Overview
When a Microsoft Dynamics 365 upgrade is scheduled there will be an interruption to the regular execution of North52 Schedules. During the upgrade process Microsoft will suspend all Asynchronous processes so all the Schedules will be temporarily suspended as well. Then when the system comes back on-line all the Schedules that have a next run datetime in the past will start to execute. This can have an unintended consequence for any Schedules that would have run during the period of downtime as when the Schedule completes it uses the current datetime to calculate the next run date which may be undesirable.
For example, you might have a daily Schedule that executes each night at 8pm. But on the night of the upgrade the system was offline for 3 hours starting at 7pm and came back online at 10pm. Now the Schedule will see that the next run datetime is in the past and will execute the Schedule. However, when it calculates the next run datetime, this will be tomorrow at 10pm. This is because the current time as of today is 10pm and it is set to execute daily.
Recommended Steps for a Dynamics 365 Upgrade
The following are the recommend steps to carry out for North52 Schedule records when performing a Dynamics 365 upgrade that has significant downtime:
- Before the upgrade stop all Schedules that would have executed during the downtime period
- To stop a Schedule, select it in the list view (one at a time) and then click N52 Commands -> Stop Schedule
- Perform the upgrade procedure
- When the system comes back online apply this process to each Schedule record
- Start the Schedule (N52 Commands -> Start Schedule)
- Wait for it to complete
- Stop the Schedule
- Open the Schedule record and change the next run datetime to what should have been the next run datetime. This would be 8pm tomorrow in the example above.
- Start the Schedule