Finance and operations apps and associated apps

  • 5 minutes

By taking advantage of Dynamics 365 capabilities, you can make better decisions by improving business outcomes with data-driven insights and recommendations, build customer relationships with meaningful engagements, and operate more efficiently by automating and optimizing everyday tasks.

Dynamics 365 applications

Several Dynamics 365 applications exist in the ecosystem. All the applications can work on their own, together, and with existing business systems.

Sales

The sales applications for Dynamics 365 help businesses prioritize the right prospects, build relationships, and increase sales. These applications include:

  • Dynamics 365 Sales
  • Microsoft Relationship Sales Solution (MRSs)
  • Dynamics 365 Sales Insights
  • Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
  • Dynamics 365 Product Visualize

Service

Dynamics 365 services helps your agents and technicians meet your customer service expectations by offering applications that enable them to optimize performance, view customer insights, and quickly solve problems. These applications are:

  • Dynamics 365 Customer Service
  • Dynamics 365 Field Service
  • Dynamics 365 Remote Assistant
  • Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation
  • Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
  • Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service
  • Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights

Marketing

Businesses must be able to reach their customers by targeting the right buyers, managing multi-channel marketing campaigns, and creating sales-ready leads. Dynamics 365 offers several marketing applications that enable your business to reach your customers. These applications include:

  • Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys
  • Dynamics 365 Market Insights
  • Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
  • Adobe Marketing Cloud

Finance and operations apps

More than ever, organizations need the ability to optimize their retail and supply chain operations and seamlessly connect to their back-office data. Microsoft offers a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) and retail solution that enables these organizations to meet these needs.

  • Finance and operations apps
  • Dynamics 365 Commerce

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

The way we work, and the workplace, have fundamentally changed—and yet, for many businesses HR processes have not. When workforce practices are disconnected, the result is lower employee engagement and higher turnover rates. Employee disruption ultimately impacts the organization through a lack of product innovation, expensive operational errors, less satisfied customers, and suboptimal financial results.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources helps HR professionals get the workforce insights needed to build data-driven employee experiences across multiple areas:

  • Compensation
  • Benefits
  • Leave and absence
  • Compliance
  • Payroll
  • Performance feedback
  • Training and certification
  • Self-service programs

Dynamics 365 Human Resources connects people and operations data to ensure businesses can optimize workforce costs and take better care of employees.

Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft Power Platform empowers people and organizations to innovate and create applications for your business and connect to Dynamics 365 applications and external applications. The three applications that make up Microsoft Power Platform include:

  • Power Apps - Allows you to build powerful apps that meet the needs your business, including task automation, data management, and application extension functionality. All of this can be done without writing a single line of code. By using Microsoft Dataverse, Power Apps enables you to consolidate business data from multiple data sources.

  • Power BI - The reporting and analytics application that allows you to embed intelligence into your applications. These visuals can be built with your Dynamics 365 data to help you make sense of your data and discover new insights to help decision making within the business.

  • Power Automate - This service automates your business processes. With more than 200 services included out of the box, Power Automate enables you to create automated workflows that connect to services both inside and outside of Dynamics 365 applications. This application can provide guidance to ensure data and process consistency throughout your organization. You can start from the beginning or use one of hundreds of available templates.

Components and architecture of finance and operations apps

Before you begin developing for finance and operations apps, you need to understand the major components and architecture of the application. The application stack for Dynamics 365 is divided into platform models and application-specific models. This module explores both the platform and application-specific models and their importance when developing for the application.

The architecture and developer experience for finance and operations apps is modeled to support a cloud-based application.

The division of the application stack for finance and operations apps allows you to develop and customize the application by using the base foundation models. The model-based development also drives how to develop for finance and operations apps by using extensions, a less intrusive approach to development compared to over layering.

To further understand this concept, consider the three key models in finance and operations apps:

  • Application suite - This is the largest out-of-the-box model. This model includes much of the metadata in the main navigational areas of the application, including modules such as Accounts receivable, Accounts payable, and Warehouse management.

  • Application foundation - This includes metadata that comprises organizational modeling, number sequences in the system, global address book, and source documentation.

  • Application platform - This contains runtime and data access metadata, workflow and services, the Dynamics 365 client and presentation, and SSRS reporting.

Developer environment

Visual Studio is the integrated development environment (IDE) that is used for all finance and operations apps development. As a developer, you will work in your own development environment with access to Visual Studio, which enables you to access all the developer tools and components, including source control by using Azure DevOps. Because multiple developers are generally developing for the application at a single time, Azure DevOps is required for source control. This topic is discussed in further detail in Manage source code by using version control in finance and operations apps.

At a high level, it's important to understand that you will use Visual Studio to develop for finance and operations apps, manage code on your team with source control by using Azure DevOps, perform builds and testing, and create deployable packages.