The Complete Guide to Setting Up a Unified Developer Experience in Dynamics 365 FnO

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Introduction

Microsoft's One Dynamics One Platform (ODOP) is a multi-year initiative to unify the various Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications—like Finance, Operations, Sales, and others—on a single platform. This consolidation will give users a seamless experience across all Dynamics apps, eliminating the need to navigate between different systems.

ODOP is designed to improve collaboration by enhancing data flow across applications, reducing duplication, and improving data consistency. One key benefit for customers is the reduced time and resources needed to integrate these applications, as they’ll communicate “out of the box.” This integration will enable unified workflows for admins, analysts, and developers, ultimately helping teams focus on core business functions rather than system administration.

For administrators, the ODOP plan aims to simplify management by centralizing tasks within the Power Platform admin center. This unification will streamline tasks like environment setup, backup, and lifecycle operations, which are currently spread across different portals. By centralizing administrative functions, ODOP reduces complexity and enhances efficiency, allowing admins to manage all applications from a single location.

Developers will also benefit significantly from ODOP. The initiative will enhance development flexibility by enabling cross-platform applications, giving developers more choices in tools and frameworks. X++ remains a key part of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, but the platform will support a broader range of technologies, enabling developers to choose the best tools for each scenario.

Microsoft's long-term commitment to ODOP is based on a gradual convergence approach, minimizing disruptions by retaining familiar tools while adding new options as needed​.

I'm confident this article will familiarize you with the detailed steps for setting up your own environment using PPAC.

As of now, environment creation is only available via PP CLI and will be brought to UI in future releases.

Required Permissions

If you are a customer then you must have atleast one of the following licenses -
"Dynamics 365 Finance" or "Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management".
 
If you are a partner or an ISV then you must have the "Dynamics 365 Operations Application Partner Sandbox" license. 

This must be assigned by your license administrator to your user account in Microsoft Entra.
You can verify the same for yourself from here.

Create a new environment

Install the PowerApps Admin module in Powershell.

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.PowerApps.Administration.PowerShell -Force


Now we have to connect this powershell session to your account.

Add-PowerAppsAccount -Endpoint prod 


Create a json object with the properties as mentioned below.

$jsonObject= @" 

{ 

 "PostProvisioningPackages": 

 [ 

    { 

        "applicationUniqueName": "msdyn_FinanceAndOperationsProvisioningAppAnchor", 

        "parameters": "DevToolsEnabled=true|DemoDataEnabled=true" 

    } 

 ] 

} 

"@ | ConvertFrom-Json

DevToolsEnabled parameter determines whether your environment is created with support for X++ development or whether it is simply going to be used for User Acceptance Testing.

DemoDataEnabled parameter specifies whether the environment will have sample data.

Default is false for both parameters.

Then finally, we trigger the start of the environment creation using the below command.

 New-AdminPowerAppEnvironment -DisplayName "DEVRB" -EnvironmentSku Sandbox -LocationName India -Templates "D365_FinOps_Finance" -TemplateMetadata $jsonObject -ProvisionDatabase


 You can read more about this command from here.

The following location options are available - 



The following templates are available for environment creation. [Source]

License Template name Template ID Comments
Dynamics 365 Finance Finance (preview) D365_FinOps_Finance
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (preview) Supply Chain Management (preview) D365_FinOps_SCM
Dynamics 365 Project Operations Project Operations Integrated (preview) D365_FinOps_ProjOps
Dynamics 365 Operations Application Partner Sandbox Project Operations Integrated (preview) D365_FinOps_ProjOps
Dynamics 365 Commerce Commerce (preview) D365_FinOps_Commerce This template is available only for trials.

This process should take about 1.5 hours which is a significant improvement over environment creation from LCS which took around 6-8 hours.


Once the process is completed, we get a response on Powershell and the environment state on PPAC becomes Ready.


In the PPAC, we can see that the environment has been created successfully and also has a Finance and Operations URL.


We can open that link to be greeted with the familiar D365 Finance and Operations dashboard.


Conclusion:

In conclusion, creating or copying environments in PPAC instead of LCS can significantly boost developer productivity by saving time and streamlining the setup process. The simplicity of directly copying a production environment in PPAC contrasts sharply with the more complex LCS process, which involves refreshing production to a sandbox, exporting to a bacpak file, and importing to dev.

Additionally, we can automate the creation and deletion of environments as needed, optimizing Azure resources and further reducing costs.

If you need further assistance, feel free to reach out so we can help you with this!

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