Common Data Service for Apps, Dynamics 365 for Talent and Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations, The integration story with the new Power platform from Microsoft

In some of my earlier posts, I discussed briefly about the testing I did for the first version of Common Data Service to integrate Dynamics 365 for Sales and Finance & Operations. That was primarily for syncing customer accounts and all associated information. Microsoft also ships several data integration templates out of the box for this, which covers pretty much all key entities in the Prospect to Cash scenario.

Today, we will take another deeper look at the Dynamics 365 integration story using the overall Power platform which contains the power of Common Data Service(CDS 2.0), Microsoft Power Apps, Flow and Power BI. We will learn about the new version of Common Data Service, which is referred to as CDS for Apps (CDS 2.0) and we will test an integration between Dynamics 365 For Talent and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

Create the Power platform environment (CDS For Apps environment): The first step here is to make sure we have a correct environment created and setup under Power platform environments. For this testing and demonstration, I have created a new environment specifically for the D365 Talent to Finance and Operations integration. This environment is where the D365 for Talent app will surface the data and this environment will also host all the associated Powerapps, CDS, flow etc.

Create the Talent project in LCS and link the project to the CDS environment and Provision the Talent environment: Now that I have the Power platform environment setup, I will go ahead and create the D365 Talent project in Lifecycle services and then will provision the D365 Talent environment that I need for this testing. To do this, login to Life cycle services (LCS) and create a new project.

We will now need to link this LCS project to the new power platform environment we created above. Navigate to the Talent app management tile and click Add button.

You will notice the environment we created in the Power platform admin center will appear here.

I will mark the “Include demo data” checkbox, so that my Talent environment will have some prepopulated demo data that i can use for my testing.

The new D365 Talent environment should be provisioned now with Demo data and you should see the status of the environment as “Deployed”. Now, let us access the newly deployed Talent environment to make sure if we are able to access the required components of Talent successfully.

Click on the Log on to Talent link in the Talent App Management area. I now have the D365 Talent environment successfully deployed and ready for my testing.

After this deployment, You will also notice that these Talent solutions will appear under the Solutions tab of the Powerapps environment and the data from the Talent environment syncs in real time with the CDS. This means all the components of the D365 Talent solution where deployed into the CDS environment.

Talent Solutions deployed in PowerApps environment

You can also see that the demo data i got in my D365 Talent app has already surfaced in the CDS entities.

Note: All the data created in D365 for Talent will surface in Common Data Service automatically and we will use that for integrating with D365 F&O.

On the other side, I have already deployed my D365 for finance and operations environment and that is ready for the integration with D365 for Talent.

Configure the Connection Set in Power platform admin center: The next step for us is to configure the Connection set, which basically defines the 2 environments/applications and their respective organizations/entities for data mapping and integration. In this case, I have created the Connection Set, which contains my D365 Finance and Operations environment and the CDS 2.0 environment.

We will leverage the out of the Data integration project templates which Microsoft ships already to configured our data integrator project. To configure the data integrator project, go to Power Platform Admin center and create the data integration project.

As you can see in the screenshot above, under this data integration project, I have selected the Connection set i configured above and I have also used a data integration template called Core HR, which is provided by Microsoft already.

If we go into the tasks of the integration project, you will notice that for each of the tasks, the source and destination data fields are already predefined in the template. If you want, you can modify the mappings based on your needs, or you can even extend the integration by creating your own tasks to integrate additional entities.

We now have all the environments and the integration configurations we need to have in place. Let us go ahead and create some data in the Core HR App of D365 Talent and we will then run the integration project manually for this demonstration. Ideally, i can have the integration to execute automatically periodically.

Note: I am not using the ATTRACT or ONBOARD apps of Talent in this demonstration/testing, but if you use those, the data from both of those applications surface directly in CDS 2.0 (Common Data Service) and the Core HR app syncs in almost real time with CDS 2.0 to sync those data (Data such as Jobs, Applicants, new hires etc.).

I have created a job named “D365 Tech Architect” in Talent as shown in screenshot below.

Now, let us run the Data integration project manually under the Power platform admin center and verify if the data syncs correctly to D365 Finance and Operations.

You can monitor the status of the execution of this under the Execution history tab.

As soon as the New job record was created in D365 Talent, it surfaced in the CDS Job entity.

