In writing my last post on Creating your own Dynamics Publisher, I stumbled across the below information on the default solution and publisher Ids within Dynamics.

Both, the default solution and publisher are the same Guids across all Dynamics environments.

DefaultPublisherId  – {d21aab71-79e7-11dd-8874-00188b01e34f}

Furthermore, you can access the Default Solution Id (consistent across all environments).

DefaultSolutionId – {FD140AAF-4DF4-11DD-BD17-0019B9312238}

I did a quick validation between an on-premise CRM 2015 tenant and my online Dynamics instance and both lined up.

Reference: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328257.aspx

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A Publisher in Dynamics is the entity by which your solutions are deployed to Dynamics CRM.

No publisher means no solution being deployed.

In any Dynamics install, there is always a Default Publisher which you can use across your solutions (if you like) but exists as the publisher for customizations made to the base system.

Creating a publisher can be accomplished by simply going to Settings >> Customizations >> Publishers and creating your own publisher.

But that’s pretty boring, so we’re going to create one using code.

Creating your Publisher

Once you initialized a connection to Dynamics, put together a little console app and use the following code to create your own Publisher that can be used for deploying your own solutions.

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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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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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