Preface

I have been lucky enough to have been working with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations since it was released in 2016, when it was first known as AX7. At that time, everything was new for the people who had been working with the previous versions such as Axapta 3.0 or Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009/2012.

During the first months of its life, it went through several name changes and suffix additions and removals, but it was just our old Dynamics AX with a shiny new face. Slowly but steadily, it developed into what it is today.

I remember my first contact with Power Platform as clear as day. It was in 2019 during the Microsoft Business Applications Summit in Atlanta. I attended a session where we followed a hands-on lab in which we used AI Builder. I won’t lie and make up a magical story wherein I saw all the potential that Power Platform had, because it wasn’t like that.

But I can tell you when that moment was: when we got the virtual tables (called virtual entities at the time) functionality, being able to use F&O data from Power Platform with its native connector, and, above all, all the convergence plans where both Power Platform and Dynamics 365 F&O started to benefit from a more real and reliable integration like the one we have today.

With all these changes, and F&O projects having more of a presence in Power Platform, we as consultants need to learn about it. I think this book can serve as an overview of the tools Power Platform has for F&O, from how we can use and integrate data with dual-write or virtual tables, to creating new functionality outside the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with Power Apps and Power Automate.

As a result, this book is intended to help F&O consultants learn more about Power Platform, as well as Power Platform consultants to learn about some of the different concepts in F&O.