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With Replica 365 you can replicate Business Central (“BC”) tables to Azure Table Storage (“ATS”). In ATS you can store large amounts of data. You can use ATS to query on this set of data using applications like Excel and PowerBI. ATS scales it’s tables automatically as your demand increases.

Replicating your BC tables to ATS will lower the impact on your BC environment, so that your BC environment is not experiencing a significant load when a lot of data is requested for reports. Because the BC data is already available in ATS, reports will also be loaded faster. From ATS you can also use the data as a source for your BI environment, for example in Azure SQL or in your Data Warehouse.

Use the Replica 365 Setup page to configure the app.

Prerequisites

1. A Microsoft Azure environment and Microsoft account with sufficient (admin) permissions to create a Storage account in Microsoft Azure;

2. A Microsoft Azure Subscription (this may also be a free trial);

3. The costs for Azure Table Storage can be determined approximately as follows:

   1. Determine the BC tables you want to replicate, by opening the BC page [Table Information]

      1. The column “Data Size (KB)” shows the size in KB’s for each table;

      2. Filter on the tables you are planning to replicate;

      3. Calculate the Sum of the column “Data Size (KB) for all tables you are planning to replicate.

4. Calculate the price for ATS using Microsoft’s Data Storage pricelist. Attention: There is a fee for each GB of data that is being stored in ATS + a fee that’s calculated based on the number of transactions.

Microsoft Azure Setup and Preparations

1. Setup a Storage account in Microsoft Azure

2. Setup a Shared Access Signature (“SAS”) and secure the key

1. Setup a Storage account in Microsoft Azure

1. Sign in to the Azure Portal: https://portal.azure.com

2. Open the menu on the left side of the screen and click on “Storage accounts”

3. Click on “Create”

4. The wizard “Create a storage account” opens

   1. Page “Basics”:

      1. Choose a Subscription

      2. Create a new Resource group, for example “BusinessCentralData”

      3. Choose a Storage account name, for example “businesscentraldata”

      4. Choose a Region where you want the data to be stored

      5. Performance: for Replica 365, the “Standard” option is sufficient

      6. Redundancy: choose “Geo-redundant storage (GRS)

   2. Click on the “Review + create” button

5. Once the setup is validated, click on “Create” to proceed with creating the storage account

6. Deployment of the storage account starts. Wait untill this process is finished before proceeding. It should not take longer then a couple of minutes.

7. Once the deployment is finished, proceed by clicking the “Go to resource” button

2. Setup a Shared Access Signature (“SAS”) and secure the key

1. On the left hand menu, click on the “Shared access signature”. This can be found under “Security + networking”

2. Make sure the Shared access signature is configured as follows:

   1. Allowed services: Check all options

   2. Allowed resource types: Check “Container” and “Object”

   3. Allowed permissions: Check all options

   4. Blob versioning permissions: Check all options

   5. Allowed blob index permissions: Check all options

   6. Start date: Leave as is

   7. End date: Lease as is

   8. Allowed protocols: “HTTPS only”

   9. Preferred routing tier: “Basic (default)”

   10. Signing key: “key1”

3. Click on the button “Generate SAS and connection string”

4. Make sure to securely store the generated SAS token and Table service SAS URL in your password manager. You can’t recover those once this page has been closed.

   1. SAS token: Copy and secure the entire string

   2. Table service SAS URL: Copy and secure the part untill “.windows.net/”

      1. Make sure to include the “/” (forward slash) as well

Behavior with this function activated

Once activated, you can use the Custom Report Layout 11295262 for Payment Reminders for your Customers.

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Business Central Setup

1. Sign in to Business Central

2. Search for the page “Replica 365 Setup”

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3. Enter the following values in the setup page:

   1. Base URL: The value of “Table service SAS URL”

   2. SAS Key: The value of “SAS token”

   3. Enable Error Logging if needed

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Setup is now completed. Close the page and proceed to the Replica365 User Manual to configure the to be replicated tables.