If you or your clients have been using Dynamics CRM it’s time to embrace the future. Microsoft has combined their Dynamics offerings into a single solution now called Dynamics 365.
If you’re using Dynamics CRM Online you would have already noticed this change and if you’re using On Premise then it’s time to start planning your upgrade. Dynamics 365 is now setup as follows: –
Sales, and Customer Service leverage heavily on Dynamics CRM functionality, while Operations is based on Dynamic AX, Finance is based on Dynamics NAV/Project Madeira, marketing is a cooperation with Adobe and their marketing cloud offering (build in progress) and the others use a bit of functionality from various other Microsoft projects including some Dynamics.
The issue with the Dynamics family has always been they have been siloed products that have been hard to integrate. With Dynamics 365 Microsoft have created an end to end solution for your whole customer lifecycle. Long term the products will be merged together however at the moment it’s just a tightened coupling of the Dynamics suite of product. Short term there is a few awesome features in Dynamics 365 (or in the last release of Dynamics CRM 2016) which you should be using: –
Editable Grids
People have been screaming out for this for a long time. You can select Editable grids for controls or leave them as the standard Read Only type that users are familiar with. The ability to allow it only on Web is also a nice feature.
Simple one click to edit
Validation inbuilt.
Power BI integration
Organisation’s love Power BI and now you can imbed it directly into Dynamics 365. Power BI is a powerful tool that is surprisingly easy to use. Allowing for key information to be displayed on the dashboard.
Integration with all your Microsoft products
Dynamics 365 is designed to out of the box work with all Microsoft’s suite of products so you can extend it in some amazing ways.
Some of the tools 365 integrates with: –
- Azure Machine Learning
- Cortana
- Microsoft Flow
- Office 365
- PowerApps
- PowerBI
- SharePoint
Updated SDK code. Upgrading the End Points
If you have old Integration points I strongly suggest you start investigating Microsoft.Xrm.Tooling. The old OData endpoint is now deprecated and Web API is the way to go.
You can get the SDK from Microsoft’s website (however I had issues with that code) or you can get the NuGet package
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.CrmSdk.XrmTooling.PackageDeployment/
Have a look at the following pages to get up to speed quickly on the Xrm Tooling functionality.
AndrewCampey.com 