Microsoft Dynamics NAV Managed Service for Partners Update - Feb. 2017

The update includes the following new or changed functionality and features:

• Dynamics NAV 2017 platform support

  A new platform based on Dynamics NAV 2017 is now available, enabling you to upgrade your tenants to the latest features. To upgrade a tenant, you'll need to perform a technical upgrade of the tenant's application database, and move the tenant to a new application server.

• Move/upgrade tenant process is faster and retains point-in-time history

  The process that runs when a tenant is moved from one application service to another has been changed. The new implementation has the benefits of being faster and retaining point-in-time history of the database.

  Previously when a tenant was moved, the tenant was dismounted from the source application service, and a copy of the database was made. The copy was then mounted on the destination application service, and the upgrade operations were performed on the copy. This was time consuming, and point-in-time history was lost. However, it did allow for quick recovery in cases when the upgrade failed because the original tenant was mounted back on the source application service.

  Now when you move a tenant, the database is dismounted from the source application service, and then mounted directly on the target application service, where all upgrade operations are performed on the database. This is much faster (because database copying is not needed), and point-in-time history is preserved. However, if the upgrade process fails, point-in-time history is used to restore the database to the state it was before you started the move/upgrade process. This can be a lengthy process, and there will be no point-in-time history in the restored database. For this reason, it is more important than in the past to ensure that the upgrade will succeed. You do this by testing upgrades on a test tenant or on a copy of your tenants before you start upgrading all your tenants for real.

• Upload ClickOnce certificate on an application service

  The Application Service page now includes a field that enables you to upload a code-signing certificate for ClickOnce deployment. The certificate will be used to sign the ClickOnce packages that are produced by the Dynamics NAV Managed Service, so your customers will not receive security warnings when downloading and installing the ClickOnce client.

• Encryption of data at rest

  Inactive data, or data at rest, in databases is automatically encrypted. This is done by using the data encryption feature of Azure SQL Database. For information about this feature, see Transparent Data Encryption with Azure SQL Database.

• Improved Azure SQL Database connection stability

  The new platform includes retrying logic to better withstand intermittent AzureSQL Database connection drops.

• Improved application service provisioning

  It is now faster to provision an application service because several stages of the provisioning process are now performed in parallel.

The following issues are resolved in this update:

• None.
  

This update includes the following know issues:

• Dynamics NAV extensions are currently not supported with thecurrent and previous platform versions. Although you can provision an application service with an application version that uses an extension, you cannot install the extension on tenants.
• If you previously removed the ClickOnce URL from the welcome email message, it will still be missing after installing the update. For more information about this issue, see Knowledge Base article 3135572.