After the MBAS on Wednesday I’m thinking about this more and more. Will Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management’s data be natively hosted in the CDS?
After watching Ryan Jones’ session “What’s new in the Common Data Service”, I ask myself whether that’s the question or it should be when will it be natively available in the Common Data Service?
Dataverse
Dataverse is a platform that allows us to store data that will be used by the business applications. But it’s not only that, take a look at this picture:
We could put MSDyn365FO on top of all that, it supports relational databases, storage, reporting, workflows, security, etc… Of course that wouldn’t be an overnight switch but maybe something progressive. Like what we’ll have with the FnO virtual entities on CDS!
With virtual entities we still won’t have Finance and SCM data on Dataverse because virtual entities:
Virtual entities enable the integration of data residing in external systems by seamlessly representing that data as entities in Common Data Service, without replication of data and often without custom coding.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/common-data-service/virtual-entities/get-started-ve
“Without replication of data”. When you access a virtual entity in the Common Data Service its state is dynamically retrieved from the external system.
As you can see in the image all public data entities will be natively in Dataverse. This means we can use the Power Platform capabilities for Finance and Operations as fast and easy as our Customer Engagement colleagues do. At least for the public data entities.
If we need data to be physically in both places we’ll still need to use Dual Write. Remember Dual Write synchronizes data between Finance and Operations and Customer Engagement/Dataverse near real time.
If you want to learn a bit more about Dual Write you can check the “And finally… Dual Write!” session Juan Antonio and I did on 2019 Dynamics 365 Saturday Madrid. It’s in Spanish and old, Dual Write has now many more Out-of-the-box functionalities, but it gives an idea of what it does and is capable of.
Will this ever happen?
Who knows, I’m just speculating, I’m a developer but I can’t stop thinking that Microsoft is investing a lot into Dataverse. And Finance and Operations Apps are the only Dynamics 365 products whose data does not reside on Common Data Service.
We’re seeing some functionalities from FnO being replicated and later extended into Dataverse like Dynamics 365 Human Resources or Dynamics 365 Project Operations. This is creating an issue, because right now, you must create an integration between the two applications if you want to have some kind of data exchange. FnO in Dataverse would solve this.
This also creates some confusion to customers that think that this integration happens Out-of-the-box when it’s not. The naming of the product suggests that but it’s not happening.
We must think that this wouldn’t happen in the following year or two, or three. This is something in the long term. I don’t know about DataverseApps, but Dynamics 365 for Finance and SCM has quite a nice and large amount of tables and migrating all of them to the Common Data Service is sure a tremendous amount of work.
And what about the developer tools? That should change for sure too! We’ll see where the product and us as professionals are headed, but for sure we can’t think about Finance and Operations alone without Dataverse anymore.
