Create a new environment

After purchasing a subscription license for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, the global administrator of the Microsoft 365 tenant receives an email that invites them to create the environment. Go to https://home.ci.ai.dynamics.com/start to get started. In this scenario, start with Step 1: Provide basic information.

After the first environment is created, the global administrator of the Microsoft 365 tenant can add users from their organization as administrators. These administrators can then manage users and environments. If your organization purchases more than one license for Customer Insights, contact our support team to increase the number of available environments. For more information about capacity and add-on capacity, review the Dynamics 365 licensing guide. Once you have the ability to create additional environments, go to Start the environment creation process.

Tip

If you're looking to try the service, see Set up a trial environment.

Prerequisites

Administrator permissions in Customer Insights

Start the environment creation process

1. Open the environment picker and select + New.

   

2. Follow the guided experience outlined in the following sections to provide all required information for a new environment.

Step 1: Provide basic information

1. Choose whether you want to create an environment from scratch or copy data from another environment. Copying data from another environment requires additional steps.

   

2. Provide the following details:

   • Name: Name for this environment. This field is already filled in if you've copied an existing environment, but you can change it.
   • Choose your business: Primary audience for the new environment: individual consumers (B-to-C) or business accounts (B-to-B). If your organization mainly does business with individuals, such as a retailer or a coffee shop, choose individual consumers. If your main audience is other companies, such as a car manufacturer or a paper company, choose business accounts.
   • Type: Type of environment: production or sandbox. Sandbox environments don't allow scheduled data refresh and are intended for pre-implementation and testing. Sandbox environments use the same primary audience as the production environment that's currently selected.
   • Region: Region into which the service is deployed and hosted. To use your own Azure Data Lake Storage account or connect to an existing Microsoft Dataverse organization, the Customer Insights environment must be in the same region.

3. Select Next.

Step 2: Configure data storage

1. Choose where to store the Customer Insights data:

   • Customer Insights storage: Data storage is managed automatically. It's the default option and unless there are specific requirements to store data in your own storage account, we recommend using this option.
   • Azure Data Lake Storage: Your own Azure Data Lake Storage account to store the data so you have full control where the data is stored. Follow the steps in Use your own Azure Data Lake Storage account.

   

2. Select Next.

Step 3: Connect to Microsoft Dataverse

If you have a Dataverse environment, connect Customer Insights. Share data with Dataverse to use it with business applications based on Dataverse, like Dynamics 365 Marketing or model-driven applications in Power Apps.

1. Follow the steps in Work with Customer Insights data in Microsoft Dataverse.

   

2. Select Next.

Step 4: Finalize the settings

Review the specified settings. When everything looks complete, select Create to set up the environment.

To change some of the settings later, see Manage environments.

Work with your new environment

Review the following articles to help you get started with configuring Customer Insights:

• Add more users and assign permissions.
• Ingest your data sources and run them through the data unification process to get unified customer profiles.
• Enrich the unified customer profiles or run predictive models.
• Create segments to group customers and measures to review KPIs.
• Set up connections and exports to process subsets of your data in other applications.

Copy the environment configuration

As an admin, if you chose to copy the configuration from an existing environment, select from the list of all available environments in your organization.

The following configuration settings are copied:

• Data sources imported via Power Query
• Data unification configuration
• Segments
• Measures
• Relationships
• Activities
• Search & filter index
• Exports
• Refresh schedule
• Enrichments
• Prediction models
• Role assignments

Set up a copied environment

When you copy the environment configuration, a confirmation message displays when the copied environment has been created. Perform the following steps to confirm credentials.

1. Select Go to data sources to see the list of data sources. All the data sources show Credentials Required status.

   

2. Edit the data sources and enter the credentials to refresh them. Data sources from the Common Data Model folder and Dataverse must be created manually with the same name as in the source environment.

3. After refreshing the data sources, go to Data > Unify. Here you'll find settings from the source environment. Edit them as needed or select Unify > Unify customer profiles and dependencies to start the data unification process and create the unified customer entity.

   Tip

   For accounts and contacts, select Unify accounts > Unify profiles and dependencies.

4. When the data unification is complete, go to Measures and Segments to refresh them.

5. Go to Admin > Connections to reauthenticate the connections in your new environment.

6. Go to Data > Enrichment and Data > Exports to reactivate them.