SaaS enables progress, why block it?

One of the truisms, I believe, is that everything in life is a compromise. While we all strive for perfection in everything, it’s genuinely exceptional if there is no downside. With Business Central SaaS there is significant upside but it's not a magic wand and you have to do some work to get those benefits. The policy published by Microsoft today what you need to do and spells out that, to use a saying I often use, you cannot have your cake and eat it.

In my experience, the primary reason we are seeing more and more Dynamics 365 Business Central customers opt for SaaS, is that they like the concept of always being up to date and the prospect of having new features available for use, as soon as they are released. ‘Evergreen’ SaaS banishes the frustration of ‘we’d like to do that but we can’t till we upgrade’ forever.

Microsoft might provide that enhanced feature in their new release. It might come from the increasing number of ISV’s found on AppSource that can be trialled in a way never possible before. Increasingly I’m seeing clients; now we have a modern dev environment like VSCode, fire it up themselves and create themselves another per tenant extension. 

The compromise is that continual updates are likely to fail without some maintenance eventually. While change brings benefits we might want, it can also bring breaks we would prefer to avoid. That means some work needs to be done regularly to fix those breaks and enable that progression before they impact business.

Microsoft is now reminding partners and users of their responsibilities for keeping any extensions compatible with the next release. We don’t have to maintain SQL database or middle-tier VM’s with SaaS, but we do have to update some of our App more often that the often years apart release cycle we saw with C/AL.

In the early days of #MSDyn365BC SaaS and AL, we got a lot of refactoring (tell me about it, we had V1 apps on AppSource) but in 2020 there has been massively less refactoring required. In fact, both Wave 1 and now Wave 2 released next week, required very little and what was required was for us at least, straightforward. As they’ve got their breaking changes right down, we need to do our part of the contract.

Even if you don’t use DevOps to help manage it for you (and you should if your smart) and exploit the admin and automation API’s (which could do with some work MS), doing this manually is not massively time-consuming. I believe partners should build it into their client contracts, ideally as part of the monthly fee, yes there will be some updates where they lose but there will be others where they win.

Anyone who says they don’t want to see any changes, I’ll respond to by saying why are you using SaaS then? The whole point is that it does progress. If you want constant certainty, then stick with on-premise. Bet that compromise will bite you eventually though when there is something new you do want.