After the article Business Central Cloud Migration – an experience report part 2 , it now continues here.
After the changeover
Now the time has come, we have arrived in the cloud with our Business Central version. The client and the pages load quickly, which is very pleasing.
But unfortunately, the work here is not quite finished yet. Some points that can be done more or less quickly still have to be worked through here.
Users and rights
The first thing that stood out was that the users and the associated rights are not available. Although there is the Define User Mapping action on the Manage Cloud Migration page, this function does not assume any user rights, but only the name of the users, which is used, for.B example, for timesheets. A direct transfer of the rights could also be error-prone, that there may be other permission sets or other rights in the cloud version.
Practical tip: Since the creation of user rights can be very time-consuming, it is recommended to work with user group memberships to speed up this process.
A help here can be the recording of permissions , here is a video on how to record permissions (German):
Personalizations and saved views
Now that it is a new environment and the users have been newly set up, user-related system data such as personalizations and saved views are unfortunately missing. Unfortunately, these have to be set up again. If adjustments are to apply to all users, it is advisable to make them in AL, as the corresponding app can then be installed immediately and the users have a time saving here.
We have decided to personalize again if necessary. That went quite well on the side, but I still found pages for weeks that I had to personalize.
Other facilities in Business Central
It is very important to take a look at job queues and master data templates before commissioning the cloud version. These are also not taken over and must therefore be set up. Again, time must be planned accordingly.
If you come from an older version of Business Central or NAV (or Navision), it can of course also happen that there are now functionalities that were not yet available in the previous version and that you would like to use.
I would like to list here only a few examples without claim to completeness:
- E-mail functionality
- Document layouts
- Exchange Rate Services
- Automated payment transactions
- Field Monitoring
- Sales price calculation
Practical tip: View What’s New materials of the versions between your previous and the new version. A summary of all news per version can be found here: What’s new in Business Central | NAVTALK – All recordings
Setting up a Sales/Dataverse connection
A big and important point was also the setup of our Sales/Dataverse connection. Here there were also initial problems, because the synchronization did not work immediately as described.
The synchronization has ignored and overwritten our set-up specifications several times, even in the repeated test. A test in a copy before activation in real operation is absolutely necessary. It is imperative to work with a test instance of Sales.
Practical tip: Create a test instance of Sales and test the connection after the test migration with the Business Central Sandbox.
Set up other connections
Last but not least, it is then necessary to check whether there are other connections to other systems that have to be set up. For example, connections to Office products such as Teams, Outlook and Excel should be mentioned here.
Interfaces that have been individually programmed must also be checked and, if necessary, adapted.
Practical tip: If possible, it makes sense to test this in the sandbox environment after the test migration.
Getting to know the new environment
Now at the latest it is time to make the new environment available to the users. Depending on which version you come from, this can be a big change for the individual user, as you may have previously worked with a different client (Windows Client, Classic Client).
Here, of course, it makes sense to give the users access to the test environment and to provide appropriate training.
On our platform there is a basic course for this, which is updated annually and thus always contains the latest version. This course explains how to work with the client in general, such as .B filtering, optimizing views, working with the keyboard,…
A guide on how to optimize views and thus make working easier can be found here (German):
Here is the link to the current basic course: Business Central Basic Course [2021] (German)
Our conclusion
On the whole, the migration worked well and the work could be resumed quickly. However, extensive testing is important and indispensable, otherwise there may be surprises that you did not expect.
In terms of setup , however, the project took more time than we thought before the migration.
We have been working with the cloud version for several months now and are very satisfied with the stability and speed and the automatic updates are of course a special highlight.
Detailed instructions for Business Central Cloud Migration can be found here: Business Central Cloud Data Migration