The data integration project execution has now finished. We will go check in D365 F&O and see if the new job record got created. As you can see the new job record now exists in D365 F&O automatically.

Note: You can think of the end to end integration story between D365 Talent and D365 F&O, where you will start all the way from attracting the talent (Recruitment) then continuing to Onboarding, hiring in D365 for Talent, and finally have the employee and related data created automatically in D365 F&O.

When you use the Attract and Onboard apps of D365 Talent, they surface/store the data by default to the Common Data Service (CDS 2.0). The Core HR app f Talent the n automatically syncs the Attract/Onboard data from CDS. The sync is almost real time. Then when your Data integration project runs in PowerApps, the data from CDS will sync to D365 Fin and Ops.

As a concluding note for this post, I will say, “The Microsoft Power platform now looks ready for prime time and it is time for us to encourage our customers to start leveraging these and innovate, and think what they can do with these tools to digitize their business processes and improve process efficiencies. There are new features that Microsoft is introducing every month for this platform to make it more and more capable and to enable customers to be able to extend and integrate their Dynamics 365 and other business apps apps in low code, no code fashion.

That’s it for today’s post!! More to come.”

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Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, SharePoint and Dynamics 365 working together, No coding required!!

All of you who attended the Microsoft Inspire and Las Vegas this year and the Microsoft Business Sumit at Seattle, would have heard a lot about the Microsoft Power platform. All the surrounding apps and services in Dynamics 365, such as Microsoft PowerApps, Flow, PowerBI, CDS etc. now are referred as the new Power platform.

In today’s blog post, we will see how all these powerful services puts the real power in the hands of the super-users of the systems and enables them to create seamless business process automation between applications such as Office 365, Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics 365 and others, without requiring to write a single line of code.

The Scenario and the requirement:

1. IT team of an organization uses Microsoft SharePoint(Office 365) for tracking company equipment loaned to it’s employees and for managing them. They use a SharePoint list for tracking these loaned equipment.
2. Let us say the HR team of the organization wants to have visibility into the details of the equipments which are loaned to the employees, within the ERP system of the organization, which is Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations in this case.
3. Also, let’s say there is also a requirement, where the HR team wants to be able to edit or add new loaned equipments for employees, from within Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations ERP application.
4. Finally, when they are done with adding new loaned equipment for employees from within the ERP, they want an email notification to be sent to certain parties.

How do we do this?

The First component of the whole scenario is the SharePoint list that IT team uses to process and keep track of loaned equipment to the company’s employees. So just create a very simple Share point list with some  basic data fields as shown in screenshot below.

I am not explaining the details of how to create the SharePoint list. All of us know it 🙂

The Second component of the scenario is building the ability for the HR team to be able to see the details of these loaned equipment for each employee from within the ERP, which is Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations(Referred as D365F&O from here on).

Let’s build this.

D365F&O provides the ability to embed Microsoft PowerApps into the forms directly and we will leverage PowerApps to extend the User interface of D365F&O, without requiring us to code and customize a new forms and underlying business logic. So we will first build a PowerApp from the SharePoint list we have for loaned equipment tracking.

To create the app, you can either initiate the App creation directly from within the SharePoint list, or you can just create a blank PowerApp within PowerApps online and the Connect to data and select the SharePoint list and list. Both will do the same thing for you.

Screenshot below shows the app I have built from my SharePoint list. I am using the 3 default screens, Browse, Details and the Edit screen.

Since we need the HR team members to be able to see the loaned equipment details for respective employees, we will need to establish the context relationship between D365F&O and the PowerApp and the SharePoint list. In this case, I will use the Unique  Personnel number/Employee ID field of D365F&O to build this relationship.

When the PowerApp launches and starts within D365F&O, we need D365F&O to pass the Personnel number of the selected employee record to the PowerApp, so that it can look for the corresponding loaned equipments for that employee and show the results. To accomplish this, we will use the standard formula on the On Start action of the PowerApp’s main Browse screen. See screenshot below.

The formula to use on the On Start action of the PowerApp:  If(!IsBlank(Param(“EntityId”)), Set(FinOpsInput, Param(“EntityId”)), Set(FinOpsInput,””))

Note: FinOpsInput here is the global variable that PowerApp will use to receive the input data from D365F&O. The above formula is just a standard formula and you can use it as it is. You can name the global variable whatever you want.

