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All roads lead to PPAC: Unified Experience for D365 FO and PP.

All roads lead to PPAC: Unified Experience for D365 FO and PP.

It's not a surprise that tech is changing, and this applies to all the big providers. While some changes are scary, most are indeed mandatory. So, let's jump into one of the changes that have been introduced lately and speaks to all of us – well, maybe not all – but a lot of us.

If you are a long-term D365FO – or any of the apps within Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations or Human Resources -expert ,you are aware of what Lifecycle Services is. If you are sitting on the other side of the fence, as a Power Platform folk, you may need a little bit of background.

According to Microsoft:

Lifecycle Services (LCS) for Microsoft Dynamics is a collaboration portal that provides an environment and a set of regularly updated services that can help you manage the application lifecycle of your implementations of finance and operations apps.

It was the go-to tool for managing Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365 FO) environments—handling deployments, monitoring, and maintenance. But let’s be honest, it had its quirks. The user experience wasn’t the smoothest; some tasks required waiting on Microsoft, and it didn’t really play well with the rest of the Power Platform.

PPAC is taking over, and it’s a big deal. It brings everything under one beautiful roof, hopefully making everything integrated with Power Platform. If you work with D365 FO, this shift isn’t just a nice-to-have, it's something you need to know.

PPAC is where PP admins have been managing everything since 2020, a centralized place for all PP apps. Either for creation, deletion or config, checking analytics about performance, managing security – roles or data, set up DLP, overlook billing and licensing. So it's THE place. And now, on top of PP stuff, you can also manage the same things but for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations.

This is how PPAC looks like, within the environments section:

As you can see there are many options when we select the environment. In my opionion it's nicer looking and easier than LCS, sorry not sorry.

The big question now is how on earth we deploy a Finance environment in this new Unified Experience – also considering that we no longer have this beauty available – we miss you btw…

Relax, it's not that difficult, breath. Everything will be fine. Follow the steps below and you'll get an environment in no time.

After selecting +New, you will need to fill the folowing. For deploying a trial environment, select the type and the Dataverse will be set as es, and Next screen will ask you which apps you want:

Here you can see the appa available.

I can't deploy another trial environment because I reached my cap, however as I already have one environment that I created fllowing these instructions let me show you how it looks like when you select it.

The difference with other environments that don't have a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations instance is that they look like this:

The environment will take a little to provision, if you remember when deploying an environment before PPAC we had to wait something between 30 to 45 minutes, well maybe honestly going to an hour? Depending on the day. So it might take up to that time to be ready, if you are lucky maybe less, but expectations low.

If we select the link provided in this section:

We go directly to the D365FO environment:

Et voilá, with this you should be ready to start playing around with D365 FO environments. It's also cool for Power Platform people to know that they have this option and that they can play with it if they want.

Here are some relevant Microsoft resources to amplify: