Last Customer Driven Upgrade for Dynamics 365 version 9.0 scheduled to begin February 2018

Microsoft is in the final phase to prepare the customer driven update roll-out that will allow you to schedule the update of an instance to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, version 9.0. The window for processing the scheduled updates begins in February 2018 and ends in August 2018.

Dynamics 365 administrators will be notified via the Office 365 Message Center and will receive an email when the update scheduling window opens.

Who can update?

You can upgrade to version 9.0 from version Dynamics 2016 (8.0), Dynamics 2016 UPD1 (8.1) or Dynamics 365 (8.2).

How to update?

To see the update availability, navigate to the UPDATES tab on your Dynamics 365 Administration Center. Instances that are eligible for upgrade will have a Status of ‘Update available’. You can schedule your update and book your preferred and alternate dates.

More information:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/manage-updates

Last of the Customer Driven Upgrades

This will be the last (or perhaps one of the last) so-called Customer Driven Upgrades (or Updates). Microsoft is moving towards a new goal: One version, with all users on the latest available version.

By April 2019, Microsoft will have upgraded all customers, either through the Customer Driven Updates or forced in the last few months.

Once every customer is on the latest version, starting after April 2019 there will continuous update cycle. Every X months, Microsoft will release a new update, to which all customers can upgrade. There will be a window to preview the new version ahead of time but, as soon as that next update becomes Generally Available, all customers must update.

This is something you should plan ahead for! Make sure you have a sandbox instance that is an accurate representation of your production organization instance. This was already important for testing out the Customer Driven Updates but, this will become even more important in the future.

Keep a separate sandbox just for this type of acceptance testing of new updates, this should be different from the sandbox you use to create and develop your customizations.

News about the update to v9.0:
https://community.dynamics.com/enterprise/b/365teamblog/archive/2017/12/18/customer-driven-upgrade-for-dynamics-365-version-9-0-is-coming

News about the end of Customer Driven Updates:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2018/07/06/modernizing-the-way-we-update-dynamics-365/