Next, we will need to tell the PowerApp how to filter the data from the SharePoint list, based on the context /input data it receives from D365F&O. The input field in my case is the Personnel number of the employee. To do this, you can just use the simple Filter function of PowerApps on the BrowseGallery of the app. This filter will take the FinOpsInput global variable as the criteria. See the screenshot below.

 

The next component of this requirement is, sending the email notification when an asset is added by HR team from within D365F&O into the SharePoint list. We will leverage Microsoft Flow for this. You can simply build the flow directly from the SharePoint list and the flow will be just basic, where it will send an email to one or more persons after a new item has been added to the loaned equipment list. Screenshot below shows the flow i have built for this.

The Final component is embedding our PowerApp into the Employees form in D365F&O. This is very straight-forward. Just go to the Employees form and click on the Insert a PowerApp button. You can insert PowerApp on other locations of the form such as under a fast tab, or even as an action pane menu button. On the next screen,  you can enter a name/label for the app, and then specify the App ID of your PowerApp (You can get the App ID from the app details within Powerapps online). Lastly, you will select the input data field that you want to pass into the app. The screenshot below shows this setup i have done.

With that, we have now built all the main components for accomplishing our requirement. Let us see this in action now.

The IT team has the SharePoint list for the loaned equipment tracking and i am not demonstrating how they will use it. It is just standard SharePoint functionality. I have loaded some data already to show in this demo. As you can see in screenshot below, the list has 2 Equipments loaned to Aaron, 1 to Adam and 1 to Adriana.

The real fun starts here. Now the HR team logs into D365F&O and navigates to Human Resources > Employees.

They can see the Loaned Equipments PowerApp button right there.

When clicked, the PowerApp will launch and show the loaned equipments list for the employee record they have selected. In this case they have selected Aaron Con, so they see the equipments loaned to him..

They can click on an asset to see the further details. All of this data is coming in real time from the SharePoint list.

When they want to see the Equipments for another employee, they will select the employee and the PowerApp will show the respective Equipments. To prove this, I selected Adam Carter and you can see the Equipments for him now.

Now, let us say there is a scenario, where HR wants to update some comments on an existing equipment record or they want to create a new equipment record for Adam Carter from within D365F&O. We will see how they can do this and how the PowerApp will write the data back to the SharePoint list.

Selecting Adam’s worker record, the HR person clicks the New button on the PowerApp.

Then they fill in the required details of the equipment. Let us say they want to add a new Samsung monitor for Adam.

After they successfully add the new equipment, the data will sync back to the SharePoint list via the PowerApp and it can be seen on the PowerApp after refreshing the list.

Finally, when the record has been added to the SharePoint list, my flow will trigger and send the email notification to required persons. I am not able to demonstrate this here since there are some data policies setup on the tenant that is blocking my flow, but it is very straight-forward. You can refer to my earlier blog post on Microsoft flow to know how this works.

So, with literally no coding required, we were able to leverage the Microsoft Power platform (Powerapps, Flow) and we connected data between SharePoint and Dynamics 365 and were able to see relations based data between the 2 systems. THIS IS VERY POWERFUL indeed !!!

I just made up this sample scenario for my post,but think of the possibilities with these. You can extend D365F&O functionality and automate business processes around everything. What if,

• You can create a Smart Bot using Microsoft QnA Service maker, use PowerApps to connect to the QnA service using Custom API and custom connector and build a PowerApp for the Q&A interaction with users. You can then embed this PowerApp in D365F&O (For example on the Vendor self-service portal) to make it easy for vendors to get answers to their questions in a bot chat interface. (Got to test this out at some point :))
• You can create a PowerApp to create shipping labels and pass the delivery address from D365F&O to the app to generate shipping label ?
• You can have tracking number of sales orders and build a PowerApp to build a package tracker. (Microsoft uses this for demo purposes)
• You can create a PowerApp to create product labels, QR codes and pass Product ID from D365F&O to generate that.
• And many more….

That’s it for today’s post. Till next time…

-Sandeep

Common Data Services (CDS), Data Integrator and Dynamics 365, What will you do?

In my post on “My favorite features from the July 2017 update of Dynamics 365 For Finance & Operations“, I highlighted the availability of the Prospect to Cash integration scenarios between Dynamics 365 For Sales and Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations.

