Public preview of Common Data Model, a Core component of Dynamics 365 is now available

When Microsoft Dynamics 365 was announced last month at WPC 2016, the Common Data Model was one of the core components of this new Cloud business solution offerings from Microsoft. I also explained in brief about the Common Data Model and the role it plays in Dynamics 365, in my earlier post.

Yesterday (8th August 2016), Microsoft announced the Public Preview of the Common Data Model and it’s integration with Microsoft Flow and PowerApps, which are  new cloud services from Microsoft ,that creates automated workflows between apps and services (such as collecting and creating data, synchronizing files or even getting notifications) and creating intelligent business apps respectively. Refer to the blog post below.

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/flow-and-common-data-model/

The Common Data Model and what you can do with it using Microsoft Flow, Power Apps, Power BI and more for your CRM and ERP (Dynamics AX / Project Madeira) data are very promising.

You can start exploring the Common Data Model and start thinking of apps and flows that you can build using this.

To see and explore some the entities of the CDM, log in to Microsoft Power apps at https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us. You can use your Office365 credentials for this.

Expand the Manage Tab > Entities. If you are doing it for the first time, click Create my database button. You will now be able to see several out of the box entities such as Customers, Employees, Contractors, Products and more (As you know them in Dynamics AX already). In this I have already created my database for the CDM which looks as shown in screenshot below.

For instance, you can select the Employee, Customer or Products entity and see all the data fields that are part of it. You can further open them in excel and play around the demo data (Contoso) using Power Apps office add in (Very similar to the Dynamics Add in we all are used to in the New Dynamics AX

As an example, I have opened the Customer master in Excel and you can see we have the familiar Contoso data in it

Just a beginning !! keep exploring and stay tuned for future posts.

Regards,

Sandeep