Implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Configure, customize, and extend Dynamics 365 CE in order to create effective CRM solutions

Mahender Pal

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838550882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Gain hands-on experience working with the architecture, implementation, deployment, and data migration of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Key Features

• Explore different tools to evaluate, implement, and proactively maintain Dynamics 365 for CE
• Integrate Dynamics 365 CE with applications such as Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Power Automate
• Design application architecture, explore deployment choices, and perform data migration

Book Description

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (CE) is one of the leading customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that help companies to effectively communicate with their customers and allows them to transform their marketing strategies. Complete with detailed explanations of the essential concepts and practical examples, this book will guide you through the entire life cycle of implementing Dynamics 365 CE for your organization or clients, and will help you avoid common pitfalls while increasing efficiency at every stage of the project.

Starting with the foundational concepts, the book will gradually introduce you to Microsoft Dynamics 365 features, plans, and products. You'll learn various implementation strategies and requirement gathering techniques, and then design the application architecture by converting your requirements into technical and functional designs. As you advance, you'll learn how to configure your CRM system to meet your organizational needs, customize Dynamics 365 CE, and extend its capabilities by writing client-side and server-side code. Finally, you'll integrate Dynamics 365 CE with other applications and explore its business intelligence capabilities.

By the end of this Microsoft Dynamics 365 book, you'll have gained an in-depth understanding of all the key components necessary for successful Dynamics 365 CE implementation.

What you will learn

• Explore the new features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE
• Understand various project management methodologies, such as Agile, Waterfall, and DevOps
• Customize Dynamics 365 CE to meet your business requirements
• Integrate Dynamics 365 with other applications, such as PowerApps, Power Automate, and Power BI
• Convert client requirements into functional designs
• Extend Dynamics 365 functionality using web resources, custom logic, and client-side and server-side code
• Discover different techniques for writing and executing test cases
• Understand various data migration options to import data from legacy systems

Who this book is for

This book is for consultants, project managers, administrators, and solution architects who want to set up Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement in their business. Although not necessary, basic knowledge of Dynamics 365 will help you get the most out of this book.

Customizing Dynamics 365 CE

This chapter will help you learn about Dynamics 365 customization features. You will learn about the concept of customization and how to consider reusing existing components instead of creating new entities. You will learn about creating new entities and customizing entity forms, views, and data types. You will also learn about Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) security. Later, you will learn about customizing dashboards and charts, which will help you to set up business intelligence features for your customers.

The main topics that we are going to discuss in this chapter are:

• Understanding Dynamics 365 CE customization
• Understanding solutions
• Working with entities
• Setting up security options
• Changing navigation
• Customizing dashboards and charts

Technical requirements

This chapter requires you to have set up the Dynamics 365 CE trial, where you can perform customization. We have discussed how to set up the Dynamics 365 CE trial in the Introduction to Dynamics 365 CE chapter. You should also have a basic understanding of Dynamics 365 CE.

Understanding Dynamics 365 CE customization

All Dynamics 365 CE first-party apps (apps that are built by Microsoft and come with the Dynamics 365 CE vanilla setup) provide a generic business experience. For example, the Sales app provides us with a core set of features required to implement an end-to-end generic sales process. This involves commonly used business entities to store your customer data, business process flows to guide and complete your sales process, and generic business intelligence tools such as dashboards, charts, and reports. All of these processes can be modified—if required—based on our business-specific requirements, and also to provide end users with a personalized experience. Dynamics 365 CE Power Platform allows us to modify most of the existing components using the Dynamics 365 CE application itself. We don’t require any additional tools to change the behavior of the components. The process of tailoring existing Dynamics 365 CE components based on our requirements is known as Dynamics 365 CE customization.

Even though we can use Dynamics 365 CE Power Platform to create new components, it is very important to consider existing components. Let's take a simple scenario of an Account entity. An Account entity is available in almost all of the Dynamics 365 CE first-party apps such as Sales, Marketing, Service, Field Service, and Project Service Automation (PSA). This entity has all the possible attributes that we can use to store customer information. The term we use to describe a customer may vary from business to business. In some businesses, we may refer to our customers as Accounts, whereas other businesses may refer to them as a Company, Corporate, Advertiser, or Agency. Therefore, we can use the existing Account entity to capture different types of customer data. We don't need to create a new object to store customer details. For example, the following diagram shows different customer terms that can be mapped to an Account entity:

We can customize the Account entity based on these different profiles. Customization for Dynamics 365 CE can be very simple—for example, when relabeling an Account entity display name from Account to Customer. Or, it could be complex, such as when we need to add a set of new entities, set up a data model, and set up business processes as well. While working on complex requirements, it is worth checking in Microsoft AppSource in case any Microsoft independent software vendors (ISVs) have already developed a solution for a similar requirement, as this could save us time and money.

Now that we have a basic understanding of customization concepts for Dynamics 365 CE, let's discuss how to customize Dynamics 365 CE.

Understanding solutions

Before doing any customization for Dynamics 365 CE, it is very important to understand where we can keep our customized components. A solution acts as a container for Dynamics 365 CE components. All of the components that we see in Dynamics 365 CE are a part of the solution, which is known as a default or a base solution. When you are connected to your Dynamics 365 CE application, if you navigate to make.powerapps.com, which is a new way to access and modify your solutions, you can see the default solution for your organization, as shown in the following screenshot:

To customize the system, the language must match the base language. We cannot customize the system in another language.

You can double-click on Default Solution to see all the components it has. We can use the filter dropdown to see only a specific type of solution component, such as the following:

This solution holds all the out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 CE components, any components customized by us, and components that are developed by ISVs. In the preceding screenshot, you can see all of the components of the solution. The list of the components given in the screenshot represents which of the components can be included in th...