The out of the box integration is probably one of the best things that can  happen to an ERP and CRM platform, where we will now depart from the traditional way of writing custom integrations every time, to be able to connect CRM and ERP systems. With the power of “Common Data Service(CDS) and the new “Data Integrator” feature now available, the integration of Dynamics 365 for Sales (CRM) and Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations (ERP) is now possible right out of the box in Dynamics 365, with no or not much custom integration needed.

In this post, let us decode some of these new features and terminologies into simple definitions, so that we all can better understand what these are, how they work and what benefits these will bring on to the table for partners and customers.

Common Data Services: The ultimate purpose of Digital transformation initiatives and implementing business applications for an organization is to be able to drive and produce actionable data and then democratize the data for key users to make more sense out of those data from all areas of the business. You can then use the data to create BI dashboards/reports using Power BI or configure business apps using Microsoft PowerApps and share it with others in the business as needed.

At the core, Common Data Services is a Microsoft Azure based Cloud data storage service that allows to surface data from multiple applications (Such as Dynamics 365, Office 365, and other similar Azure or Non-Azure based services), and make them all available at one central place. The data model in the Common Data Services is referred to as the “Common Data Model” that basically contains several out of the box data entities. These entities then contain  the required set of data fields to store the data. Some examples of these data entities are “Customers”, Accounts, Contacts, ERP Sales Orders etc. When you create a new environment in CDS, you will see the readily available entities that you can take advantage of, or you can create your own entities as you need. You can  also modify the standard entities of CDS to be able to store data specific to your business.

Screenshot below shows some standard entities of the CDS and specific data fields of one of the entities.

Data Integrator: With that high level overview of what is Common Data Service, let’s understand what is the Data Integrator. The Data Integrator is a new feature of the Common Data Services, that lets you build an end to end view of your business data by making Dynamics 365 data available in Common Data Service. It enables you to connect multiple business applications such as “Dynamics 365 for Sales” and “Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations”, by surfacing data from the source app to CDS and then passing it over from CDS to the target app automatically.

This is done through a set of Connection definitions and Connection sets, which are eventually used in the data integrator projects. Connections basically stores the active directory credentials for your target app/system. Connection sets primarily stores the organization mapping info(For example the Legal entities of D365 For Finance & Operations app and Sales Unit/organization of D365 for Sales). We will discuss more about the specifics of the Connections and Connection sets in a future post.

The data that is synchronized to CDS by Data Integrator is currently Read-Only and will not be editable. You can use the CDS data to sync that to other business apps or to create business applications using Microsoft Power Apps and CDS SDK.

Customers can create Data Integration projects by themselves from scratch or use existing templates provided by Microsoft and then set those data integration projects to run on a recurring basis to sync data into the CDS flow the data between multiple applications.

Screenshot below shows some data integration templates that are already available to pass data between Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations. These templates seems to be supporting the Prospect to Cash scenario between D365 For Sales and D365 For Finance and Operations, where you can pass Customers/Accounts data from Sales to Operations , pass Products/Items data from Operations app to the Sales app, or pass Sales quotation data from Sales to Operations(Still in preview) via the Common data Services.

Note: I have not configured my D365 For Sales environment yet, so I am not able to test the full experience yet, but it is very obvious how this feature is architected and how the data flow will happen between the apps. I will be able to test this soon, when the environment is ready in coming weeks.

Data Flow Overview via CDS

PowerApps and CDS: If you do not know already, think of PowerApps as the front end interface for interacting with the data in your database (which in this case will be the Common Data Services or any other supported services). The configurable data integrator feature of the CDS is the first step towards integrating the Dynamics 365 apps (Such as D365 For Sales and D365 For Finance and Operations). Down the line, all the apps under Dynamics 365 such as D365 for Project Service Automation, D365 for Field Service etc., will be supported for this integration, where we will be able to sync data between all these different purpose built apps using the CDS as the staging database.

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Think about it ! Once your data is available in CDS via the Data integrator from multiple applications, Power users of your organization can write business apps (Mobile or tablet based) using this data and PowerApps and extend the business processes more with this. I explained some of my initial observation about PowerApps and CDS in my earlier post here. In future, Microsoft will surely make it easier by providing more and more out of the box data integration templates for more data integration scenarios and will automate the data sync to CDS automatically at some point, so that the data will be readily available in CDS any time for you to consume and use.

