Powerful Microsoft Fabric and Dynamics 365 integration

Prologue

In this article you will learn how you can connect and optimize your business applications with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Fabric.

Here are the topics we’ll cover:

What we’ve heard from conversations with companies and today’s current business agility and analytics landscape.
How Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Fabric integrate and augment one another.

Figures and trends

Over the last several years, we’ve seen just how critical it is for businesses to evolve and adapt to shifting market conditions, modernizing their infrastructure to become more resilient to disruptions and maintain their competitive edge.

71%

of businesses reported low agility and expressed inability to respond quickly to changing market conditions.¹

77%

organizations are also experiencing a talent shortage, unable to keep up with the current pace of change and without the skillsets needed to execute against the changing market landscape.²

86%

There is a significant need to connect people, data, and processes, increasing visibility across legacy systems and optimizing for scalability and growth, and 86% of businesses see scalability and the ability for their business to adapt as a key to success.¹

Sources: ¹Business Agility Institute and ²Forbes

In the coming years, 75% of organizations will move to a single source of truth for their data with ability to support federated data-driven initiatives like business application modernization – enabling easier ERP and CRM application optimization and collaboration, with unified and comprehensive data and insights – and the ability to empower business users with insights to drive business outcomes through those applications.

Unified analytics modernization is the key to shaping the future of your business

Data and analytics

core to every business and application that drives experiences.

Unified enterprise-wide data for a business

The recent launch of Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end analytics offering that brings together all of an organization’s data and analytics in one place, addresses that need for a constant supply of data for optimized development and modernized analytics capabilities.

We have embraced an open and governed lakehouse, establishing a unified, single source of truth by combining all analytics workloads in a secure and governed lake-first foundation. Teams can reduce the time and effort it takes to uncover impactful insights through democratized access to data, accelerating decision-making and time to value for low code app development.

In connection with Dynamics 365, Fabric offers extensible solutions for you to be able to do even more with your data and empowers you to democratize enterprise-wide data for efficient, intelligent, and agile business application optimization.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 in brief

With Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can create the new era of AI-powered business, innovating with intelligent CRM and ERP business applications, connecting your teams, processes, and data, across your entire org, providing superior customer experiences, and creating operational agility.

Since business applications most frequently use data from multiple sources, Dynamics 365 integration with Dataverse lets you securely store and manage said data as you create your intelligent business applications. With Dynamics applications being built on Power Platform, you get built-in, extensible analytics capabilities within Microsoft Fabric that allow you to do even more with your data.

Later we’ll be focusing on a subset of Dynamics 365 products, highlighting use cases (in the next article) for Supply Chain, Finance, Sales, Marketing and Service, but there are more Dynamics solutions available to solve for any of your business needs.

Dynamics 365 Products

Sales

Empower sales teams and make selling easier with AI, automation, and real-time insights built into the seller’s flow of work.

Customer insights

Understand your customers like never before and personalize customer journeys by using AI to deliver real-time insights.

Customer Service

Transform customer experiences by empowering agents to drive faster resolution and quality service using generative AI and automation.

Supply Chain

Build an adaptable, resilient supply chain that automatically reacts to challenges using real-time visibility, agile planning, and advanced insights.

Finance

Keep pace with evolving business needs as you drive growth using finance tools for reporting, embedded analytics and AI-driven insights.

Dataverse Low Code Data Platform

Empower sales teams and make selling easier with AI, automation, and real-time insights built into the seller’s flow of work.

Microsoft Fabric – SaaS data platform

Fabric is an end-to-end, human-centered analytics product that brings together all an organization’s data and analytics in one place. It brings together the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Factory into one unified software as a service (SaaS) platform. Data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users can seamlessly collaborate within Fabric to foster a well-functioning data culture across the organization.

Unify data into one data estate for analytics

Centralize and curate all your data in an open and governed hub that can virtualize data from Azure or AWS and enable the same copy of data to be used across workloads.

Build fit-for-purpose analytics and AI-powered experiences

Fuel your own, tailor-made AI experiences in Azure AI Studio with curated data seamlessly flowing from Microsoft Fabric.

Responsibly democratize analytics

Give everyone the ability to unlock insights in a unified platform that has industry-leading governance and compliance to help you stay in control.

Scale transformative analytics applications

Gain visibility and uncover insights with responsible, self-service access to power analytics tools––accelerated by Copilot and integrated into the apps you know and trust.

Inegration of business applications with unified analytics

Microsoft now enables business application optimization powered by cloud scale analytics with Microsoft Fabric and Dynamics 365 integrated through Microsoft Dataverse. The native integration between the intelligent business applications portfolio, Dataverse, and Microsoft Fabric enables you to easily use data already in Dataverse and/or connect the data in Fabric to your business applications, ERP, and CRM systems.

Working conversationally with your data, simply describe the insights you need or ask a question about your data and Copilot in Fabric will analyze and pull the right data into a report. You can seamlessly include conversational AI into your business applications with Copilot in Microsoft Fabric.

Definitions

Microsoft Dataverse

The intelligent, scalable, low-code platform that manages data and business logic across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Fabric

The one-stop-shop for data integration, data engineering, real-time analytics, data science, and business intelligence across all your organizational data.

Dynamics 365

The portfolio of intelligent business applications that delivers superior operational efficiency and enables businesses to become more agile.

Dataverse makes it easy to connect Dynamics 365 to Microsoft Fabric

No Copy. No ETL

There is no data copy or ETL schedules to manage – the system does all the work for configuration and data movement

Direct Connection via Dataverse

The system generates an Azure Synapse lakehouse, SQL endpoint and default Power BI dataset with your data, saving hours and days of work.

Low code

Insights democratized to all low-code apps using core Fabric workloads.

Data is governed

Open and governed access controls so data is protected.

Summary

Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Fabric offer seamless integration and real-time insights, empowering both data professionals and business users. Key benefits include:

Native Integration: Effortlessly integrate data with Dataverse, making Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data readily available for analysis in Microsoft Fabric.

Efficiency and Innovation: Reduce operational complexity, democratize data access, and enhance value extraction from data, fostering a hyperconnected business environment.

Actionable Insights: Utilize real-time, actionable insights through low-code applications to drive efficient and effective decision-making, transforming business operations.