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Introduction to the Dynamics 365 implementation guide

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Picture this scenario: A customer purchases a car from a dealer. One day, the car starts making strange noises. The customer calls the service center and reports a problem. A service advisor opens an application, types a few notes about the problem into a form, and schedules a repair visit. The notes on that form might be the first time in years that any data related to the customer or the vehicle flows into the dealer's relational database. It's only a trickle in response to a malfunction, and it stops at the source. The car's manufacturer might never see a single byte of data from the event. We call this scenario the reactive past: Data drips downward from applications to databases in response to external triggers.

Now consider what's possible today: The same customer purchases another car from the dealer. With appropriate permissions granted by its new owner, the car provides a continuous stream of data back to both the dealer and the manufacturer, from engine operating parameters to the composition of the gases in the tailpipe. The car can report a problem before the customer is even aware of one. We call this scenario the predictive future: Data streams continuously, providing a rich foundation for predictions—about both products and services and the people who purchase them—that help businesses build higher-value relationships with their customers.

A new paradigm

In the predictive era, the new paradigm is that everything is a source of data and potential insights. At Microsoft, we believe that every product, every service, every customer, and every organization gains higher-value relationships when data flows from anywhere into a planet-scale database like Azure, filters through the Power Platform, and shows up in Dynamics 365 applications and services.

Graphic showing data in the predictive era as a river flowing into Azure, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365 applications.

For companies that "grew up" in the predictive era, that paradigm is second nature. But for organizations with longer histories, it can be difficult to embrace the change. It requires a complete transformation of their capabilities and processes.

At Microsoft, that kind of change isn't just a "what if." We've been pursuing our own transformation and faced many of the same challenges. The way we build products is at the heart of our transformation. Instead of the multiyear development cycle of traditional, on-premises products, we now deliver Dynamics 365 as a service that continuously gets better and is always up to date. It allows us to capture rich data about bugs and usage to inform ongoing feature development.

Our digital transformation influenced the way we run our own business—but it also influences how we think about success for our customers. Our vision is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Harnessing data to help you predict the future and intelligently guide your actions represents a core capability that invites organizations to achieve more by innovating everywhere.

Illustration of innovating across different areas, from suppliers, assets, operations, employees, products, and services, to customers.

Data, applications, and platforms come together in the cloud

The opportunity from the shift from reactive to predictive—from waiting for the car to fail to knowing the car is about to fail before its owner does—is hard to overstate. For Microsoft and for our customers, every product, service, and business process is ripe for reinvention. But the reinvention requires a wholesale reimagination—a literal turning upside-down—of the systems that power the interconnected fabric of products, services, and applications.

To help companies reinvent their businesses and thrive in the predictive era, Microsoft invests in the Dynamics 365 family of products, an application platform (Microsoft Power Platform), and an infrastructure platform (Microsoft Azure). Our business applications and platforms span enterprise and independent software vendor (ISV) developers to citizen developers. The entire Microsoft cloud comes together as a unified platform for digital transformation with consistent security, identity, and compliance boundaries.

With everything as a source of data and potential insight, our goal is simple: Help customers take the right action at the right time with the right message in the right channel to achieve the right business outcome. We call it the digital feedback loop: Organizations tap into data signals from across their business. These signals drive ongoing improvements in the products and services the organization delivers to their customers, who respond to these improvements, fueling a self-reinforcing cycle.

Diagram illustrating the digital feedback loop with data and AI in the middle and spin-offs for 'empower people,' 'transform products,' 'optimize operations,' and 'engage customers.'

Dynamics 365: Cloud-based apps for holistic, unified digital transformation

Keep the opportunities of the predictive era in mind as we take a step back for a moment. Looking back, it's clear that our company-wide push into the cloud set in motion the trajectory of what we know today as Dynamics 365. But our journey to the cloud started with our Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, and Dynamics NAV business applications. Those standalone Dynamics apps became the cloud-based Dynamics 365 business apps and platform. Dynamics 365 tells a powerful story as cloud-based business applications and a unified platform for digital transformation that cover the front office, the back office, and beyond.

