Contoso Inc. is a fictitious global manufacturing and retail company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington, and a number of regional subsidiaries on all continents. Contoso Inc. works in the industry of manufacturing and implementing large machines and factories as well as producing consumer electronic goods. Furthermore, Contoso Inc. operates a chain of retail stores around the globe together with an e-commerce sales channel.

This fictitious company will serve as an example Power Platform customer to present the practical implementation of the concepts presented in this book. In this chapter, Contoso Inc. will familiarize itself with the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 to decide what components will suit their business requirements.

In this section, you will learn the structure of the Microsoft Power Platform to understand the background technology on which Power Apps as well as all Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications run.

Microsoft made a big shift when it introduced the Power Platform. For seasoned Microsoft Dynamics CRM and, later, Dynamics 365 CE experts, the Dynamics product is no longer the centerpiece of this product line but rather a first-party app running on the Power Platform. The change can be illustrated in two diagrams. The first diagram shows the Microsoft Dynamics 365 high-level architecture before the Power Platform was introduced (not all applications are included for brevity):

Figure 1.1: Microsoft Dynamics 365 before the Power Platform

The second diagram presents the dramatic increase in the complexity and number of various new products and technologies that are part of the Power Platform today (not all applications are included for brevity...

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM technology was historically the foundation for Microsoft Dataverse, but in the current concept, Microsoft Dataverse is the foundation and the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM applications are called first-party Power Apps. Each of the applications, when provisioned, extends the Microsoft Dataverse database with the workload-specific data model and provides one or more model-driven apps for managing the respective workload. The applications cover the typical CRM workloads of sales, marketing, and customer, field, and project services. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM applications are available also as an on-premises deployment, except for Marketing and Project Operations. In this section, you will learn the capabilities of all five main Dynamics 365 CRM applications.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales app (also called Sales Hub) has the following capabilities:

• Customer...

Although the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP applications are not in the scope of this book, it is important to have a basic understanding of the capabilities of these modules to make informed decisions when designing a future business solution. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP applications are not based on the Microsoft Dataverse platform and are not considered model-driven applications. Some of the applications are also available as an on-premises deployment. In this section, you will learn the capabilities of all five main Dynamics 365 ERP applications.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance app is dedicated to midsize to large multinational customers and has the following capabilities:

• General ledger
• Accounts receivable
• Accounts payable
• Budget and forecasting
• Project accounting
• Invoicing and billing
• Fixed assets
• Cash and bank management
• Expenses...

For a long time, Microsoft has been heavily investing in bringing advanced capabilities into the business solutions product line by leveraging modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and mixed reality. The result is a large and always-growing number of Dynamics 365 addons and separate applications extending the business solution modules with analytical and insight capabilities as well as unique capabilities provided by the HoloLens hardware.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a customer data platform (CDP) solution intended to bring a comprehensive 360° view of the customer by combining master data with transactional, observational, and behavioral data from various data sources using connectors. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights has the following capabilities:

• Data source configuration
• Data unification (mapping, matching, and...

The purpose of this section is to provide a brief overview of the licensing possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform components including high-level price tags. Licensing details, which are very complex and change frequently, can be found in the various licensing guides Microsoft regularly publishes:

• Trials: For almost all Microsoft Power Platform components, there is a possibility to provision a free trial, usually limited to 30 days.
• Power Apps Developer Plan: Specific free-of-charge but permanent license for learning and individual development. Cannot be used for production purposes and is limited to a single user.
• Power Apps/Power Automate for Office 365: These licenses allow building apps and flows using the standard data connectors only, based on the Office 365 services.
• Power Apps/Power Automate for Dynamics 365: These licenses are included in most Dynamics 365 licenses and allow the creation of apps...

After this theoretical introduction and overview, it might be interesting to examine an example solution for our fictitious company, Contoso Inc., wanting to leverage all capabilities and maximize the benefits of using the Microsoft Power Platform components.

Contoso Inc. has analyzed all the high-level requirements for a new business solution and decided to leverage the Power Platform components to the greatest possible extent.

The various workloads Contoso Inc. is planning for implementation using Power Platform and Dynamics 365 applications are described in the following overview:

• Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Product Visualize will be used by the sales department for managing B2B sales processes and providing analytical insights.
• Dynamics 365 Marketing will be used by the marketing department for running product campaigns and various presentations and conferences.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Power Pages...

In this chapter, you learned the basics about the Power Platform and its components and capabilities, as well as the capabilities of the broad and ever-growing family of Dynamics 365 applications. With this knowledge, you will be able to decide on the most suitable Power Platform components for your needs (after analyzing a requirements catalog).

In the next chapter, we will present an overview of the two other Microsoft cloud products, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure, in the context of Power Platform solutions.