Microsoft Entra ID and OAuth 2.0 authentication

  • 10 minutes

Finance and operations apps use Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Microsoft Azure Active Directory) for authentication. OAuth 2.0 authentications allow integrations on behalf of a user. OAuth is an abbreviation for “Open Authorization.”

To access finance and operations apps and be assigned to a role, a user must have an authenticated Microsoft Entra ID account. By default, only authenticated users with user rights can establish a connection.

Microsoft Entra ID is a primary identity provider. To access the system, users must be provisioned into a finance and operations apps instance and should have a valid Microsoft Entra ID account in an authorized tenant.

OAuth 2.0 is a standard that allows a website or application to access resources, on behalf of a user, that other web apps are hosting, as shown in the following diagram.

Diagram of how Microsoft Entra ID and OAuth 2.0 work with data security in finance and operations apps.

For finance and operations apps, OAuth 2.0 provides authentication for the web application programming interface (API), services, and integrations.

OAuth 2.0

In finance and operations apps, OAuth 2.0 is used for integrations to allow external systems to access it in the following scenarios:

  • Batch data API
  • OData
  • Custom services
  • Data management package API
  • Other integration scenarios

To register finance and operations apps with OAuth 2.0 in Microsoft Entra ID, follow these steps:

  1. Go to portal.azure.com.

  2. Search for App Registrations and then select New registration.

  3. Choose the appropriate option under Supported Account Type. The most common option is Single tenant.

  4. Enter the applicable Redirect URI, which should be your environment’s URL and your environment’s URL + /OAuth, as the following image depicts.

    Screenshots of Redirect URLs.

  5. Select Register, and then select Certificates & secrets in the navigation pane.

  6. Select New client secret, and then enter a description and expiration period.

  7. Select Add to create the secret.

  8. Copy the value to a text document. Remember to save the value because you won’t be able to copy it later.

  9. Select API permissions in the navigation pane and then select Add a permission > Dynamics ERP.

  10. Select Delegated permissions and then enable Ax.FullAccess, CustomService.FullAccess, and Odata.FullAccess.

  11. Select Add permissions to close the dialog.

  12. Select Overview in the navigation pane.

  13. Copy the Application (client) ID and the Directory (tenant) to the same text document in which the Directory (tenant) ID value resides.

Now setup continues in finance and operation apps.

Set up finance and operations apps

Follow these steps to set up finance and operations apps:

  1. Sign in to the finance and operations apps environment, and then select System Administration > Setup >Microsoft Entra ID Applications.
  2. Enter the client ID from the app registration in Azure.
  3. Enter a name and a user ID, and then select Save.

Now, you can generate an authentication token based on the value from the secret, the Application (client) ID, and the Directory (tenant) ID.