What is One Dynamics One Platform
Microsoft recognizes that its Dynamics 365 applications, including Finance & Operations, Customer Engagement, Field Service, Sales, and Marketing, are highly regarded in the market as standalone products. However, integrating these applications can be a complex and costly endeavor.
To address this challenge, Microsoft has introduced the concept of “One Dynamics One Platform.” This initiative aims to seamlessly integrate these Dynamics 365 applications, eliminating the need for extensive customizations and reducing the time and effort required for integration.
Over the course of the next few years, Microsoft plans to align and unify the various Dynamics 365 applications, enabling them to work together seamlessly. This integrated platform will provide users with a unified and cohesive experience, allowing for smooth data sharing, streamlined workflows, and improved collaboration across different areas of business operations.
By implementing the “One Dynamics One Platform” vision, Microsoft aims to enhance the overall effectiveness and efficiency of organizations using Dynamics 365, simplifying the integration process and maximizing the value of these applications within a unified ecosystem.
One Admin, One User, One Developer, One Insights is the vision to enable the
converged experiences across F&O and the Power Platform
One Admin
At present, administrators have to utilize multiple platforms to manage various Dynamics 365 applications. For instance, they rely on LCS for Finance & Operations (D365 F&O) management, while the Power Platform admin center handles Power Apps, Power Automate, and customer engagement apps such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation.
To enhance the productivity and efficiency of administrators, Microsoft has undertaken the initiative of consolidating D365 F&O administration into the Power Platform admin center. The goal is to provide a unified platform for managing all Dynamics 365 applications. However, achieving this integration is a complex undertaking and will require a couple of years to fully accomplish the vision of “One Dynamics One Platform” (ODOP).
One Developer
Currently, F&O developers utilize X++ within the Visual Studio IDE, while CE application developers work with different toolsets. This division of tools and languages often hampers developer productivity as they need to switch between applications and familiarize themselves with diverse toolsets.
To address this issue and align with the vision of ODOP, Microsoft aims to provide consistent tools and development concepts across applications. The goal is to enable developers to focus on their core strengths without the hindrance of adapting to different environments.
As part of this initiative, Microsoft has introduced Power Platform Tools for Visual Studio. These tools support the rapid creation, debugging, and deployment of plug-ins, facilitating a more streamlined and efficient development experience. By utilizing Power Platform Tools for Visual Studio, developers can leverage their existing skills and expertise while building cross-application functionality.
F&O Development today
- Everything is local
- Windows Server dependency
- (VHD) Needs to operate as
Administrator - Uses a different runtime (IIS) than prod (Service Fabric)
Online F&O Development
- Dataverse/Power Platform/CE
connected and preconfigured
(Dual Write, Virtual Entities,
Business Events…) - Dev environments are
provisioned from PPAC. - Additional option to
VHD/CHE: you can run the
tools on your own machine
One User (Experience) – Mix and match
- Canvas apps can be embedded into F&O apps.
- Model-driven apps can also be embedded into F&O apps.
- F&O pages can be embedded in model-driven apps
(only in the linked DV environment).
One User Runtime
- Managing master data, transactional data and e2e business processes with Finance & Supply Chain via dual write.
- Citizen-developer extensibility in Power Platform for Finance & Supply Chain via Virtual Tables, Business Events, Power Automate, Power Pages & Power Apps.
- Pro-developer extensibility in Power Platform for Finance & Supply Chain via Dataverse extensibility using plug-ins, Virtual Tables & Business Events
One insights
- One integrated experience
- Export to Data lake in F&O combines with Synapse Link for Dataverse
- Simpler configuration experience
- Deeper integration with Synapse and Power BI
- Launch Synapse from Dataverse available today – becomes available for F&O data
- Dynamics metadata in Synapse
- More performant
- Save data as parquet for better query performance
- Supports Delta Lake forma