Users of Dynamics 365 finance and operations sandbox environments should be aware of changes to Microsoft’s update strategy.

What are PQUs?

Microsoft is introducing PQUs or proactive quality updates. PQUs are cumulative builds of hotfixes that are delivered with “near-zero downtime.” Updates are applied to LCS (Lifecycle Services) environments in the background, deployed by region. PQUs are automated, ensuring that customers will get fixes quicker. Before most customer didn’t get these updates until they deployed the next service update.

Microsoft has three technologies/processes that aim to make the PQU process “non-disruptive”:

• Higher-quality concise payloads
  • Limiting to bug fixes and regulatory changes
• Safe deployment rollout process
  • • Rolling out to small subsets rather than everyone at once in case any issues are found, reducing risk
• Fallback via flighting
  • Allows for enabling or disabling of changes introduced in PQUs

Read more on PQUs here:  

Proactive quality updates overview - Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

When are PQUs released?

Microsoft has a published release schedule. Microsoft will send notification to customers five days before a PQU is applied. Customers cannot delay, reschedule, or pause a PQU.

Any finance and operations environment provisioned after August 17^th, 2023 is automatically signed up to receive PQUs per this schedule:

Release schedule for proactive quality updates - Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

How can I tell what is in a PQU?

The changes included in a PQU can be found by going to LCS (Lifecycle Services), open the Environment details for your sandbox environment, and then select View Update for the latest PQU in the Available Updates section. Then export the build to a CSV or Excel file. Then by filtering for and selecting the build version that’s less than or equal to the build number, you will be able to review the delta payload.

Read more here in the Microsoft documentation:Proactive quality updates FAQ - Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

Key Takeaways

Customers on Dynamics 365 should familiarize themselves with all the new PQU information and come up with a plan to deal with these new changes. Since Sandbox updates will be more frequent, releases of customizations will need to be more tightly controlled to ensure that versions are consistent when testing and deploying to different environments. If a test sandbox is updated automatically via PQU before testing is completed, tests may need to be re-run, resulting in more time spent on a particular release. Sticking to more agile, smaller releases along with being aware of the PQU release schedules will help minimize any testing and deployment issues related to the automatic PQU updates. And the frequent updates will solve the problems of environments not getting updated on a regular basis. This will ensure sandboxes will receive the latest hotfixes that may give additional functionality or solve some problems users are facing.

Written by
Jeff Warren