Platform Unification - Dynamics 365 & Power Apps - PART 1

CONTENT Introduction Dataverse Dual-Write

INTRODUCTION

In the beginning, there were just installations, solutions were being installed locally on the company's hardware and servers and this was managed by the company's IT team. As a result of fast-evolving technologies, solutions are on the cloud now.

In the traditional approach, one installation is expected to fill all business GAPs. In cloud solutions, there are multiple applications that fill all the GAPs perfectly for Procure to Pay and Order to Cash (or Prospect to Cash) processes.

This article series provides several solution ideas by using Microsoft cloud business applications.

DATAVERSE

Microsoft is continuously enhancing the platform and services that support Finance and Operations apps with new capabilities to enable businesses everywhere to accelerate their digital transformation. The key driver for all of the new, core capabilities is to increase productivity and return on investment.

The Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities can be categorized as follows:

• Power Platform features are capabilities that bring FO apps closer to Microsoft Power Platform. Environment provisioning, authorization and authentication, run-time events, and developer tools are areas that will enable new capabilities. It is a challenge to make FO data useable in other 365 business applications because all other applications are built on top of data verse whereas the database is Azure SQL database in FO. To overcome this challenge, Microsoft now unifies CE (CRM) Dataverse and FO (ERP) Azure SQL solutions into one fully integrated cloud service.
• Cross-app features provide ease of use to all users of FO apps.
• Data and process integration features provide enhanced data exchange experiences between Finance and Operations apps, Microsoft Dataverse, and customer engagement apps in Dynamics 365.

Dataverse is the idea of having a database system that is easy to use across Power Platform applications.

• It gives you the platform to start leveraging the power platform tools around it. 
• It's a cloud-based, low-code data service and app platform. 
• Users don't need to switch browsers or switch applications from one to another.

Dataverse structures a variety of data and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes in a secure and compliant manner. With dataverse;

• Power apps can be embedded in FO
• Model-driven apps can be embedded in FO
• FO pages can be embedded in Unified Interface apps outside FO

Integration scenarios in this article series are focused on ERP and CRM collaboration. Depending on the business requirement, there are several ways to integrate ERP (Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management aka Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations) and CRM (Power Apps - CE):

• Dual-write
• Virtual entities
• Logic app
• Data integrator

DUAL - WRITE

Since the integration happens between databases, not applications, endpoints will be mentioned as FO and Dataverse. Dual write creates the same data in both SQL database and dataverse at the same time. That's why it doesn't matter where we are creating/maintaining/modifying quotes, orders, or customers. Data lives in both applications depending on the setup of dual writes. In another saying, dual-write is a synchronous integration that has a direct connection between the two systems in near-real-time.

Flowing data between environments helps to provide segregation of duties that is the operational reality of businesses. For example, Sales rep creates an account in the sales app, the account needs to fly into ERP as a customer so that SO can be created and invoiced. Data sharing (via dual-write) is required because of the business requirement. Or imagine a Power BI solution that requires native entities. For example, Power BI consumes Datalake data that comes from Dataverse via dual-write. In this case, data sharing is required due to a technical requirement.

You can set up a dual-write connection between a Finance and Operations environment and a Dataverse environment.

• A Finance and Operations environment provides the underlying platform for Finance and Operations apps (for example, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Dynamics 365 Human Resources).
• A Dataverse environment provides the underlying platform for customer engagement apps (Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 column Service, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation).

The setup mechanism varies, depending on your subscription and the environment:

• For new instances of Finance and Operations apps, the setup of a dual-write connection begins in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS). If you have a license for Microsoft Power Platform, you will get a new Dataverse environment if your tenant doesn't have one.
• For existing instances Finance and Operations apps, the setup of a dual-write connection begins in the Finance and Operations environment.
• Dynamics 365 applications use Dataverse capacity and features to store and secure data. Power Apps users who have a Power Apps license may use custom applications to access (that is, create, read, update or delete) any Dynamics 365 non-restricted table in the Dataverse. However, Power Apps users and devices that need to create, update, or delete data in Dynamics 365 restricted tables must be properly licensed for Dynamics 365.

Features

• Any (create/update/delete) CRUD operation in FO results in writes to dataverse and vice-versa
• Bi-directional(2-ways)
• Alert friendly
• Extendable, ISV solution's entities or custom entities can be included
• There is no extra training is required for users since this is an out-of-the-box configuration and data is flying around in the back end
• Used to replicate master data (customer, contact, etc.) and business documents (quote, sales order, invoice, etc.) between environments.
• Integration can be paused and resumed for a specific entity

Considerations

• FO and dataverse must be in the same instance and on the same tenant
• For minimum latency, FO and CDS instances should be in the same region
• FO instance cannot be linked to multiple dataverse instances
• Dual write works only in between FO and Dataverse. If you need similar functionally between FO and a none-Dataverse environment then you may want to use Logic App
• Dual write doesn't support "Cross company data sharing"
• Use it only when it is required

If there is an active FO instance that you want to start using dual write, migrate data to dataverse before running Dual-Write. You can skip the initial synchronization if you don't have to sync data between the two environments. Copying preexisting data from FO to dataverse can be done in 2 different ways.

• If your data is low volume then use initial write to copy reference and dependent tables from the Finance and Operations app to Dataverse.
• If your data is too high volume, then consider migrating data before enabling Dual-Write.
• or both methods can be used respectively. Imagine Customers table in a Finance and Operations app, and the Account table in Dataverse:
• Use initial write to copy reference and dependent tables, such as Company, Customer groups, and Terms of payment, from the Finance and Operations app to Dataverse.
• Use the Data management framework to export data from the Finance and Operations app in comma-separated values (CSV) format. For example, set up an export project in Data management to export customers from each company by using the DataAreaId field in the Finance and Operations app. This process is a one-time manual process.
• Use Azure Blob Storage to store the CSV files for lookup and transformation. Upload the CSV file for your Finance and Operations customers into Azure Blob Storage.
• Use Azure Data Factory to push data into Dataverse.

If you are implementing a brand new system, data can be loaded into one side through data migration and then synced to the other side through the initial synchronization.

After go-live, any data change in Finance and Operations apps causes writes to Dataverse, and any data change in Dataverse causes writes to Finance and Operations apps. This automated data flow provides an integrated user experience across the apps.

Sample implementation scenarios will be discussed in further sections.

to be continued ...