Hi…
This week I got a question from one of my oldest friends an I got curious (as one does). The question was: “What are the limitations when running Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain on a Mac?”. Since I am not a Mac user I thought; I might as well document this for the future.
I reached out to a colleague and what I got was this:
Since Finance and Supply Chain it self is a web-bases applications the core application will work without any problems in (almost) the browser of you choice (the supported browsers are Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. There are however 3 areas that does not work that requires some workarounds.
- Open in Excel – The Excel add-in is not available for the Mac version of office. You are able to export to Excel since this is just a pure download of a file that you then open, but the Open Excel requires an OData add-in for publishing the data back to FnO. The workaround is to use a virtualization. By using Parallells or another virtualization to run Windows on the Mac you are able to install the Windows version of office and run the Excel Addin.
- Management Reporter Report Designer – Management Reporter Report Designer is a is a .NET application that is launched from the FnO web application and used for editing report that are then viewed in FnO. This also requires Windows to run and the virtualization workaround above is also applicable. The tool is however not used in day-to-day work in the system which makes a bit easier to live without.
- Workflow edit – Just as the Report Designer above the Workflow editor is a tool used for building and administering the workflows in the system… not as much in the daily work. As with Report Designer it is also a .NET application and will work with the same workaround.
Depending on the technical level of your users this virtualization solution might be a working solution or you could with an old fashion terminal server/Citrix solution.
If you have any experiences around this that I have missed… please do not hesitate to reach out.
Links:
Install Windows 11 on a Mac with Apple M-series chip (parallels.com)
Options for using Windows 11 with Mac® computers with Apple® M1® and M2™ chips – Microsoft Support
System requirements for cloud deployments – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn