Currently, there are only two types of environments: Production (a single instance) and Sandbox (typically three environments). A better approach would be to introduce a third category: "Startup." The three available environments could then be allocated between Sandbox and Startup as needed. The project team should decide which environments to designate as Sandbox and which as Startup.
Startup environments would have higher priority than Sandbox environments. Like Production environments, they should be kept available as much as possible. Additionally, if maintenance is required, the back-end team should notify the project team a few days in advance.The reason for the suggestion is often unavailability of the current Sandboxes, when the Customers are working on development or just testing new features in Business Central.
Comments
This is particularly important for Business Central Partners. They work in project teams on a custom made extension for their Customer. This Customer is going to use Business Central as their future ERP system. This process takes a while, and during this period, it is indeed very important the Partner and Customer can continue their work in a proper way:developers are developing a custom made extension on a sandbox environmentconsultants demonstrate and set up Business Central as required to fulfill customer requirementscustomer key-users and other users are testing in an acceptance or test sandbox environmentcustomer data is imported or migrated from other systems to their new ERP Business Central.During this period, the sandbox environments should get a higher priority, for example by putting them in a "Startup" environment.Once the Customer has gone live into production with his new built Business Central system, then the Startup environments are not needed anymore, and the development, test and acceptance environments can go back to the "Sandbox" environments.
Category: Development
Business Central Team (administrator)
Thank you for this suggestion! Currently this is not on our roadmap. We are tracking this idea and if it gathers more votes and comments we will consider it in the future. Best regards, Business Central Team