The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for Lifecycle Services (LCS) (February 2018, release 1).

Downloadable VHDs available directly through LCS 

You can now get downloadable VHDs directly through the LCS Shared Asset Library instead of downloading the VHDs from the Connect site. To get a new VHD, click the Download VHDs tab is the Shared Asset library or the Project Asset library. This functionality is available for both Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and Dynamics 365 for Retail projects.  

Updates to subscription estimator 

With this release of LCS, users no longer need to provide purchased license counts in the Excel template. Instead, the estimator will extract those counts from the organization’s purchased licenses as shown in Purchase History. Any new estimates must be created using the new sample Usage Profile Template. For older estimates that have not been marked active, you will need to create a new estimate using the new sample Usage Profile template and then mark it as active. 

Upgrade your Database directly from LCS on development environments 

With this release of LCS, you can initiate and complete the data upgrade process on a development environment directly from LCS. This supports the end-to-end process of upgrading to the latest major release of the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations application. 

The overall upgrade process is described in Scenario 3 of this topic. The article also links to details on how to upgrade a database on a development environment. 

After you copy the preview release database to your development environment, and you are ready to upgrade the database, upgrade the database from LCS using the same process of applying updates on an environment. 

1. Go to the Environment page in LCS.
2. Select Maintain > Apply updates.
3. In the list of available deployable packages, select the appropriate data upgrade package (Package type = Data upgrade) based on the release you are upgrading to.
4. Select Apply to start the data upgrade.