The new CDS 2.0 in the April '18 Release (Part 1)

Dear Dynamics 365 Community,

Welcome to the first post of my blog. I am looking forward to tackle data integrations issues on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform and hopefully also interact with the community about various topics of interest. The main focus will be integrations concerning Finance and Operations but some posts might also cover other apps on this exciting platform. I aim to keep posts concise (whenever possible) with the objective of sharing a piece of information without taking much of your valuable time.

These days, when discussing integrations, one cannot not talk about CDS. CDS was originally made generally available by Microsoft in the July 2017 release. However, as shown in the screenshot below, in the original release, CDS stood as a completely 'stand-alone' entity or 'go-between' vis-à-vis synchronization of data between Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) apps and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (FinOps). Essentially, data had to hop from the source system to the CDM and then to the target system and thus your connection set and your mappings had to reflect this. This double hop is indicated by the two red arrows. CDS also had its own separate SDK! As you might imagine, this was quite cumber-some to deal with … hence the arrival of CDS 2.0 .. and the CDS SDK is now part of the previous version.

As can be seen in the screenshot below, with the April'18 Release, the Dynamics 365 CE and Talent Apps have been completely moved into CDS in a native manner and are no longer separate entities. From a FinOps perspective this means that we now have direct synchronization to CRM apps and thus intrinsically also to CDS without any extra efforts! So there is only one red arrow now! To understand the concept further please compare and contrast the screenshot above and below this paragraph! 

I guess your next question would be: So why aren't the FinOps tables also made native to CDS entities and therefore totally cutting out the need to have data synchronizing between FinOps and CDS? That of course, would be a dream come true but the short answer why this was not done is the fact that FinOps needs to support Enterprise-Grade work-loads which are high in complexity and are very cumbersome to deploy directly on a CDS encapsulated database. Also keep in mind that even the Data Entities of FinOps are heavily X++ code oriented. All this, of course, doesn't mean that we wouldn't like Microsoft to have something along the lines of moving the FinOps data-model to CDS, in some mode or manner. ;-)

This was the end of the first blog post. The next blog post I will discuss this topic further with some more details. 

If you have any questions or comments about any of my posts or anything related to Dynamics 365 do not hesitate to get in touch with me on mbonello@bluefort.com.mt