM UTC

Next Steps: A full post incident report will be published as soon as it is made available.

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We are seeing some degradation in the performance related to the act of clicking Deploy in Cloud Hosted Environments. Once Deploy is selected you may see the following for up to :02

In some cases an error will appear requesting to try the deployment again. Retrying the deployment should enable restart of the deployment.

An update on this issue will be posted no later than end of day 8/31.

We are currently aware of a service outage with upgrade analysis for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. We are actively working on addressing this issue. 

This issue is resolved and all services are back online.

We are seeing broad failures in deploying topologies with AD provided by the deployment. These are manifested in the experience by the following (attached picture). More information will be posted shortly on this issue.

As of 4:37PST this issue has been resolved.

Update 12:10 AM UTC

We have resolved the issue.  Customers can now use the Cloud-powered support feature. 

Original post

LCS users are experiencing issues filing support incident cases for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2/R3 using the Cloud-powered support service through LCS.  We are currently having a service issue fetching topics, subtopics and associated account information.

We are actively working on addressing this issue and will post an update once this is fixed. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

We are currently aware of an issue where uploaded Visio’s for BPM are stuck in the queue. We are actively working towards resolving this issue and getting the services back to full functionality as soon as possible.