Today, businesses exist in a hostile environment with stiff competition all around. To deal with the challenges arising out of the hostile competition, businesses should adopt tactical practices. 

One of the effective ways of dealing with the stiff competition is implementing the Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution. 

Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365

With the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can get a wide array of benefits that can take your business to the next level.

The benefits of the implementation are:

• Automation of tasks
• Increase the return on investment
• Enhance customer satisfaction
• Shortens the sales cycle
• Get seamless connectivity in your information systems
• Elicit valuable insights from data to improve decision-making 
• Easy deployment and scalability
• Increase productivity and collaboration in your organization 

The Upgrading Process

When you use Microsoft Dynamics 365, the dynamics 365 upgradeis essential to perform periodically.

You will get all the essential updates online. And you should be aware of the updates. Typically, Microsoft delivers two major updates in April and October.

In addition, Microsoft also delivers minor updates from time to time. Such updates usually relate to bug fixing and performance improvements.

Before a major release, Microsoft allows customers to:

• Download the detailed release plan 
• See a preview for the update to test new features 
• Schedule the date and time of the upgrade 
• Automatically be updated to the latest version 

While some changes will be automatic, others will have to be enabled by the administrator.

Best Practices of the Upgrade

Usually, Microsoft implementation partners know the best practices of upgrading Microsoft Dynamics365. The practices are as follows:

First, check whether you have the right environment set. Typically, there have to be four environments: production, UAT, Test and Development. The different environments separate development from work.

All you need is a sandbox and a production. You will see the update previews going into the sandbox for testing before proceeding to the production environment.

Secondly, you need to download the release plan after it becomes available. Usually, it becomes available before three months of the release. 

When you go through the release, you will get a good idea of what it includes and that can give you a sense of the changes being made. Then, you can compare them with your system.

However, there can be one aspect that you may not like. Usually, the release notes are long. But, it can help if you look at the summaries and highlights.

Finally, test the updates. And, do not skip this step. Although it is a time-consuming task, you should test the updates to ensure that they are functioning properly. And, if anything is causing an issue, you should fix it.

Moreover, you should also review whether the updates’ customizations, integrations, and third-party solutions have supported you. 

Remember, unsupported functions are likely to stop functioning after the upgrade. But, again, your upgrade partner will have the tools to check for the unsupported functions. 

Conclusion      

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementation, you can reap substantial benefits to help your business flourish in stiff competition. It helps your business increase productivity and efficiency by having features to improve your current business practices and processes. Before upgrading, you should speak with your Microsoft partner about the convenient time for actuating the upgrade. Moreover, you should not fail to keep an eye on the upcoming upgrades.