We would like to give feedback on lack of release versions notes/documentation that comes with D365 F&O releases. We have observed that not all changes introduced in a version are documented in the release notes - especially when relating to the critical area of Commerce / Payments, which results in business impact and even financial loss.
1. For example, in v42 / v43, Microsoft internally introduced a new flight called “RetailSavePaymentCaptureTokenFiledValueInCustomerOrderPropertyFlight” (This flight changes the AUTH request to CAPTURE request). This flight was enabled by default when the system was upgraded from v41 to v43. As a result, our asynchronous customer order logic was heavily impacted. Only after multiple calls and meetings with Microsoft did we learn from Microsoft had introduced this flight in v43 — yet it was not mentioned anywhere in the release notes. As a result v43 was delayed for us by 2-3 months.
2. Now, after the v45 upgrade, we are once again facing issues with asynchronous customer orders. We are still analyzing what changes may have been introduced, but this uncertainty makes it difficult for us to take proactive action. Just to share some figures around sales from such orders - In upcoming peak sales period (Nov through Dec to early Jan) forecasted sales is 1 million GBP per month from asynchronous customer orders (also called shop mail orders) where customer places an order in store to be delivered by the Distribution Centre.
3. After upgrading from v43 to v45, we started facing an issue with the token scope in the CreditCardCust table.
In v45, the system is now sending the value as non-recurring instead of unknown. This behavior started only after the v45 upgrade, even though we are not using the non-recurring feature.
As a result, our Async Customer Orders are failing because we cannot use duplicate UniqueCardId, and the system is unable to create Async orders.
To validate this, we installed v44, where the token scope still appears as unknown and the system is able to create Async Customer Orders without any issue. From our side, we are unable to identify what changes Microsoft has introduced in v45 that caused the token scope to appear as non-recurring. If this issue was related to our code customization, the same behavior should also have occurred in v44, which is not the case
4. Each release upgrade is getting increasingly challenging due to lack of information provided in release notes, particularly in the store commerce area – this has been flagged to Microsoft on a number of occasions but there has been no improvement. For this reason we have to do a full POS regression test each time as we don’t know what has changed.
Since version 41, changes have been made in the area of payments which is critical, the documentation is poor, response from MS on issues logged is very slow and this is a difficult area to troubleshoot as we need to do physical testing with cards and involve our payment provider, elongating the time to resolve issues.
We feel it would be highly beneficial if the release notes contained complete and transparent details of all changes (including new flights and feature toggles). This would allow us to properly assess the impact in advance, plan mitigation steps, and avoid disruption to customers operations.