Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

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Posted on by Community Member Microsoft Employee

Greetings! I have been spending a lot of time in the MS documentation sites over the past couple of weeks, trying to turn my company's product into a Dynamics 365 CRM Online customer service solution. I've learned a lot, but I'm missing a few fundamental pieces that I hope this community can fill in for me.

My goal: On customer service case pages, I want to display a functional widget that will interact with our cloud service hosted on our servers.

Here are some persistent questions I have while reading docs. I'm sure the answers are obvious to many of you, but I am 100% new to the Microsoft ecosystem, so please be patient with me :)

1. From this document, I am told "Solution components are created by using the customization tools or APIs included in Dynamics 365 and are fully hosted in the application." But I am not told how to create a solution. When I log into my Dynamics instance ([tenant].crm.dynamics.com), I don't see anything that will help me build a solution.

2. What language are "solutions" written in?

3. Can a "solution" be an HTML page that opens an iframe to my application hosted on my servers?

Thank you!

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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

Thanks, all for your time and assistance. After a couple of hours of online and offline help from MS support, the solution was to nuke our tenant/domain and create a new one. Now everything makes sense; options and menus described in the documentation now exist, and things make a lot more sense.
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

This is my main page in the Dynamics app. I am Global Administrator for our tenant, but maybe I'm not seeing admin in Dynamics 365 because I'm not recognized as such?
Aric Levin 30,188 on at

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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

Hi Steve,

Not sure if you are System Administrator, but you are not in the Dynamics 365 main application, but rather in the app navigation page.

I think the url that you would be trying to access is screenmeet.crm.dynamics.com, but I am not sure.

If you click on one of the apps, you will notice that the url becomes something like: screenmeet.crm.dynamics.com/main.aspx...

Remove the portion that says ?appId from the Url (and everything after), and see if you can get to the main solution.

Let us know what your result is.
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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

I appreciate your generous help, @Aric. I mentioned a couple times that I don't have a "Settings" menu anywhere. I'm not sure how to get to the screen you posted. This is what mine looks like.
Aric Levin 30,188 on at

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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

Hi Steve,

Package Deployer is not really what you were asking for. It is an add-on for Visual Studio that helps you in building parts of your solution, but it is not the actual solution.

A solution is basically a container that holds the different components that make up your individual implementation. Solutions contains entities (which includes fields, forms, views, relationships, business rules), option sets, web resources, plugins, security roles, etc...

Although you can build most of your solution components with Package Deployer, I don't think it is the best approach for it.

As mentioned earlier, you get the the solutions area of the application, by navigating to Settings ->Solutions. See the screenshot below.

There you will see a list of all the solutions in the system. Click on the New button on the Solutions toolbar, and you will be able to create a new solution. There you will be able to add the parts of the solution you are looking for.

You can use Visual Studio to develop Plugins, Custom Workflow Activities and Web Resources, but most of the solution implementation will be done from within Microsoft Dynamics 365.

I hope this helps.
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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

Create packages for the Dynamics 365 Package Deployer (msdn.microsoft.com/.../dn688182.aspx) is the best resource I have found. It explains how to use the Dynamics CRM SDK in VisualStudio 2015 to author a Web Resource solution, and then deploy it using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Package Deployer. This doesn't answer the enumerated parts of my original question (where the heck is Settings > Customization > Solutions?), but it's a start.
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gdas 50,085 on at

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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

Hi Steve,

Aric has shared most of the important link . You can go through them . However I am trying to give you short answer of your question. Hope this will help.

1. From this document, I am told "Solution components are created by using the customization tools or APIs included in Dynamics 365 and are fully hosted in the application." But I am not told how to create a solution. When I log into my Dynamics instance ([tenant].crm.dynamics.com), I don't see anything that will help me build a solution.

Answer:

Go to Settings --> Customization --> Solution --> Click On New --> Give Name , Select publisher (any prefix which will add as name prefix in your solution component) and version. --> Click Save.

Once Your solution created , you can add your table/entity in the solution , you can create field, forms by expanding the newly created entity.

2. What language are "solutions" written in?

Answer :

Dynamics CRM is nothing but set of related entities or table to manage customer record. To enable flexibility you can create view(Selected Column,Filter Condition) ,Forms (How data will display), Fields , Dashboards,Charts , Web resources (Javascript,html ,css,image etc)

3. Can a "solution" be an HTML page that opens an iframe to my application hosted on my servers?

Answer:

When you expand solution by clicking on arrow button . You can see Entity, Web Resources . Under Web Resources you can add your HTML and Javascript. But remember to display your HTML in Dynamics CRM you need to point them either in the entity form of you can point as a navigation.
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

Thanks for your response, @aric. I have been to each of those docs, and been driven in circles as they eventually link to each other. One consistent problem with the MS documentation on this topic is that it assumes too much of the reader. For example, in the second link you provided about the Solutions Explorer, there is no instruction for how to get to it. Is it an independent Windows app? Is it in the Dynamics 365 online dashboard? There is merely a screen shot of it. (docs.microsoft.com/.../use-solution-explorer)
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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

> You can create a "solution" under "Settings > Customization >Solutions". You should create a new solution and add new or existing items (entity, webresource etc) inside your solution.

Where is "Settings > Customization > Solutions?" What app? I don't see this in the Dynamics 365 dashboard.
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Aric Levin 30,188 on at

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RE: Creating a Managed Solution For Dynamics 365

Hi open Source,

Your link provides a link to the Microsoft Solutions intro page. From there you will have to navigate further to get to the exact content that you are looking for:

The following links explain some of the basic elements of solutions:

Creating a publisher, a solution, importing and exporting a solution:

docs.microsoft.com/.../create-export-import-unmanaged-solution

Using the solution explorer:

docs.microsoft.com/.../use-solution-explorer

Creating a solution:

docs.microsoft.com/.../create-solution

In each one of these links, you will see links to other pages.

This is the best place to start and create your own custom solutions.

Solutions are not language specific, but a set of components that make up the functionality of your application. There are some parts of the solution which are code based such as Web Resource (that can be HTML or JavaScript files) used on the client side of the application and you can have Plugins or Custom Workflows where you will write server based code in C# or VB.NET.

After you delve into solutions, you can add apps to CRM instance which will allow you to create applications from CRM that will only contain the set of features that you are looking for.

Hope this helps.