Dynamics 365: Learn in doing

If you have ever worked with a Data warehousing solution, you would probably say that the most important part of the job is to ensure proper Data ingestion (Data loading). If you lose any data at this point, then the resulting information (reports) will end up inaccurate, failing to represent the facts on which Business decisions are made. Microsoft Azure provides several services which you can use to ingest data and one of them is Azure Data Factory. So What is Azure Data Factory?  Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a Platform-as-a-Service offering from Microsoft. The primary purpose of this service could be to do Extract, Transform and Load (ETL)  or Extract, Load and Transform (ELT) and this is done via using a concept pipelines. Two types of pipelines to begin with - data movement pipelines (Extract & Load) and also data transformation pipelines (Transform). And being a PaaS service, ADF automatically scales out based on the demand enforced using these pipelines. ADF is ...

First post in year 2020, I am surprised by myself that I haven't managed to make a single post this year - given that I am, like most of you, working from home for the majority of the year.  Anyways, here comes a small tip about Copying Databases. With Dynamics 365 for Finance and operations (now a.k.a Dynamics 365 for Finance, Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management and also Dynamics 365 for Commerce) - you might be in need to perform several database operations during the Project implementation phases. Also you might want to take a back up of the existing database for recovery perspective.  Below is something which I use to support with Copy actions on databases. How to make a quick copy of AXDB hosted in Azure SQL (Tier 2 and above) To begin connect to the Azure SQL database from within the primary AOS server (AOS 01 - because this is where you would great maximum permissions to perform actions on SQL database) You should use the credentials from LCS to connect to Az...

If you are in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations development and if you have a scenario of Synchronous integration , most probably you must have used oData service and along with that POSTMAN app in order to validate your scenarios. A short intro.. Postman is free tool available for download which can be used as a test client for API development. It is available as a native app (need to download) and also as a Chrome extension.  Just to give you a context around, API, different types of API and D365FO, different integration approaches in D365FO and oData service (format=JSON) - I have tried to illustrate the relation in the below picture. Disclaimer: Obviously, the above illustration doesn't contain all the relevant information, but might only help in setting some context.     Now in this blog post I would like to share about the ease of working with POSTMAN when working with D365FO oData endpoints. So information regarding integration as such will have to ...

In my previous post, I tried to illustrate how Microsoft licensing works. Of course, a lot more information is already share by Microsoft in Docs - have look for the latest from Microsoft. In this post I try to illustrate how to add a new subscription from Microsoft 365 Admin center , or otherwise called as Office 365 Admin center (or) Dynamics 365 Admin center - all of them most probably will lead you to https://admin.microsoft.com   Basically to assign one of your Organization user available in a particular tenant to a SAAS based cloud offering , you would need to go through the Admin centre. The Organization AD administrator would have access to this and can delegate it to others by creating/updating the AD user accounts accordingly.  Steps to add a subscription:   1. Sign into the Microsoft 365 admin center ( https://admin.microsoft.com ) with your global administrator account. The Home page would look something like below:  2. From the ...

Now with all the Cloud offerings which Microsoft provides to their customers/users, it has become a little more important to understand few terminologies around Licensing. The primary ones for me were:  Organizations  Subscriptions Licenses User accounts and Tenants Where an Organization could be any Business entity. Let's take the example as Walmart is an Organization.  And a Subscription is an agreement the Walmart made with Microsoft, the terms, the agreed price, the offers/rebates from Microsoft and till what time the Subscription is valid - all such elements are covered under this. Now Licenses are needed on top of Subscription (sometimes subscription comes along with certain number of free/included licenses). So whenever a license under a particular subscription is allocated to a Walmart user, only that he/she can use the Cloud offering.  So that explains what User accounts consist of - Users and user groups within the Active directory...

When working with Dynamics 365 Finance and operations implementations, it is an obvious step to perform database movements across environments. We have been doing this in the previous version (AX2012) as well, where we had to change the environments related settings after the database copy manually. Now we D365FO , we might end up in different scenarios based on the Tier-level of the environment . So I have tried to identify the #4 major scenarios in here and share the approach I have used.  Copy of DB from Tier 1 env. to another Tier 1 env. Copy of DB from Tier 1 env. to a Tier 2 env. Copy of DB from Tier 2 env. to another Tier 2 env. Copy of DB from Tier 2 env. to a Tier 1 env. The below picture is an illustration of different types and corresponding solutions on a high level (sorry for my not-so-good-handwriting 😅) #1 Tier 1 -> Tier 1 DB copy:   This scenario can happen quite common if you have multiple tier-1 environment in your on-going project li...