Know whether Fabric is the right move, before you commit

You should move to Microsoft Fabric when something concrete forces the decision: the pipe your reporting depends on has been retired, your Power BI Premium capacity is up for renewal, or the estate you have can no longer carry what finance is asking of it. You should not move because Fabric is new. The readiness and strategy assessment establishes which of those is true for you, before a single day of programme work is committed.

Fabric is a platform decision, not a reporting project. It changes where your data lives, who can reach it, what your monthly bill looks like and which levers you hold when that bill misbehaves. Those are IT Director questions with a Finance Director signature on the end of them, and they deserve to be answered on evidence rather than on a vendor's roadmap slide.

Three things have genuinely changed, and they are the only three that should move you.

The pipe you were probably built on has been retired. Export to Data Lake was deprecated and Microsoft has moved to decommission it. If your Dynamics 365 reporting still depends on it, the clock running against you is not commercial, it is technical.

P SKUs can no longer be bought, only renewed. Power BI Premium P capacity is renew-only, and the conversion to an F SKU happens at your renewal. That is an account-specific date sitting in your own contract, not a market-wide cliff. The point of the assessment is to find it and plan around it, rather than be surprised by it.

The levers that actually control Fabric's cost only exist on F SKUs. Pause and resume, on-demand resizing, and Spark autoscale billing are F-only. They are not available on P. Readiness is not only about whether the platform can carry your workload. It is about knowing which controls you will hold when the bill starts moving, and which you will not.

What has not changed is worth saying plainly, because plenty of people are getting it wrong: Azure Synapse Link is not being retired. Microsoft continues to support exporting your data and building your own pipelines, and both paths are live. Anyone telling you that route is dead is selling you something.

You need a readiness assessment if a decision about Fabric is coming at you and you cannot yet defend an answer: your export pipe has been retired, your capacity renewal is in sight, a proposal has landed that you have no way to sanity-check, or nobody in the building can tell you what capacity you will actually need.

Most teams that come to us recognise themselves in at least two of these.

• The pipe underneath you has gone. Your Dynamics 365 reporting was built on Export to Data Lake, which has been retired, and you have not yet decided what replaces it.
• A capacity renewal is coming. You hold Power BI Premium P capacity, it renews at some point, and nobody has worked out what the conversion to an F SKU means for your cost or your features.
• A proposal has landed and you cannot check it. Someone has quoted you a Fabric programme. It looks plausible. You have no independent way to test the architecture or the capacity it assumes.
• Nobody can size the capacity. You are being asked to commit to an F SKU and the honest answer inside the business is a shrug. Under-size it and everything throttles. Over-size it and you pay for air.
• Finance will not sign what it cannot predict. Fabric is sold as software and bills like infrastructure. Your FD has read enough about capacity overruns to want a number they can defend before they approve anything.
• A proof-of-concept has quietly become production. Someone built something clever in a trial workspace. The business now depends on it. It was never designed to be depended on.

If two or more of these are true, the readiness and strategy assessment is built for you.

A PrecisionPoint Fabric readiness assessment examines six things: the data path you are actually on today, the architectural fork between Link to Fabric and Azure Synapse Link, the capacity you need and the licensing decision buried inside it, the cost-control levers you will and will not have, your governance and security position, and whether your people are ready to run it. Six checks, one decision-grade report.

A generic readiness review checks whether Fabric can technically host your workload. That is the easy question. These are the six that decide whether the programme succeeds, and what it costs you to run afterwards.