Fast forward to today. Few of our competitors can offer a complete cloud business solution with the breadth, depth, and level of integration with other Microsoft products that Dynamics 365 has.

Dynamics 365 is a portfolio of business applications that meets organizations where they are and invites them to digitally transform. Each app in the portfolio is designed to remove barriers and eliminate silos by working with existing systems—or the entire family of Dynamics 365 apps—to achieve outcomes you simply can't get unless every part of the business is connected seamlessly.

Our data-first Dynamics 365 strategy

Whether your business already uses Dynamics 365 or is still thinking about it, understanding our vision for the Dynamics 365 family helps you see the full potential of your investment.

Dynamics 365 is just one part of our cloud strategy, although it's a vital part. Several other factors contribute to our data-first strategy to put Dynamics 365 into a category of one:

  • Dynamics 365 front-office and back-office cloud applications are consumable in a composable manner and integrate easily with other platforms. You can maximize your investment without having to rip out and replace your existing customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes and systems.

  • The low-code Power Platform allows pro and citizen developers alike to build solutions, automate processes, and generate insights. No other vendor can offer the same breadth and depth of functionality and approachability with its core platform.

  • Dynamics 365 and Power Platform apps are natively built on Azure, the cloud with an unmatched level of security, trust, compliance, and global availability.

  • Dynamics 365 integrates with Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, and Bing, to enrich the experience of business application users.

With Dynamics 365, organizations have the only portfolio of intelligent business applications that enables holistic, unified digital transformation and empowers everyone to adapt and innovate—anywhere. And with out-of-the-box functionality that allows organizations to hit the ground running, Dynamics 365 customers realize faster return on their investment.

Start here

When organizations make an investment in business applications, they need to clearly identify the value they intend to get from it. Technology alone doesn't get you there. Think about the following key questions before you embark on an implementation of Dynamics 365:

  • Why are you doing it?
  • Is it just a rip-and-replace effort?
  • Does the implementation represent an opportunity for digital transformation, advance your business model, allow you to leapfrog over the competition, or something else?

We understand that every organization has unique challenges, opportunities, and priorities. No matter where you are in your digital transformation, this implementation guide offers the guidance, perspective, questions, and resources to help your Dynamics 365 implementation succeed.

Start with an overview of the Success by Design framework, which Microsoft created to help our customers and partners successfully implement Dynamics 365. You should also learn about the mindset and thinking that are required to implement in the cloud.

Tip

The Dynamics 365 implementation guide and the Success by Design framework is used by the FastTrack for Dynamics 365 team and partners across the world for complex and not-so-complex implementation projects. We believe the Success by Design framework can help any organization. But if you're a startup, a small business, or overwhelmed by a perceived complexity here, you might want to go explore Dynamics 365 Business Central now. Learn more at Welcome to Dynamics 365 Business Central.

However, the Dynamics 365 implementation guide is relevant for organizations of medium size and upwards. If you're a business owner, talk to your own administrative team about the guidance here, and then contact your reselling partner. The FastTrack for Dynamics 365 team supports and collaborate with our partner network to help you find the right solution.

Our ideas about how you should implement Dynamics 365, or any other business application, are detailed in the rest of the implementation guide. They include many of the traditional activities of deploying a new solution:

But tradition doesn't always serve you well. Microsoft recommends that teams not structure their projects as massive 9–18-month waterfall efforts. From a cloud services perspective, this outdated, on-premises implementation style must be jettisoned in favor of agility.

Project teams should focus on finding the function or area of the application that the business can start using as quickly as possible. They can expand and enhance from there. The application and the business are going to change anyway, so it's in the organization's best interests to claim value early.

More to the point, we believe that there's more to being agile than adopting sprint cycles that still require 9–18 months of effort to deploy part of a solution. Traditional models can no longer keep up. Long setup times, expensive and complicated customizations, and slow adoption make it nearly impossible to meet the needs of a changing and demanding customer base using old methods.

Next steps

Whether you're a first-time implementer or a been-there-done-that Dynamics 365 architect, we hope you bring us along on your journey.

We suggest you continue with the implementation guide. The following articles address the major subjects in the Dynamics 365 implementation lifecycle and include our point of view on solution design and more: