Self-service deployment overview

Self-service deployment is available for cloud environments. Self-service deployment makes deployment easier and significantly reduces deployment times.

What's new or changed

Customers who use the self-service capabilities see the following changes in their Lifecycle Services experience.

• Deployment is self-service and can be completed within an average time of 1-2 hours, depending on the type of environment (sandbox or production). There are no longer lead times and wait times for deployment. You can control when you deploy, and verify that the environment is deployed. This experience is the same as the current experience. For more information, see Self-service deployment FAQ.

  

• You no longer have remote desktop access to the Tier 2+ sandbox environments. All operations that need remote desktop access are now available as self-service actions. The following image shows some of the operations in the environment’s Maintain > Move database menu option. For more information, see Maintenance operations for deployments.

  Important

  Remote desktop access is restricted only to environments deployed by using the self-service deployment. There's no change to existing environments or existing customers.

  

• The diagnostics capabilities remain the same, which enables troubleshooting without remote desktop access. For more information, see Troubleshoot environments deployed through self-service deployment.

  

• You don't have SQL Server access on Tier 2+. You continue to have SQL database access by using just-in-time access.

• You need to provide a combined deployable package for customizations. That is, you must deploy all custom extension packages, including ISV packages, as a single software deployable package. You can't deploy one module at a time. This practice was always recommended and is now enforced.

• The document preview experience is improved to deliver greater fidelity with the printed output. Before this change, documents viewed on screen were displayed by using an HTML viewer. Although the HTML format supported interactive functions like embedded drill-thru links and collapsible sections, this format wasn't a true representation of the document rendered by the service. By using the new embedded PDF Viewer, customers have access to a preview that's consistent with the printed documents. For more information, see Preview PDF documents with an embedded viewer.

• Custom fonts are no longer supported for document reports rendered by using the built-in SSRS framework. Finance and operations apps include access to hundreds of standard, business-ready fonts available for documents rendered by the cloud-hosted service. This portfolio continues to grow as the service expands into new regions and industries. However, the service no longer supports the installation of custom fonts in customer environments. Requests to expand the collection of fonts supported by the service are considered on a case-by-case basis.

• The service no longer supports business logic defined by using Visual Basic script embedded in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports. Visual Basic expressions defined in Tablix controls used to format and evaluate data at runtime continue to be fully supported. However, the service ignores instructions defined in Visual Basic script functions. This change was necessary to improve the security and reliability of the service.

• Sub reports are no longer supported in document reports defined by using the SSRS development tools. Application solutions that include sub reports need to be recreated or replaced with solutions that take advantage of other reporting options supported by the service.

  Important

  Support for sub report items is re-introduced by the Platform update 36 release. Customers dependent on solutions that include properly formatted sub report items can transition to self-service deployments running on Platform update 36 or later.