Dynamics 365 Business Central: Cloud Migration and permission sets.

When moving Dynamics 365 Business Central customers from the on-premises platform to the online platform, the absolutely recommneded way to do that process is by using the Cloud Migration toolset provided by Microsoft.

With this set of tools, you can manage cloud migration from Dynamics 365 Business Central online through a connection to the on-premises database and various components that establish a pipeline for replicating data. The on-premises solution remains the operative environment until you complete the cloud migration. A schema of the migration components is described in the following picture:

The cloud migration process transfers business data from one or more companies in the on-premises database to the online tenant database and data migration can be run multiple times.

The Cloud Migration Management page in the web client is a central hub for managing cloud data migration. This page provides you with the necessary actions and information to manage your migration services and keep track of data migration runs.

Results of the cloud migration process will then be available via the Migration Information factbox:

You can find more informations about how to setup the Cloud Migration process here (the goal of this post is not to explain that process in details).

After the data migration, all users in the migrated company (except Admin) will be assigned to the Intelligent Cloud user group. This means that the database for them becomes read-only. After you upgrade the data, you must open the Users card page and assign normal permission sets.

What changes with Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release?

In the upcoming V23 release, in the Cloud Migration Management page you will have a new action called Enable/Disable Removing Permissions from Users. This action will allow you to enable/disable the current behavior to assign Intelligent Cloud user group to all users when you setup the cloud migration:

How can I have this feature in previous Dynamics 365 Business Central versions?

To avoid having users with the Intelligent Cloud group assigned after cloud migration on previous versions of Dynamics 365 Business Central, you can create a per-tenant extension defining the following event subscriber:

Publish it on your Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant and that’s done!