Understand Business Central online

Path: Administration > Understand Business Central online · tier official · system administration · narrative reviewed (checked by Opus)

Overview

This section explains how Business Central online is structured and operated. The infrastructure page describes the model: a Microsoft Entra tenant holds environments organized by country/localization, and each environment holds companies as separate legal entities. The Environment types subtopic covers production, sandbox, preview, test and demo environments, including trials, partner sandboxes and quotas.

Operational reference pages cover update cycles (major updates in April and October, monthly minor updates, preview, grace and enforced update periods), version numbering mapped to release waves, operation limits, and country/region availability with supported languages.

Partner-facing pages cover reselling, delegated admin access through GDAP, and technical support. Trials and subscriptions covers the customer-side lifecycle. Start with the infrastructure page, then Environment types, then the page that matches your task.

Key points

• Infrastructure: Microsoft Entra tenant, environments per country/localization, companies as separate legal entities within an environment.
• Environment types subtopic (7 pages) covers production, sandbox, preview, test and demo environments, trials, partner sandboxes and quotas.
• Update cycles: major updates twice yearly (April and October), monthly minor updates, with preview, update, grace and enforced update periods, plus rescheduling and maintenance windows.
• Version numbers use the major.minor.build.revision format, with platform and application versions mapped to release waves (listed for versions 24 to 28).
• Operation limits cover client connections, file and database size, search and SQL command timeouts, background sessions, reports, and OData and SOAP requests.
• Country/region availability lists localization providers, Azure geography mapping, and platform and application language support.
• Resellers use Partner Center and the cloud solution provider model; delegated admins get access through GDAP, with the Dynamics 365 Business Central Administrator role and some limits such as job queues.
• Trials and subscriptions covers free trial signup, extending trials, buying subscriptions, data migration, removing licenses and canceling; support page covers contacts, break-fix, performance and data corruption.

Subtopics

• Environment types (7 pages)

More Learn pages

• Country/Regional Availability and Supported Languages: Learn where Business Central is available, which languages are supported, and how partners deliver localized solutions through Microsoft commercial marketplace.
• Delegated admin access to Business Central online: Learn how to help customers easily manage their Business Central online and get the technical support they need as their reselling partner.
• Get started as a reseller of Business Central Online: Learn about how to get started as a reselling partner of Dynamics 365 Business Central online, how to become a partner, and how to onboard customers.
• Operation Limits in Dynamics 365 Business Central: Learn about constraints on what you can do in Business Central online that is different from what you can do with on-premises deployments.
• Technical support overview: Learn about how to support your Business Central customers, online and on-premises, troubleshoot issues, and when to escalate problems to Microsoft.
• Trials and subscriptions: Learn how it works with trials and subscriptions for Business Central online, and how the admin can cancel subscriptions.
• Understanding the infrastructure of Business Central online: Learn how environments in Business Central online reflect the Microsoft Entra tenant with an example of environments and companies across two countries/regions.
• Update cycles: Learn about the timeline of Business Central online update rollouts. Prepare for both major updates and minor updates with minimal disruption in productivity.
• Version Numbers in Business Central: Learn how to read version numbers in Business Central and how to understand them when you troubleshoot issues.

Videos and posts

Linked by a Haiku matcher with a grounding quote from the item’s summary (link/topics.ts); machine-generated.

• Dynamics 365 Business Central on Italy North Datacenter: here we are! (community post): “Dynamics 365 Business Central is now available on the Italy North datacenter”

Business Central pages and reports

The pages, reports and queries this hub’s Learn pages name (ms.search.form, API reference), joined to the code by exact object id (data/index/docs-objects.json); a page shows the table it runs on.

• Page 9 “Languages” · on Table 8 “Language”
• Page 1801 “Assisted Setup” · on Table 1990 “Guided Experience Item”
• Page 1803 “Assisted Company Setup Wizard” · captioned “Company Setup” · on Table 8627 “Config. Setup”
• Page 2500 “Extension Management”
• Page 3563 “Allowed Languages” · on Table 3563 “Allowed Language”
• Page 9882 “Report Res. Govern. Settings” · captioned “Report Limits and Settings”
• Page 20350 “Connectivity Apps” · on Table 20350 “Connectivity App” · via Environment types

Learn also names 1 object with no object page: page/2502.

Source: Microsoft Learn (CC BY 4.0). Descriptions are Learn’s own.