Posts in Category: dynamics 365

A Scaled out CRM Solution Architecture

Recently I started work on a pretty big CRM project and I wanted to apply a more scaled out approach to my solution architecture.  CRM offers a great facility to deploy code in their solutions but when starting a new project you should always ask yourself the following questions before you starting adding entities into your solutions.

  1. What is the frequency of updates that will be requested by the users and to what components?
  2. Are there multiple users contributing to this project?
  3. How big do you expect this project to grow by?
  4. What kind of promotional model is in place for deployments?

I  have found that questions such as these generally drive the overall solution architecture I will put in place on a project.  For instance, if we are working with a client that has

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Change Tracking in Dynamics365

In Dynamics 2015 Update 1, a small update was released that you might have missed called Change Tracking.  This feature is implemented via the CRM SDK and let’s developers query for changes to the system, supplying a watermark (the token) from the last fetch to start retrieving from in the next fetch.

In terms of data retrieval, this is a big feature as no longer do you need to add fields into Dynamics to store this information and instead can leverage the platform as is to return this data and keep track of it for you.

For this post, I used the code from MSDN, modifying it slightly.

Enabling Change Tracking

Change Tracking is enabled on a per-entity basis – another great idea as it enforces the notion of “only use what you

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Site Maps and Custom Entities – Oh My!

You can now create your own groups and areas in Dynamics365 giving you further customization over your user’s experience in the application when accessing your custom entities.

I recently got a chance to play with this and was really impressed with it’s simplicity.

Note: This does not replace the security permissions to your entities which must be in place alongside these changes which are User Interface only.

You can see from my screenshot that you can add new areas (in my case “Custom”), new groups (in my case “My Goodies”) and then Subareas (in my case I dropped in a new custom entity but there are other options here too.

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Using Dynamics365 as a Queue for Data Synchronization

Over the years, I’ve migrated a lot of data from on-premise systems into Dynamics365 (whether they be existing CRM system, homegrown solutions or off the shelf packages).  I’ve used a number of third-party tools to accomplish these tasks (Scribe and Kingsway) but have also written my own when the need arose.

On a recent project, faced with yet more synchronization requests and the need for more infrastructure to manage changes, mediate conflicts, prevent ping-ponging data writes, etc, etc.  I started to change my thinking from being able to have everything on-premise (i.e., the ability to queue up new Virtual Images and tons of server space et al) to think of how I solve this problem if all I had was Dynamics365 and the server I am moving data from.

To

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The Simplest Connection to Dynamics365

Whenever starting something new, you always want to find the quickest way to make something happen.

Think Hello World – I want Hello World (but not really Hello World) so I can start doing all that cool stuff.

I was searching the other day for some code on how to make an initial connection to Dynamics365 for the start of a new project.

Here were the objectives;

  1. I didn’t want to download someone else’s library on creating a connection.
  2. I wanted to learn how to connect to Dynamics365.

The first point is really important because although there are some really, really great libraries out there, it prevents the accomplishment of my second objective which was – I wanted to write the code, not consume someone else’s code.

The best way to learn how something really works is

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