Category: Dynamics Features (Page 1 of 3)

Self-Service Disaster Recovery

Self-Service Disaster Recovery for Power Platform and D365

April 14, 2025 /

Microsoft provides Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) across all production environments as part of the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform offerings. This aims to minimize outages and disruptions and ensure that your data is protected at all times.

Infrastructure is deployed to an Azure Geography, and a geography is made up of between 2 to 3 Azure Availability Zones (generally located 300 miles / 482 kms away from each other). An Azure Availability Zone deploys critical data center infrastructure such as network, power, and cooling. To ensure resilience across a geography, your environments are replicated across to at least two Availability Zones in real time.

The diagram shows a typical architecture of a geography that serves a single or multiple countries/regions.

Figure 1 – Example of Azure Geography and Availability Zones

If a failure is detected within an availability zone, disaster recovery will route traffic to the unaffected availability zone. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is stated to be near zero, and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is stated to be less than 5 minutes.

As part of Wave 1 Release 2025, Microsoft released Self-Service Disaster Recovery for Power Platform as a public preview.

Today we’ll be further exploring this capability by running a Disaster Recovery Drill.

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Power Platform Update Guide for Administrators

Navigating Updates: Your Guide to Microsoft Power Platform Updates

April 2, 2025 /

This article provides a high-level overview of managing updates for the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365. It is important to stay informed about the latest updates and understanding the different types of updates that are deployed to ensure platform stability and minimize disruptions.

New features, optimisations, bug fixes, deprecations, and security patches are constantly being deployed, making this guide essential for anyone whose role involves managing Power Platform environments. It covers both new and existing information that is crucial for effective management.

In this article I will be focusing on four core concepts:

  • Release Wave Updates – Major updates to the Power Platform service that are generally available twice per year in April and October. These updates are deployed automatically.
  • Early Access Updates – Updates designed for testing functionality in test environments, available ahead of the automatic wave updates. These updates are deployed manually.
  • Refresh Cadence (Incremental Updates) – Updates that occur between Wave Release cycles and can be deployed weekly or monthly. These updates occur automatically.
  • Release Channels (for Model Driven Apps) – Semi Annual (twice yearly) or Monthly updates to the Unified Interface that drives Model Driven Power Apps.

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Dataverse Long Term Data Retention

Dataverse Long Term Data Retention

February 4, 2024 /

What is Dataverse Long Term Data Retention?

Currently in Public Preview (Q1 2024), Dataverse Long Term Data Retention allows your organisation to archive data to long term storage. But what exactly does this mean?

This means that you can achieve a number of goals:

  • Reduce your overall Dataverse Database Capacity (more on this later)
  • Have more control over data that will only primarily be used for auditing or occasional read-only access. It is designed as an interim stage between having live data, and deleted data. Microsoft calls this ‘retained data’.
  • The ability to query retained data on demand.
  • Build long term retention policies that will work within your ALM, meaning that you can define as a solution layer and carry your long term retention policies between your higher environments.

Note, that this feature should only be enabled in non-production environments for testing purposes at this stage (see Known Issues).

How do I set up Long Term Data Retention?

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Continuous Threat Monitoring for Dynamics 365

January 11, 2022 /

According to the Identity Theft Resource Centre, data breaches in 2021 were up 17% over 2020 (source). The average cost of data breaches was also escalating with a report by IBM indicating the typical cost was $4.24m per breach (source).

This represents a worrying trend for our industry, and it is no wonder that data security has now become top of mind for CIOs and key decision-makers.

While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are invaluable in managing your client relationships in a central datastore, they also present a soft target for nefarious actors.

In today’s blog post, I will explain what the recently released Continuous Threat Monitoring for Dynamics 365 is and how it can be used to secure your CRM.

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Dynamics 365 and Power Platform April 2019 Release – Marketing Suite first impressions

January 22, 2019 /

It feels like Christmas to me, and I’m tearing open my presents. Welcome to my ‘unboxing’ blog series on the upcoming D365 and Power Platform April 2019 Release. Over the next few weeks I’ll be going through the April 2019 release, module by module.

I’ll be specifically looking for those gold nuggets that I think will make a big impact, as well the leaps in innovations that haven’t been seen before in the industry.

Today let’s delve into Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Marketing suite.

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