United at last: Dynamics 365 Dual-write goes GA

On March 27 2020, Microsoft announced that the Dual-write feature is generally available. After being in preview for over a year, the functionality itself isn’t necessarily a surprise to anyone who’s actively following what’s taking place in the Dynamics 365 product portfolio. The GA does however mark a milestone where it makes sense to reflect on what the broader impact of Dual-write is to business applications built on top of Microsoft Power Platform.

The very short answer to “what is Dual-write” would be that it’s a built-in feature for making business data available across Dynamics CRM & ERP products without any additional integration tools. It may come as a surprise to people outside the MS ecosystem that even though the Dynamics 365 brand was announced already in the summer of 2016, the practical work of bringing the different apps from this product suite together has not yet changed that much from the early days of custom integration projects. Putting things into context, the effort to unify the 1 CRM & N ERP products in Microsoft’s portfolio originally targeted its first deliverables in 2004 (as “Project Green”). This proved to be impossible (or rather not feasible from a business perspective) in the on-premises era, but now when the Dynamics products are services hosted in the global MS cloud, the unification has actually been doable.

Dual-write isn’t your everyday CRM-ERP integration, though. It is a near real-time synchronization of data between the Finance and Operations database and the Common Data Service that powers the low-code application and automation development story of Power Platform. Looking at the even broader data story that Microsoft is building around it’s business apps, BI and AI capabilities, we can also see that Dual-write is just one of the mechanisms that will move business data around:

Taken from the Ignite 2019 session “Common Data Service with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations”, this slide highlights the role of Azure Data Lake Gen2 in the analytical features that will be offered both as preconfigured features from Microsoft as well as customer specific implementations, to derive new insights from the business data. When it comes to the more operational side of doing business in the digital world, having the SCM and Finance app data available in CDS is what opens up plenty of new interesting scenarios. What if anyone could easily build Power Apps that work directly with the enterprise master data from ERP like customers, products and pricing information? If CDS indeed could lower this data integration barrier and bring task based experiences with pixel-perfect Canvas apps into the hands of frontline workers, that could surely be a transformative service worthy of its name. Not just a single database like XRM was but a connecting layer across many Microsoft cloud technologies.

In order to bring the ERP data into CDS, Microsoft needed to design harmonized data models that align with what used to be the independent products of Dynamics CRM and Dynamics AX originally and define how the schema of each system maps to the other. As an example, the CRM product data model has understandably been considerably more limited than that of an actual ERP application. Now with Dual-write, these two must come together in a unified product experience:

No two businesses operate exactly alike when it comes to data and processes, so the logic of Dual-write has been built to allow no-code configuration to adjust the details of specific implementations. However, this new depth of application integration within the Dynamics 365 portfolio now means that you should have very good reasons if you decide to deviate from the standard model. Let’s look at Microsoft’s guidance for the above mentioned product data model as an example:

The dual-write entity maps for products have been designed to flow data one-way only, in near-real time from Finance and Operations apps to Common Data Service. However, the product infrastructure has been made open to make it bi-directional if required. Although you can customize it, it’s at your own risk, as Microsoft does not recommend this approach.

Anyone who’s worked with Dynamics CRM / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement implementations in the past has surely come across the need to extend or modify the overly simplistic product and pricing data model that hasn’t been flexible enough to accomodate many real life sales scenarios. Jumping from such a customized environment in production use into Dual-write may not be all that easy, nor will the new data model defined by Microsoft just magically solve everyone’s problems. Dynamics 365 consultants working on data integration between systems aren’t likely going to be out of jobs just yet.

Whether you’ll be jumping into deploying Dual-write or not, everyone needs to educate themselves on the implications of this new piece in the Dynamics 365 puzzle. From the DW documentation, have a look at the chapter “What does dual-write mean for users and architects of CRM products?” to understand why. There will be several new concepts introduced over on the CDS side like “company” and “party” that will affect all apps built on top of it – such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing or Customer Service. Foundational elements like how customers of the organization or the internal units within that organization are defined have different data models in CDS vs. FinOps, so it’s important that everyone working on either side will use the new common documentation for Dual-write as the starting point to try and understand eachother’s perspectives on the world.

There are also other dimensions affecting future solution architecture listed out in the documentation. According to MS, initially Dual-write will be shipped as separate solutions (notice that DW is solution-aware right from GA, highlighting the role of CDS as the cross-product ALM foundation in Power Platform). “In future releases, those solutions will become part of Common Data Service”, which I presume translates to every Dynamics 365 customer getting the core components, regardless of whether they already have Finance and Operations apps deployed in their tenant or not. Data types in CDS are also about to get extended to accomodate the enterprise ERP needs arising from this out-of-the-box FinOps integration.

Of course not everyone is using the ERP solution based on AX, Finance & Operations, Unified Operations, Finance/SCM or whatever name Microsoft comes up next for it. A large share of the customer base will be a better fit for Dynamics 365 Business Central, which isn’t at least publicly yet targeted with Dual-write. Is there going to be an impact to SMB implementations where CDS is part of the solution architecture in some way and is this going to be positive or negative? According to the documentation, “in future releases, concepts in model-driven apps in Dynamics 365 (for example, customer, contact, quotation, and order) will be scaled to mid-market and upper-mid-market customers.” If Microsoft is really aiming to have a Common Data Model that should serve not just all Dynamics 365 products but also software providers from outside the immediate MS ecosystem, there are bound to be trade-offs between the complexity of the required schema for enterprise ERP and the ease of use for how citizen developers can tap into the Common Data Service for building simple business apps.

Finally, there’s the ever interesting licensing aspect, of course. From the Ignite 2019 presentation, we can find the following statement on Dual-write licensing implications:

When Microsoft customers (ISV, Partners, End Users, etc.) possess a valid Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations license, they are entitled to replicate data between the Common Data Service and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.  This entitlement does not include capacity consumed by the replicated data; if necessary, this is purchased separately.  This entitlement does not include use rights for the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement applications, including Sales, Service, Marketing, etc; if necessary, this is purchased separately.

I’m expecting that the upcoming versions of the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide would include documentation about the licensing scenarios for Dual-write, as at the time of writing there isn’t any public guidance available yet to address the concerns of multiplexing that inherently arise from the real-time synchronization of ERP data into CDS.

As we know, having Power Apps licenses allows you to read all of CDS data. If you read through the GA announcement of Dual-write and its documentation, you’ll notice that MS is following its own guidance and not mentioning Customer Engagement even once, since CE now refers to on-premises software only. The new term, “Model-driven apps in Dynamics 365”, is a representation of Microsoft app teams themselves ship as the Sales app, Customer Service app and so on. When it comes to the customer specific business apps tailored to their needs, meaning Power Apps, these can be Model-driven or Canvas, ranging from simple “one click” mobile experiences to advanced information worker UI’s for desktop environments. They are all backed by the Common Data Service and running on the Microsoft Power Platform. How will these custom apps be treated in the licensing documentation that traditionally assumes customers would just be using the Dynamics 365 Apps as-is rather than adapting them to their unique needs and real life processes? This remains to be seen.

Now that we are gradually getting over the age old divide between CRM and ERP, I hope the next area of unification would be a common licensing story that doesn’t draw artificial lines between Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. Splitting these into different licensing guides and different pricing publication formats isn’t all that helpful for the customers nor the partner ecosystem. A Common Data Service based on a Common Data Model should preferably be backed by a Common Licensing Model, don’t you think?