What is next: For customers who have the Plan 2 or Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations subscription, they have access to Common Data Services and the Data integrator feature right now. Go and explore what you will do with it!!

I will share some real time testing experience of the Prospect to Cash integration scenarios between D365 Sales and D365 Operations with the Data Integrator, Connections, Connection sets etc., once I have my environment for D365 For Sales configured and after I have fully tested it.

Till then, stay tuned, stay current !!

Microsoft Unveils the Next chapter of Dynamics Cloud Business Apps, Dynamics 365

With the launch date now getting near(1st November 2016), Microsoft unveiled the First look and shared more information regarding Dynamics 365, the next generation intelligent business apps in the cloud. Right now, there are obviously a lot of excitement, questions, confusions, concerns among existing customer and user base of the legacy On premise applications (GP, SL, NAV & AX) as well as prospective customers and the partner community. All of us probably are wondering how our investments is Microsoft Dynamics is going to shape up in the new Dynamics Cloud era .

In this post today, let us understand and decode some of the key facts about Dynamics 365, that were unveiled and discussed in Summit 2016 held at Tampa, FL.

Microsoft unveiled the First Look of the next generation cloud business apps, all under one unified platform called Microsoft Dynamics 365. Below are some of the key take away from the first look.

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the next generation of intelligent business applications that enable organizations to grow, evolve and transform. These applications unify CRM and ERP capabilities by delivering new purpose-built applications that work seamlessly together to help manage specific business functions across Sales, Customer Service, Operations, Financials, Field Service, Project Service Automation, Marketing, and Customer Insights.

• This perfectly aligns the Dynamics business segment with the Cloud First, Mobile first strategy of Microsoft and puts the Dynamics platform and business applications in the forefront of the Cloud and mobile innovation by Microsoft. This means customers will see faster and continuous innovations in the business applications and will get feature updates frequently, and get capabilities connected to the entire breadth of Microsoft Cloud apps such as Office 365, Azure, Cortana Intelligence Suite, Power BI, PowerApps, Flow, IoT, Machine Learning and more.

• Dynamics 365 integrates the Dynamics CRM and ERP products into one unified Cloud Service and delivers end to end business application functionality as a SaaS service in the Cloud. These apps can be consumed separately and together based on your needs. So you pay only for what you use.

• Let us  now understand what each of these business apps really  are under Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 For Sales: It is the Sales component/module of Dynamics CRM Online.

Dynamics 365 For Customer Service: It is the Customer Service/module component of Dynamics CRM Online.

Dynamics 365 For Field Service : This is the Field Service component/Module of Dynamics CRM Online.

Dynamics 365 For Project Service Automation: This is the Project Service component/module of Dynamics CRM Online.

Dynamics 365 For Marketing: Microsoft recently announced that it fully will integrate Adobe Marketing cloud with Dynamics 365 and make it the preferrable marketing app for Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 For Operations: This is the New Dynamics AX (AX 7) ERP that we all are familiar with. This is where most of the customers/prospects might get confused. The name “Dynamics 365 For Operations” misleads a little bit. This business app  is really  targeted for the enterprise customers and obviously includes full advanced Financials functionality as well of AX 7. With this app, customers do NOT need to buy other Financials apps such as “Dynamics 365 for Financials”. “Dynamics 365 for Operations has everything you need to manage your Operations, including Core Financials. Hopefully Microsoft will rename this app to “Dynamics 365 For Operations & Financials” at some point :).

Dynamics 365 For Financials: This is the new Financials app of Dynamics 365(Earlier known as Project Madeira) and is primarily targeted for SMB customers in most cases. This does not include any of the advanced Operations functionality such as Manufacturing, E-commerce(Retail), advanced supply chain etc.   When we say, this is targeted more for the SMB customers, we might argue whether Microsoft thinks that SMBs do not have “Operations” ? Of course some of them do and Microsoft is probably thinking those customers should chose Dynamics 365 For Operations app instead of the Financials app. We will have to wait and see how this shapes up.

• Dynamics 365  provides a unified user experience across all different apps and seamless transition. So you don’t have to spend more time navigating between systems. These apps are also seamlessly integrated to exchange data and play nicely with each other. For example when a Sales rep creates a Sales order from a confirmed sales quotation in the Dynamics 365 for Sales app, it will create the Sales Order automatically in the Dynamics 365 for Operations app. Very powerful. I am excited to test more scenarios and how the data flow looks between these apps !

