By: Linda Rosencrance
Microsoft’s Common Data Service (CDS) team yesterday shed more light on the its priorities and progress related to Dynamics and other products.
At the core of the CDS is the Common Data Model, an extensible data model that’s shared by all the apps a company builds on the CDS, described Microsoft Group Program Manager Jono Luk in a blog post.
Among the topics in the wide ranging upda, Luk describes how Microsoft is investing significant effort to automatically bring together data from across the Dynamics 365 family into an integrated data model in the CDS. He made particular note of the efforts to provide automatic synchronization between CDS and Dynamics 365 apps and of building new apps usind CDS as the data source. This includes:
- Data integration capabilities that automatically sync in data from Microsoft services, including Dynamics 365 for Sales and Operations, with just a few clicks. In the past month, Microsoft launched an initial preview of these capabilities through its Prospect to Cash integration features. In the future, Microsoft plans to allow users to bring in data from both Microsoft and non-Microsoft sources.
- Many new entities from a variety of areas, including customer engagement, project management, incident management, service management and human resources. Microsoft also plans to work with partners on new scenarios.
- Multiple Dynamics 365 apps and offerings built on the CDS, making the data that’s used by those apps available for users to build their own apps against.
Luk stated these features help realize the goal of the CDS: to enable users to use and build apps that operate on a single, centralized set of data, without significant investment.
The CDS “just works with other services,” Luk stated. For customers using products such as Dynamics 365 for Sales or Operations or Azure Active Directory and Office 365, Microsoft enables the data to “just show up” in the CDS.
“Not only does this data show up without you needing to invest time, effort or infrastructure, the data from across these services are automatically fully integrated and related as appropriate in our data model,” Luk stated.
With general release in November, the Common Data Service brings a company’s business data together in one place, giving business app developers starting point from which to plan and create custom entities.
The data model starts with a set of commonly used business entities that Microsoft automatically provisions for customers. For example, Microsoft automatically makes available entities for managing customers, employees, products, accounts, sales orders and sales leads.