Dynamics 365 home menu not showing sandbox apps

Question

I have the Sales app plus two custom apps in a production instance. I have created a sandbox instance and done a full copy from production to sandbox. https://home.dynamics.com however is only showing tiles for the apps in production, there is nothing there for sandbox. The same is true of the Dynamics 365 drop down that shows available apps, nothing for sandbox.

I know the sandbox apps are present because I can navigate to them by modifying the URL for the production app to point at the sandbox instance. I have tried clearing cache, syncing on the home menu and logging off/on.

I have an outstanding request open with Microsoft, but they don't seem to know much about this.

Answer 1

You can't see the sandbox there because sandbox is a separate "Instance" of CRM not a separate "App" of CRM. I believe that you don't want users to have access to the same data on Sandbox and on Production? Apps are simply a way to allow you to group your data into different set of entities (you can specify which entities should be available for an app), providing different sitemap etc. but the underlying database is the same. Sandbox is different database (a separate organization) which can (and most likely is) on separate server. That's why you won't see it under your apps (as it is technically not an app)

UPDATE: Don't know why I thought you are talking about this pane on the left when you are exploring Dynamics 365. https://home.dynamics.com should indeed show you a tile for different instances. It's clearly a bug, so this is a task for Microsoft Support team, not Stack Overflow question

Answer 2

You should be able to see the Sales app and the custom Dynamics 365 instance using the following steps - click the chevron on the right of Dynamics 365 label on the upper left - click the chevron on the right of My apps label - Sales app is shown - Custom app is shown

If you still can't see it using those steps, then you might encountered the issue that I have also encountered before where my apps are missing. I just reinstalled a new sandbox, and all my previous changes are gone. Hopefully this won't be your last resort and someone could post a better alternative. For me I just recreated it since it's just a sandbox anyway.