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Field notes from enterprise Microsoft delivery

Written by the architects who build and run these platforms for clients. Fabric, Azure, Power BI, Copilot and the governance that holds them together.

Written from delivery

Every piece is written or reviewed by the architects who build and run these platforms for clients.

Sourced, not summarised

Where we state a number we say where it came from, and when we last checked it.

Built to be used

Patterns, runbooks and checklists you can take straight into your own environment.

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Two panels comparing an AX 2012 upgrade: carries across the database upgraded in place with full transactional history and configuration and master data, rebuilt covers overlayered code as extensions, integrations against new patterns and operations on a shared model, with a note that upgrade runs only from R2 or R3 and not from virtual companies or data partitions
Dynamics 365

AX 2012 to Dynamics 365: what upgrades and what gets rebuilt

AX 2012 to Dynamics 365 has an upgrade path, but only from R2 or R3 and not for every system. What carries across, what
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Two horizontal bars comparing delivery layers: a workload bar that ends at a clear handover point marked done, and a central bar for policy, baselines and standards that runs off the edge of the frame because it never completes
Azure

Managed service vs project delivery model

Managed service vs project gets treated as a commercial choice. It is an operating model decision, and a project cannot deliver the central layer
Two rows of blocks comparing DLP simulation coverage: SharePoint and OneDrive fully evaluated including existing items, against Exchange, Teams and devices where only six of twenty blocks are filled because only new items are in scope
Data governance

Purview DLP policy design starts with one sentence

Purview DLP policy design starts with a sentence, not a template. Microsoft puts intent before configuration, and simulation mode is not a dress rehearsal.
Four Dynamics 365 integration options as an ascending ladder: do not copy using a virtual table, copy on a schedule, copy on an event, and copy both ways with dual-write, which also carries a Dataverse schema change
Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 integration patterns: copy or connect

Dynamics 365 integration patterns start with one question: does the data get copied at all? Dual-write is a schema change, not a connector you
Four published Business Central limits shown as cards: 300 companies per environment, 3 TB of data, 6,000 OData requests per user, and 10 concurrent background sessions highlighted as the ceiling that binds first
Dynamics 365

Business Central vs Finance and Operations

Business Central vs Finance and Operations is asked as a headcount question. Microsoft publishes no user threshold, but it does publish the hard limits.
Two panels answering which Power Platform projects need a baseline: fast-track for personal helpers under five developer days with no external dependencies, where adoption count is enough, and a hard gate for 50 or more users, premium licensing or auditable processes, requiring cycle time, error rate and labour hours before the sprint.
Power Platform

Power Apps ROI: the number you cannot recover

Power Apps ROI rests on a baseline most teams never capture. Every measure Microsoft lists is a before and after, and the before is
Decision diagram from the question what do we do if this does not arrive, branching to two answers: nothing, meaning it is an event for Event Grid or Event Hubs, and reconcile, raise a ticket or re-send, meaning it is a command for Service Bus.
Azure

Azure messaging services: the choice is command or event

Choosing between Azure messaging services starts with one question: is this a command or an event? Answer that and the product choice mostly makes

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