Complimenting/supporting tools with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 is complimented with tools to make it more personalized and easy for information consumption and informed decision making. Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow are all backed by the best-in-class cloud services for enterprise developers and IT professionals to quickly extend capabilities for power users and scale to enterprise-wide manageability easily at any time.

Let's have a visual overview of additional apps/services/tools which could be utilized to measure information, act upon task, and automate stuff as much as possible. The following screenshot shows the apps, Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow, addressing each of the aforementioned capabilities:

Let's now explore all of these tools one by one.

Power BI

Power BI is a powerful analytical visualization for power users to quickly gain insights into information over cloud or on their premises. It works with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to provide a self-service analytics solution. With Power BI built directly into Dynamics 365, you gain access to powerful business intelligence – real-time on any device no matter where you are in the world – with rich visuals, charts and graphics.

Power BI also has data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data discovery, and interactive dashboards and can be embedded on most Azure Cloud platforms. The following screenshot shows a sample dashboard from Power BI with several informational parts such as charts, trends, values, tables, and many more:

PowerApps

PowerApps is a mobile app with capabilities for power users with faster time to market delivery. It is the foundation to build any web/mobile application on top of Dynamics 365 solutions without writing any significant code.

Let's have a glimpse of a sample mobile app built in no time and ready for usage by business. The following screenshot shows an app built on top of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition (AX) and its data entities:

This app is expected to create the much needed disruption in how ERP and CRM data are used.

Microsoft Flow

Flow is the new workflow engine of Microsoft Cloud helping in quickly designing any time consuming task or process as either a complex multi-step process sequence, or a simple one-step task. It is going to be seen more in areas of notifications, sync, and automating  approvals. Let's have a look at the chain of events which is so easy to establish in Microsoft Flow as follows:

Flow supports a wide variety of data sources to connect to external world applications seamlessly and the list is increasing as you are reading this book.

Common Data Service (CDS)

Common Data Service (CDS) is a shared database for storing business entities that connects to Dynamics 365, Flow, and PowerApps. It is the fabric behind Dynamics 365 and Office 365 to provide consistently structured entities across services spanning solutions within Dynamics 365 as well as external applications.

CDS gives a secure and encrypted business database, comprising of well-formed standard business entities that can be deployed for use in your organization. It provides structured metadata, rich data types, auto numbering, lookups, business data types, such as Address, Currency, capabilities, such as referential integrity, through metadata configuration, and cascade deletes, making a compelling functionality. CDS is licensed together with PowerApps as a standalone solution and is included in two different versions with Dynamics 365.

The following is a glimpse of managing entities within CDS with other tools such as connections, gateways, notifications, and others:

Microsoft AppSource

Think of an ecosystem in cloud which can act as a single destination for business users to discover, try, and acquire line-of-business SaaS applications. That is what Microsoft AppSource is and we see it as a great platform for partners having niche expertise in a specific subject to build, show and sell their expertise and solution on Cloud.

Let's see how the AppSource landing screen looks. The following is a visual showing the AppSource search page along with solution offerings by partners related to one or many Dynamics 365 apps:

Consider AppSource as an application store, where businesses will be able to find and try out line-of-business SaaS apps from Microsoft and its partners.

AppSource also provides a list of implementation partners who can assist customers in implementing these business apps. Currently, it hosts more than 80 apps for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition (AX).

For customers, Microsoft AppSource is your destination to easily find and evaluate the apps from Microsoft and our partners that drive your business. Use AppSource to review the details of business application, request trial through implementation partner.

For ISVs, Microsoft AppSource is your destination to market line-of-business (LoB) SaaS apps to business users. Drive discoverability and usage of your apps within an existing global network of business customers through co-marketing opportunities, lead generation, and the support of Microsoft's worldwide ecosystem and sales force. Harness Azure's leading, secure, and intelligent Cloud services platform and tools to deliver differentiated apps to customers:

The preceding image shows the AppSource landing page and solution across industry segments for ease in locating the perfect solution.
To learn more about it, you can visit https://appsource.microsoft.com.