• The data path you are actually on. Before any target architecture, we establish the current state: how Dynamics 365 data reaches your reports today, what it costs, where it breaks, and what depends on it. That includes the Microsoft-native routes and, where extraction from Dynamics is in scope, our own product Reveal as one of the options on the table. You cannot plan a move without an honest map of what you are moving.
• The architectural fork, and it is a real fork. Link to Fabric is no-copy and no-ETL, and your data stays inside the Dataverse governance boundary. The trade is that every non-system table with Track changes enabled is auto-selected, you cannot cherry-pick, and it consumes additional Dataverse storage. Azure Synapse Link puts the data in your own storage account with your own pipelines, and you can choose the tables. Both are supported paths. Choosing the wrong one is expensive to unwind, and the choice turns on facts about your estate, not on a preference.
• Capacity sizing, and the licensing decision hidden inside it. Sizing an F SKU is not only a compute decision. F64 is the threshold at which people can view Power BI content on a free Fabric licence. Below F64, every single viewer needs a Pro licence. So the right capacity is a function of how many people read your reports, not just how much data you crunch, and getting it wrong on either side of that line costs real money. We size it against your actual workload and your actual audience.
• The cost levers you will actually have. Pause and resume, on-demand resizing and Spark autoscale billing are available on F SKUs and not on P. These are the controls that make Fabric's running cost governable rather than a monthly surprise. Part of readiness is knowing, before you commit, exactly which levers you will hold and who will operate them.
• Governance and security readiness. Who reaches what, how row-level and column-level rules are enforced, and where a naive rollout quietly hands out more data than anyone intended. We assess the position you would be starting from and what has to be true on day one, not day ninety. The detail sits in Fabric governance and security.
• People, skills and adoption. The check most readiness reviews skip, because it is the one that most often returns an uncomfortable answer. A platform nobody in your team can operate is a dependency, not an asset. We assess who would run it, what they would need, and whether the honest answer today is "not yet".

You get four things: a current-state assessment of the estate you have, a target architecture for the one you need, a capacity sizing with the licensing position that goes with it, and an adoption roadmap sequenced to your renewal and your team. It is a decision-grade artefact you own, not a proposal with a diagnostic bolted on the front.

• Current-state assessment. How Dynamics 365 data reaches your reports today, what it depends on, what it costs, and what is already failing or about to. Written so an IT Director can act on it and an FD can read it.
• Target architecture. The specific shape of your Fabric estate: the data path, with the reasoning shown, the workspace and storage design, and how the reconciled model and the reporting sit on top of it.
• Capacity sizing and licensing position. What capacity your workload and your audience actually need, where you land relative to the F64 free-viewer threshold, and what the conversion looks like against your own renewal date. The number, and the working behind it.
• Adoption roadmap. What to do, in what order, and when. Sequenced to your commercial events rather than ours, with quick wins separated from the work that needs a proper programme, and the skills gap named rather than glossed.

Yes, and it sometimes does. A readiness assessment that can only ever conclude "buy the programme" is not a diagnostic, it is a sales call with a document attached. There are four verdicts this assessment can return, and two of them slow you down or stop you.

Fabric is genuinely good, and for a multi-entity business running Dynamics 365 it is very often the right platform. But "eventually right" and "right now" are different findings, and the difference is worth money. These are the four answers we actually give.

• Move now. Something concrete is forcing it. The pipe you depend on has been retired, or a renewal is close enough that the decision cannot wait. We say so, and we tell you what the move looks like.
• Move at your renewal. There is no cliff, so there is no reason to pay twice. P capacity converts to an F SKU at your renewal. If that is the sensible forcing event, we sequence the work to it rather than to our calendar.
• Move, but not the way you were planning. The intent is right and the design is wrong. The data path does not suit your estate, or the capacity in the proposal on your desk is sized to the vendor's convenience rather than to your audience. This is the most common verdict of the four.
• Do not move yet. The foundations are not there. If your Dynamics data is not fit to be reported on, or nobody in the team could run the platform once it exists, moving onto Fabric buys you an expensive version of the same problem. We will tell you that, and we will tell you what to fix first.

We would rather lose a programme than sell you one you are not ready for. A diagnostic that cannot tell you not to buy is not worth commissioning.

You choose the next step on the evidence, with no obligation. The assessment qualifies you into a migration, into a build, into a managed run-state, or into doing nothing for now. Because the findings are a neutral read, IT can defend them and finance can approve them from the same document.

The assessment is the first rung of a ladder, not a foot in the door. You are never committed further than the value you have already seen.

1. Diagnose.

   The assessment you are reading about: current state, target architecture, capacity sizing and an adoption roadmap. It ends with a decision, including the decision to wait.

2. Migrate or build.

   If you are coming off a retired or ageing pipe, migration to Microsoft Fabric moves you across without losing the numbers on the way. If the platform needs building out properly, Fabric architecture and implementation puts it in place to the design the assessment set.

3. Run.

   Once it is live, the managed Fabric platform keeps the capacity policed and the bill predictable, so the platform does not quietly become somebody's second job.

Where you enter depends entirely on what the assessment finds. The whole path, and how it fits Dynamics 365 specifically, sits inside Microsoft Fabric for Dynamics 365.