Welcome to the various types of guidance that Microsoft provides for Dynamics 365. Get an overview of already published content at Dynamics 365 guidance documentation, and submit new content here.
Overview
In this section, we provide an overview of what we mean with the term guidance.
Microsoft uses the term guidance for design patterns, reference architectures, deployment diagrams, and other recommended approaches to implement Microsoft services in an organization. Solution architects, administrators, functional consultants, and many more use the content to start conversations or implementations. For Dynamics 365, we add end-to-end business process descriptions, and best practices for how to configure and set up Dynamics 365 for an organization.
Microsoft believes that every business is in the business of creating great customer experiences. To achieve that, business applications must do more than just run your back office, marketing, supply chain, or even field operations as discrete entities. We recognize that businesses don't just implement technology solutions, they implement business applications to solve real-life business problems. These investments are often coupled with an expectation of a return on investment, a reduction in total cost of ownership, or another perceived and measurable business objective. The end-to-end business processes content will help guide your implementation to success faster and easier.
The term business process covers a wide range of structured, often sequenced, activities or tasks to achieve a predetermined organizational goal. The term can also refer to the cumulative effects of all steps progressing toward a business goal. In our articles, we illustrate this sequence of steps in flowcharts. Dynamics 365 is a suite of applications that are designed to help organization meet the organizational goals aligned to a variety of business processes focused on specific industries.
We've structured our business process content into four levels:
This section contains guidance for how to implement solutions that include Dynamics 365. The original Dynamics 365 Implementation Guide introduced the term Success by Design with four stages. But we've added an earlier stage to the list so that there are now five stages:
In this section, we provide an overview of the resources in the Dynamics-365-FastTrack-Implementation-Assets GitHub repo. The tools and scripts are sorted by the Dynamics 365 apps that they support, or the technology or concept that they apply to.
This section provides best practices for ongoing administrative tasks, such as data management, reporting and business intelligence, servicing the solution, and other aspects of administrative tasks.
Patterns
This section is still pretty slim, but we expect to publish some of the patterns we've seen that admins and consultants use to bring Dynamics 365 solutions to life.
Reference architectures
The first reference architectures are already there, and we hope to build a library of reference architectures to help our customer and admins get deployments and integrations right.
FastTrack
Microsoft FastTrack for Dynamics 365, our customer success service designed to help our partners' customers implement and go live so they can realize business value faster. It is an onboarding program run by the product engineering team that offers best practices, tools, resources, and expert advice. The customer will gain valuable insights with solution implementation, onboarding, and continued education.
Product documentation
Wherever you are in the guidance content, the navigation panel shows links to the core docs for each Dynamics 365 app or service. You can also find these links on the Dynamic 365 documentation hub page.
Get notified about changes through an RSS feed
To subscribe to a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed of all updates to the Dynamics 365 guidance content, use the following link:
The RSS feed returns a list of the 100 articles most recently updated. The list is sorted by date, but it can take up to a week before the most recently updated articles make it to the list.
Tell us what you think
On the learn.microsoft.com website, each documentation article encourages you to provide feedback. We've changed the mechanism a couple of times based on, well, feedback. Currently, we ask you to choose the Feedback action below the article's title. Give the article a rating, and write a comment if you want to. The feedback goes straight to the article's author and the team that owns the docs.