As an ERP admin, one of the foundational things to understand about your system is its environment, tenant, and the settings that control these components. In this blog, I’ll explore how you can access and start using the backend of a typical Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central system using the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model.
When you open your Business Central system and log in, you enter a production environment. Depending on your setup, you may have multiple production environments (often the case in multi-national companies) or UAT/Sandbox environments. All of your environments, though, are managed by one tenant.
The easiest way to manage your environments is to use the Business Central Admin Center. The most straightforward way to reach it is to click the gear icon in the upper right corner of your screen while logged into Business Central and clicking Admin Center on the menu that appears on the right.
There are three types of permissions that allow users to access the Business Central Admin Center:
If you need to assign one of these permissions to a user, you will need to go to your Microsoft 365 Admin Center (not the same as your Business Central Admin Center), accessible at https://admin.microsoft.com. You will need to be a Microsoft 365 admin to access this page.
When entering the Business Central Admin Center, you will see a list of all Production and Sandbox environments in your tenant.
When you click on one of them, you can learn all the technical details, such as the environment’s Azure region, application version, URL, and more. From this screen, you can also take several administrative actions such as:
I hope this exploration of how to manage your environments in Business Central SaaS has been helpful to you. If you want to explore other powerful admin tools for this Cloud-based ERP, I recommend watching a recent webinar I presented on-demand. In it, I cover this process and many others in greater detail.