Create a solution to manage customizations

This topic applies to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises). For the Power Apps version of this topic, see: Use the Common Data Services Default Solution

We recommend that you create a solution to manage your customizations. With a custom solution, you can easily find just the solution components you’ve customized, consistently apply your solution publisher prefix, and export your solution for distribution to other environments.

If you don’t use a custom solution, you'll be working in the default solution in the unmanaged layer. The Default Solution is a special solution that contains all components in the system. The default solution is useful for discovering all of the components and configurations in your system.

Why you shouldn’t use the Default Solution to manage customizations

There are a few reasons why you shouldn’t create apps and make customizations in the Default Solution:

• The Default Solution contains all components and customizations from all solutions in the environment.
• It is difficult to locate or identify the customizations you have made in the environment using the Default Solution.
• Using the Default Solution, when creating components will also use the default publisher assigned to it. This may result in the wrong publisher prefix being applied to some components.
• The Default Solution can’t be exported. Therefore, you can’t distribute the Default Solution to another environment.

Privacy notices

By enabling a solution, you consent to share your data with an external system. Data that is imported from external systems into Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online) is subject to Microsoft Privacy and Cookies.

You can import and export solutions to and from Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online). When you do so, the solutions, which may contain personal information, are transferred over a secure connection between your computer and Microsoft servers. In turn, third-party code imported to Dynamics 365 (online) could eventually transmit Customer Data to an external system (i.e. InsideView) or configure/expand entities that get synchronized (i.e. exported) to other external systems that are controlled by a party other than Microsoft.

If a solution to be imported is meant to transmit Customer Data outside of the security boundaries of Dynamics 365 (online), Administrators are invited to verify the types of Customer Data that will be called by the service/software/application prior to uploading third-party code to their Dynamics 365 (online) instance.
Extraction of Customer Data by third party services/software/applications or solutions is controlled by the customer, not Microsoft. The final destiny and privacy policies applicable to the data points extracted by these external solutions are controlled by the Administrator; adequate review of the policies applicable by the third parties operating these services/software/apps is recommended.

See also

Customization overview
Getting started with customization
Privileges required for customization
Whitepaper: Patterns and Principles for Solution Builders