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Dynamics 365 application platform - A platform for building extended Dynamics 365 (xRM) applications

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Applies To: Dynamics 365 (online), Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2016, Dynamics CRM Online

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online & on-premises) offers customers, partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), and systems integrators (SIs), a powerful platform for building line-of-business applications. These applications are often referred to as Extended Dynamics 365 applications (xRM) applications because they leverage the relationship tracking capabilities beyond the typical customer relationship management (Dynamics 365) scenarios. These applications span across various industries including Retail, Service industries, Manufacturing, Distribution, Financial services, and Public sector.

Dynamics 365 includes additional capabilities for Operations and Financials. For developer documentation using these capabilities, see:

What does xRM mean for a developer?

Business applications typically model and track connections between various types of business data (people, places, and things). Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides for declarative development of relational business applications with flexible data models and dynamic services. In addition to the declarative application capabilities, business applications built on Dynamics 365 can be extended and integrated with external systems through a rich Software Development Kit (SDK).

Rapid application development

These days there is little time to write a lot of custom code to deliver solutions. To meet requirements for business applications you need a framework that provides the agility and flexibility to rapidly adapt to changes and get user acceptance and adoption.

You get a user interface ready for international use

Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides a user experience optimized for interacting with relational data. Users can navigate to, view, edit, report, and take action on their data using modern web and mobile applications available on iOS, Android, and Windows. These applications have the ability to guide users through a business process and rules from start to finish. This user experience provides a common and consistent interaction model for a user who uses multiple business applications.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 application supports many international languages and currencies. Your application inherits all these capabilities.

You get an extensible data and security model

Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables you to extend the out-of-the-box data model to meet the data storage and tracking needs of your business application. You can disable elements of this data model if they don’t apply to your business application. The data model is protected by an extensible security model to apply role, record and field level, as well as hierarchical security. All other aspects of the Dynamics 365 platform and user experience are driven by the data and security model you define. In this way, users only see and have access to the data and actions you choose.

Organizations can also add their own data elements and security to work seamlessly on top of the data model used by your application. Or other ISVs or SIs can build solutions on top of yours, just as yours is built on top of the default Dynamics 365 data and security model.

You get extensible business logic

Defining and enforcing consistent business processes is one of the main reasons people use Microsoft Dynamics 365. You can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to define and enforce consistent business processes and rules for your application.

Organizations that use your application can modify or extend your default application business logic without writing code.

You get Microsoft Office 365 integration

Office 365 provides so many additional options to work with your application. With your application people will be able to:

  • Integrate with Exchange and Outlook for email tracking, scheduling and task management.

  • Initiate instant messaging and phone calls with Skype for Business.

  • Use Power BI to analyze data.

  • Edit data with Excel.

  • Take rich contextual notes with OneNote.

  • Create personalized documents as a team with automatic document generation and real-time co-authoring.

  • Manage contextual documents across SharePoint, Office 365 Groups, and OneDrive for Business.

  • Get relevant content with Office Delve based on what they're working on and who they're working with.

You get cross-platform mobile applications

The Dynamics 365 mobile apps download metadata about your data model, security configuration, business processes and rules, transforming the out-of-the-box experience into a customized mobile app for your application.

You get business intelligence

People using your application will be able to gain insight into your business and proactively anticipate business needs.

They will be able to use Power BI, interactive dashboards and reports, advanced visualizations, and natural language Q&A. People will have visibility into business performance with at-a-glance dashboards and contextual charts inside your business application.

You can build on top of the platform

The web services built into Dynamics 365 allow developers familiar with standards based web technologies to extend and integrate their business applications built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and the .NET Framework. Dynamics 365 exposes the same end user and administrative capabilities you've seen in the UI through a RESTful web service API built on open standards including OAuth 2.0 and OData v4. Because Dynamics 365 embraces web standards, external systems can integrate with your business application built on Dynamics 365 using their platform and languages of choice.

Learn more about building extended Dynamics 365 (xRM) solutions

View these videos to learn more:

  • Building xRM Solutions I: Introduction
    Microsoft Dynamics 365 capabilities can be leveraged to build line of business applications, managing any relationship and interaction versus customer relationships and interactions. In this video, we’ll walk through the capabilities within Microsoft Dynamics 365 application platform, including:

    • Rapid application development

    • Business process management

    • Business intelligence

    • User experience

  • Building xRM Solutions II: Configuration
    In this video, the terms configuration and customization are used interchangeably and refer to an iterative process of defining the data model, security model, navigation, forms and views, business process flows, business rules, business process automation, and solution packaging.

  • Building xRM Solutions III: Code
    In this video, we’ll cover four main concepts to consider when extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 to build a xRM solution:

    • Client extensions

    • Server extensions

    • Integration

    • Custom user experiences

See Also

Extend Microsoft Dynamics 365
Supported extensions for Microsoft Dynamics 365
The metadata and data models in Microsoft Dynamics 365
Extend Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the server
Extend Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the client
Customize Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications
Package and distribute extensions using solutions
Developers guide to reports for Microsoft Dynamics 365
Extend Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Outlook
Integrate Microsoft Dynamics 365 with SharePoint
Integrate Microsoft Dynamics 365 with OneNote

Microsoft Dynamics 365

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