Describe Business Central
Delivery model first
Business Central is an ERP delivered two ways: Software as a Service (Microsoft-managed, always current) and on-premises (customer-managed, the customer owns the upgrade cycle). Most exam items hinge on knowing who owns which responsibility.
Core concepts to recognize:
- Editions and users: Essentials and Premium (Premium adds manufacturing and service management). Users are Full Users or Team Members/Device users; effective access is governed by permission sets and user groups, not by the licence alone.
- Environments and companies: One environment holds one or more companies. Production and sandboxes behave the same technically, but sandboxes are for testing, can be copied or reset, and can be deleted. A sandbox is never promoted to production - you deploy your extension to production instead.
- Extensibility: The base application is locked. All changes ship as extensions (.app files): per-tenant extensions (PTE) built by a partner, or AppSource apps. Base objects are never modified.
- Release cadence: Two major releases per year (April and October) plus monthly minor updates. Feature Management lets an administrator turn on new features before they become mandatory, and shows which features are enabled for all users.
- Administration surface: the Business Central admin center handles environment lifecycle, extension deployment, telemetry and support; Microsoft Entra ID handles identity and single sign-on; Microsoft 365 provides Excel, Outlook and Teams integration.
Rule of thumb: any answer option that edits a base table, base page or base codeunit is wrong. The correct answer always extends.
Traps: assuming every environment is Microsoft-managed (on-premises is customer-managed); confusing an AppSource app with a PTE (PTEs skip AppSource validation); believing a sandbox can be converted into production.