Dual-write integration
Dual-write is an out-of-the-box infrastructure that provides near real-time interaction between customer engagement apps and finance and operations apps. When data about customers, products, people, and operations flows beyond application boundaries, all departments in an organization are empowered.
Dual-write provides tightly coupled, bidirectional integration between finance and operations apps and Dataverse. Data changes in finance and operations apps cause writes to Dataverse, and data changes in Dataverse cause writes to finance and operations apps. This automated data flow provides an integrated user experience across the apps.
Dual-write has two aspects: infrastructure and application.
Infrastructure aspect
Dual-write infrastructure is extensible and reliable and includes the following key features:
Synchronous and bidirectional data flow between applications
Synchronization, together with play, pause, and catch-up modes to support the system during online and offline/asynchronous modes
Ability to sync initial data between the applications
Combined view of activity and error logs for data admins
Ability to configure custom alerts and thresholds and to subscribe to notifications
Intuitive user interface (UI) for filtering and transformations
Ability to set and view entity dependencies and relationships
Extensibility for standard and custom entities and maps
Reliable application lifecycle management (ALM)
Out-of-the-box setup experience for new customers
Application aspect
Dual-write creates mapping between concepts in finance and operations apps and concepts in customer engagement apps. This integration supports the following scenarios:
Integrated customer master
Access to customer loyalty cards and reward points
Unified product mastering experience
Awareness of organization hierarchy
Integrated vendor master
Access to finance and tax reference data
On-demand price engine experience
Integrated prospect-to-cash experience
Ability to serve in-house assets and customer assets through field agents
Integrated procure-to-pay experience
Integrated activities and notes for customer data and documents
Ability to look up on-hand inventory availability and details
Project-to-cash experience
Ability to handle multiple addresses and roles through the party concept
Single source management for users
Integrated channels for retailing and marketing
Visibility into promotions and discounts
Request-for-service functions
Streamlined service operations
Dual-write provides data integration across Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications. This robust framework links environments and enables different business applications to work together.
Reasons for using the dual-write framework include:
It provides tightly coupled, near real-time, and bidirectional integration between finance and operations apps and model-driven apps in Dynamics 365. This integration makes Microsoft Dynamics 365 the one place to go for all your business solutions. Customers who use Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, but who use non-Microsoft solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), are moving toward Dynamics 365 for its dual-write support.
Data from customers, products, operations, projects, and the Internet of Things (IoT) automatically flows to Dataverse through dual-write. This connection is useful for businesses that are interested in Power Platform expansions.
The infrastructure follows the no-code/low-code principle. Minimal engineering effort is required to extend the standard table-to-table maps and to include custom maps.
It supports online mode and offline mode. Microsoft is the only company that offers support for online and offline modes.