• A brand new HOME page showing you a view of all apps you own under Dynamics 365 and a direct access to Microsoft Appsource. Appsource is where you can go explore more purpose-built industry solutions(Apps) built by various Microsoft partners. When you discover new business apps, you can also see partners that are capable of implementing those apps.

And Probably a new LOGO for Dynamics ? The Dynamics platform is most certainly getting a new logo which may look something like below.

• Power BI is embedded throughout the Dynamics 365 experience. As a result, you will get business insights for each of your business areas at one central dashboard page, still powered by Power BI.

• Dynamics 365 is inherently MOBILE with full offline mode support! (For Windows, android and iOS). This is probably one of the biggest feature update of Dynamics platform. With Dynamics 365, Customers can have mobile apps (Several Out of the box) and can create apps literally for any area/App. You can check my earlier post HERE to learn more about the mobile apps framework of Dynamics  365 for Operations (Dynamics AX).

•  Integration of Dynamics 365 and Office 365 Better than ever before. Traditional On-premise business apps (NAV, AX, SL etc) always had integrations with Office 365 and could exchange data with Microsoft word, excel outlook. But the scenarios and capabilities were somewhat limited. With Dynamics 365, the integration goes to a whole new level and provides users a full-blown integration. For example, you can drill into the details of a customer record of Dynamics 365 from within your Outlook email and even see further details such as associated sales opportunities, and launch the Dynamics 365 for Sales app/Other apps from within the email. Sleek !! A lot to explore and learn.

• Artificial Intelligence in Dynamics 365. Microsoft and other big companies like Google, Amazon and more are betting their future on Artificial intelligence. With Artificial intelligence built-in in Dynamics 365, you can now get product recommendations, have your office 365 data(Such as email communications and more) automatically populated into Dynamics 365 Sales or even get proactive automated personal sales assistance with warnings and recommendations when needed . This certainly involves a good learning curve for me and understand what are various things we can do with it.

• New SaaS service called “Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights“ announced under Dynamics 365. This app/service is built on top of core Azure and Cortana Intelligent data services and it can connect to your Dynamics 365 data and literally any other data source, to help you build a 360 view of your customer and better understand and engage with your customers in real-time.

Question: Do customers need to pay to use this Service ? I do not know and we will need to wait and watch.

• What will happen to the existing customers using AX 2009 or AX 2012 On-premise versions: There is no immediate impact for these customers. Microsoft will continue to support AX 2009 until 2018 and AX 2012 for even longer time(2021, Find more info on my earlier post). There may also be feature updates released for AX 2012. However, Microsoft also revealed upgrade plans for existing customers. You can learn more in detail at the blog post by MSDynamicsWorld.com HERE.

Long story short, customers using AX 2009 can start evaluating their upgrade options with assisted upgrade tool for AX 2009. These tools are in preview now and when released, it will have the capabilities to do the heavy lifting for you for the upgrade. I assume, while the tool can help these customers to a great deal, there will still be good amount of work that needs to be done to make these upgrades successful.

For Customers using AX 2012, the upgrade path will be comparatively easier given the fact that schema and underlying business logic of AX 2012 and AX 7 are pretty much same. The upgrade assisting tools for AX 2012 may be available around March of 2017. Need to wait and watch.

• More news on Common Data Model and surrounding Apps: Many of us probably know what is the Common data model and the role it has to play in the new Dynamics era. CDM basically is intended to surface data that is stored within Dynamics 365 across all the different business apps (Sales, Marketing, Operations etc.) into a set of data entities that can model the data between these different apps. It can also connect to entities outside Dynamics 365 such as Office 365 and more. As Microsoft clarified further in AXUG conference, think of CDM as a parallel data repository and will sync with Dynamics AX and other database of different business apps of Dynamics 365.Then services like Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow can use this to create powerful events automation and business apps connecting multiple applications and services.

• What is coming in Dynamics 365 For Operations and it’s roadmap: There are a whole lot of new features and capabilities coming to the Dynamics 365 for Operations(Dynamics AX 7) app in the fall release (November 2016). Below are some of the key features that you will see in the fall release.

Courtesy : MS Dynamics World News

Hope this was a good summary of Dynamics 365 announcements at Summit this year. We all have  a long way to go and learn the cool new features and services and be ready to sail through the cloud era.

