Why?
With the big October release right around the corner, I wanted to look into the updates to D365 Marketing. Although being part of the release waves of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, the marketing module has its own update cycle.
This means that there will come updates, bug fixes and changes to your marketing solution every month that you should be aware of, whenever making customizations to the standard solutions.
Luckily, it is not as scary as it sounds. The updates are not applied to your organization right away. You can be up to 2 updates behind. But when the next update comes out, then you get updated automatically.
This gives you time to test out the changes and make sure that none of your solutions break.
The best way to make sure that you are always ahead of the coming changes is to make sure you have a release plan.
How?
First make sure you know which version of the D365 Marketing app you are currently on. This you can figure out in the Settings section of the Marketing app and choosing Versions under the Overview section.
Your release plan should consider the following steps:
- Read through the release notes
- Note out the changes that affect your solutions
- Note out the updates that you would like to implement in your processes
Some of the changes are implemented automatically and others are added with the possibility to either turn them on or off.
The changes you can turn on and off are in Marketing settings, in the very last area of the sitemap, called Feature switches.
When you have got the first steps in place, then it is implementation 🙂
I suggest you update your Sandbox environment first, in order to test out your changes.
You get the best results if your Sandbox environment mirrors or is very close to the solution you have on your Production environment.
When you are ready to test the changes, then make sure that you test both the technical changes and also the business flows in the system. This is the only way to make sure that both you and your users are prepared for the changes and no big issues are to be expected when going live.
More info
You can read about the changes coming every month from here.
I know they write that the updates are happening automatically, but that is first when you are 2 versions behind 😉
