FAQ for developer and admin experiences for Dynamics 365 Business Central

Business Central is available in a limited number of markets, but new countries/regions are added through Microsoft-led localization or through partner-led localization on a quarterly basis. For more information, see Countries and Translations Supported.

Business Central online is governed by Microsoft's Modern Lifecycle Policy. This means continuous service updates and a major update every six months. For more information, see Dynamics 365 Business Central Service Compliance and Dynamics 365 release schedule and early access.

You can get an overview of new and upcoming changes in the Dynamics 365 release plans.

Business Central online is governed under the Modern Lifecycle Policy. The service level agreement terms are described in the document that you can download from the Service Level Agreements for Microsoft Online Services section on the Licensing terms page.

For more information, see Service Compliance.

For information about lifecycle support for Business Central on-premises, see Software Lifecycle Policy and Dynamics 365 Business Central On-Premises Updates.

Databases are protected by automatic backups that are kept for 28 days. The backup includes data from any production and sandbox environments that the database contains. Administrators of a Business Central tenant can't directly access or manage these backups because they're managed automatically by Microsoft. But admins can restore their environments to a specific point in time in the past using the Business Central admin center. For more information, see Restoring an environment and Automated backups - Azure SQL Database.

No, but from the Business Central administration center, you can export the database for Business Central online environments as .bacpac files to an Azure storage container. For more information, see Exporting Databases.

Yes, you can. Find free eLearning content on the Microsoft Learn site. As a partner, you also have access to the Dynamics Learning Portal, where you can find older eLearning courses for Business Central. For more information, see the Microsoft Dynamics 365 training page.

You can find guidance for setting up Business Central in the application content. For more information, see Setting Up Business Central. Also, starting with 2021 release wave 1, you can customize the onboarding experience. For more information, see Onboarding experiences in Business Central.

You can also find relevant content on the Microsoft Learn site.

For more information, see Preparing Demonstration Environments.

You can use the Help and Support page in your customers' tenants to find technical information, and they can use that page to contact you. You can also create a sandbox environment and use Visual Studio Code to debug that. For more information, see Managing Technical Support.

For Business Central online, there's a limit to how much database storage capacity we allow each tenant to use for their environments (databases).

By default, Business Central customers can use up to 80 GB plus an allowance per licensed Essentials or Premium user of database storage capacity. This storage capacity is shared, meaning that the sum of capacity usage across all environments in a tenant must not exceed the limit. If a tenant exceeds this limit, Microsoft restricts administrative actions that create additional environments. Exceeding the storage limit will not interrupt transaction processing within the existing environments.

Some businesses have unique scenarios that may require additional storage. For those organizations that need more space, there's an option to purchase extra database capacity.

For more information, see Managing capacity.

The Outlook add-in is designed to function as a business inbox in Outlook, based on the standard Business Central online. If you're using a different type of deployment, such as a solution that is part of the Embed App program, then you must set up an Azure Key Vault and specify secrets for TEMPORARYDOCUMENTSTORAGEACCOUNT and TEMPORARYDOCUMENTSTORAGEKEY. For more information, see Using Key Vault Secrets in Business Central Extensions.

The first releases of Business Central on premises included an installed client derived from Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Since 2019 release wave 2, this legacy component, referred to as "the Windows client", hasn't been available for Business Central. For more information, see FAQ About the Windows Client and Business Central.

If you have a background with Dynamics NAV, you'll find that in-product Help is different in Business Central. For more information, see User Assistance Model.

If you were familiar with PartnerSource, then the new Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner Portal site is different. But it hosts many useful links and other assets that can help you ramp up on what's going on with Business Central. The site requires that you sign in with a partner account. Some assets are marked as confidential and can't be shared with clients.

When you exchange data through the API, you might have to safe list the IP addresses. The addresses depend on the direction of the call.

• Inbound

  Inbound requests go into the Business Central API, for example through OData calls. The requests go to the https://api.businesscentral.dynamics.com URL that currently resolves to IP addresses in the IP ranges of the following Azure regions:

  • Australia East
  • West Europe
  • Switzerland North
  • East US
  • South Central US

  Important

  Data routed through https://api.businesscentral.dynamics.com isn't stored in these regions. The data transits through them.

  We reserve the right to change the list of Azure regions used by the https://api.businesscentral.dynamics.com URL without prior announcement. We will, however, update this guidance accordingly once such a change is implemented.

• Outbound

  Outbound requests come from Business Central environment, such as code that uses the HttpClientdata type to send HTTP requests. The requests come from an IP address in the IP ranges of the Azure region in which the environment is hosted. You can see where an environment is hosted on the Environment details page in the Business Central admin center. For more information, see Managing Environments.

You can find the IP addresses of the Azure regions as a download on the Download center. Search for the AzureCloud.<region name> sections in the file to find the corresponding IP ranges, such as AzureCloud.westeurope.

FAQ for developing in AL Features not implemented in on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Business Central Software Lifecycle Policy and Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises updates Dynamics 365 Business Central compliance FAQ for Dynamics 365 update policies Dynamics 365 resources Welcome to Dynamics 365 Business Central