Say hello to the Regulatory Configuration Service – RCS

This time I’ve got a less technical and more functional post about the Regulatory Configuration Service (RCS) for you. I couldn’t find too much information about it out there, besides the MS Docs pages. Lately I had to set it up in some projects, and wanted to share my findings.

With the release of the 10.0.17 version the deprecation of the LCS as a storage option for the ER configurations was announced: Removed or deprecated in 10.0.17
So this was quite some time ago, given the fact that last week 10.0.25 was released as PEAP. But deprecation is planned for April 1st, so there is still some time left and the deprecation date could be subject to change.

What is the RCS environment?

If you are not aware of what the RCS is, it’s ‘a standalone designer and lifecycle management service for no-code/low-code globalization functionality‘. It can be used to develop ER configurations and to manage the configuration lifecycle.
Basically, it’s a D365 environment with access only to the Electronic Reporting, Feature Management and System Administration workspace. Note, that there is no data stored in the RCS and it doesn’t know about the metadata from the customer.
Also check the LCS deprecation site as there is a FAQ and the actions you need to take if you want to move your configurations to the RCS: Lifecycle Services (LCS) storage deprecation

Setup the RCS environment

The setup of the RCS is self-explanatory. We have to keep in mind, that a user from the tenant in which the D365 is deployed also has to access the RCS through the provided link.

The RCS comes at no additional costs and is part of the existing F&O app licenses.

System Management

In the system management workspace, it’s possible to add the users which will work with the RCS environment. So here the customer admin can add other users who are developing the configurations.

Feature Management

Here we can enable ER related features, but there are also some features from the system administration module.

Electronic Reporting

Now it gets interesting, the workspace looks like the GER workspace in the D365 system, but there are some new links to explore:

Connected Applications

I mentioned above that the RCS doesn’t know about the metadata of any customization that has been done in a development environment. So how can we use them in our configurations you might ask.
The solution is to use so called ‘Connected Applications’.

Here we configure the environments to connect to. When the connection is setup it’s possible to get the metadata from the specific environment. Also, it’s possible to share the configurations to the connected environments.
Setup itself is easy, we only need to create a new record, give it a recognizable name and insert the environment URL. Validate the setup with a click on the check connection button and we’re done.

When we now head to a configuration, we are able to select a connected application to which the configuration is connected. It will then read the metadata from this application and we’re able to use fields that were added in this environment.

This gives us more flexibility as you can easily switch the connected application and use fields that are not present in another environment.

Git integration parameters

This part is very interesting, we can setup a Git repository where we can store our configurations. Thanks to this integration the configurations can be added to an ALM flow almost effortless.

Advanced Sharing

The best improvement we can see in the advanced sharing menu. Here it is now possible to choose between the following options:

• Get a Link
  • This option will give you a deep link to the selected configuration
• Git repository
  • Here we can share the configuration to the configured Git repository
• Global repository
  • Upload the configuration to the global repository
• Upload to connected application
  • Upload the configuration to the connected application. With this option it’s very easy to distribute the configuration to the desired environments. No need to share to LCS and get it from there, or even to download and upload it using XML files.

Personally, I like the RCS approach and I think it gives us a a more convenient way of distributing the configurations. Compared to the LCS approach it’s more comfortable and more flexible.
Not everything is perfect, for example we can’t debug or test the configurations in the RCS as there is no data present.

I’m curious if anyone is also using the RCS already and what their conclusions and finding are.

Original Post https://d365fostuff.wordpress.com/2022/02/14/say-hello-to-the-regulatory-configuration-service-rcs/