I recently discovered that you can downgrade D365 v9.0 to earlier versions like v8.2 or even v8.1. Also, I noticed that others around me didn’t know that it’s possible to do so and few of us had a need to test or develop something on earlier versions of D365.

Here are the basic steps how to accomplish that downgrade.

1. Create a new trial D365 instance and go to Administration center.
2. Click on the Edit button on your trial instance.
3. Change instance type to Sandbox and click on Next.
4. Click Save on the next screen.
5. Next step is to click Reset on your newly created sandbox instance.
6. Finally, in this step, you can select the earlier D365 version from the dropdown menu.
7. After a rather long wait, you can turn your instance back to production one like we did in steps 2 and 3 and you are ready to do whatever you want on your fresh pre-9.0 version of D365.

It’s great opportunity to assemble a pre-9.0 solution on a trial instance if you don’t want to mess your other instances. I can’t explain how happy I was when I found out that I can have a pre-9.0 trial instance which can serve me as a playground for creating managed solutions.

I just hope that I’m not the only one that didn’t know about this downgrade thing and that at least someone will be happy with this feature as much as I was when I found it out.