Best,

Sandeep

Making sense of the Common Data Model and Microsoft PowerApps in Dynamics 365

When Microsoft Dynamics 365 was announced a few weeks ago, the Common Data Model and other Microsoft productivity services such as PowerApps and Microsoft Flow were a significant part of this, along with the unified offering of Dynamics CRM and Dynamics ERP cloud services under this umbrella. The solution stack diagram below for Dynamics 365 depicts the positioning of these various  elements in Dynamics 365.

In my earlier post I mentioned about the release of the public preview of the Common Data Model last week. Now that the public preview of the Common Data Model is available, let us try to make sense of these together and see what are the possibilities using the CDM and Microsoft PowerApps.

In today’s post, we will create a simple example mobile app using Microsoft PowerApps and the Common Data Model database.

Log in to Microsoft PowerApps at the URL https://powerapps.microsoft.com. You can use the PowerApps web version to create your apps. But the best way to do this is to download the app from Windows store .

In this post, I will use the windows store app to create this sample mobile app.

Launch PowerApps and click New tab to select the data source. While you can use various data sources such as Dynamics CRM online, excel file stored in the cloud, online storage such as OneDrive or Google Drive, in this case we will use the Common Data Model as the data source for this app.

 On the next screen, select the entity that you want to use in this app and click Connect button. For this sample app, we will use the Sales Order entity and build a simple app to interact with Sales orders (Simple actions such as view sales orders, edit or even create a new order).

At this point, PowerApps will consume the Sales Order entity data and create the sample app with some default screens automatically, which you can adjust and change to make it look the way you want it. The auto creation feature comes in handy, as you do not need to create the app from scratch.

Now that the default screens of the app are created, let us try to edit those a little bit to make them look more complete. The first screen is a Sales Order overview screen that shows the list of sales orders.

• Rename the screen to call it as “Sales Orders Overview”.

• Next, lets establish the links to some of the data fields to show the sales order overview data. In this case, we will show the customer name, Sales order number, order status and the sales order total amount. To do this, select each data field and select the data field for each field on the right hand panel.

• You will now notice that the first overview screen of the app looks more complete with meaningful data and you also have basic actions such as searching a sales order, or even sorting them. You can also select a different layout for this screen at this point if you want by selecting from various readily available templates.

• Let us now move on to the next screen, which will load up when user select or taps on a specific sales order record on the first screen. Let us call the next screen as the Sales order details screen. Follow the same approach to make edits to this screen. For example, we will add a few data fields and change the layout a little bit.
• In this screen, you can click on the “eye” mark to add or remove fields and then click Advanced option to chose data fields relation, or even rename a specific data field. For this demonstration, I have added simple data fields such as Order ID, Name, address, payment terms, shipping method, order date and tax, discount amounts of the order. At the end of this your screen should look something like below. You can also change the layout of this page, like you did for the first screen.

 

• Moving on to the 3rd screen of the app, let us make it the Edit screen for the sales order. When user clicks on the Edit button on screen 2, this screen will load up. Follow the same instructions above to complete the design of this page. You screen should look something like below.

• You can then explore the various tabs on the top to change different aspects of the app. For example you can add a new screen, change the color and theme of the app, add a new data source(such as the Sale Order line table if you want show order lines on this app), add a background image for the app, or even add new controls to the app such as a new button, a text field, charts  and more.

• Now that all the screens we intended are designed, let us preview the app by clicking the preview button and you will notice that you can interact with the app in various ways. For example on the first screen when we select a specific sales order record, it will navigate to the details page. (Note: I have changed the theme of the app before previewing it.)

• Finally we will save the app (you can save it in the cloud or in your local computer) and then share it for consumption by others. Notice that you can specify with whom you want to share this app and what level of permission you want to give them while sharing the app.

Below screenshot shows how this mobile app looked on my smartphone after I shared it and launched it on my Android phone.

This was just a very simple demonstration of the possibilities and what you can do with the Common Data Model and productivity tools such as PowerApps or Microsoft flow. The CDM is in preview now, but when it releases this fall, you will see a lot more data entities and much more capabilities of designing powerful business apps  in the cloud for your organization.

That is it for today’s post and I will share more as details emerge and as I learn more. :). Hope you all will keep exploring more on this. Till next time!!

Regards,

Sandeep