Watching it run
Operations
What needs a person today, in one place. Five minutes each morning is the whole job when it is set up properly.
The workspaces
| Workspace | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Operations | Everything that needs attention: failures, overdue receipts, certificates about to expire |
| Inbound | Documents waiting to be processed, with their verdicts |
| Outbound | The queue: what is waiting to go, what went, what failed |
| Partners | The relationships and their health |
The outbound queue
Every document waiting to leave has a row. Three states, and only one of them wants you.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Queued | Produced, waiting to be picked up. Normal for a few minutes |
| Sent | Handed over. Watch the message for what happened next |
| Failed | It did not leave. The error is on the row |
The row carries the validation result too: how long the check took, what it concluded, and the summary. That is where you look when a document was refused before it was sent rather than after.
Certificates
The one thing that fails on a date rather than for a reason. The certificate list shows what is approaching its end, per partner. Look at it weekly; a renewal is a small job with three weeks' notice and an outage with none.
Getting a document moving again
Nearly everything is retryable, and retrying is the right first move once the cause is fixed.
- An outbound document that failed. Read the error. Fix the cause. The document is produced from the posting, so it can be sent again from the queue without reposting anything.
- An inbound document that failed processing. Fix the cause and press Process. It runs on the same staged rows. The partner does not resend.
- A message with no receipt past its deadline. Not something you fix in Dynamics. Either the partner does not send that receipt, in which case the agreement is wrong, or they do and it did not arrive, in which case it is a conversation.
Starting a partner again from scratch
Everything for a partner can be reset: the messages, the queue, the staged documents. It is refused outright unless the cloud connection says the environment is development or test, so it cannot be reached in production even by someone who has the right to run it.
It exists because the alternative is a test environment that fills with half-finished attempts until nobody can tell which run they are looking at.
A morning routine
- Failures first. There are usually none, and when there is one it is the day's real work.
- Inbound documents waiting, and their verdicts. Process the greens, read the yellows.
- Overdue receipts. Chase, or fix a deadline that was never realistic.
- Certificates, once a week.
If that takes more than a few minutes most days, something is misconfigured rather than broken, and the list itself will tell you which partner it is.