Large and multinational companies own multiple sources of data, and they are facing the problem to manage all of that company information, which is difficult and time-consuming. Integration between various systems has always been a challenge to the software engineers. Communication between the systems and keeping the systems synchronized is one of the main points to focus on.

The purpose of this blog is to present a two-way integration, between Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, and to give you just a quick glimpse of what our integration experts are working on for a client.

As a starting point was chosen the account module in Dynamics 365 for Sales and the customer module in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. After the initial integration of these modules, the plan is to integrate the next modules: opportunity, quotes, sales orders, demand forecast lines, payment terms, delivery mode, delivery terms, sales tax groups, customer assets, work order.

Account-to-Customer module integration

What actually means the integration between the two modules, account and customer? Creating a new account in Dynamics 365 for Sales will result in a new customer created in Dynamics 365 for Financial Operations. Updating an account in Dynamics 365 for Sales will result in an update of the corresponding customer in Dynamics 365 for Financial Operations. Deleting an account in Dynamics 365 for Sales will result with a delete of the corresponding customer in Dynamics 365 for Financial Operations. The purpose of this integration is to increase the employees’ productivity, to make it easier for them to store the data in one system, and easier and more transparently to manipulate the data between the systems keeping the information relevant and accurate.

So, where do we start?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers out-of-the-box web service end-points for communicating, accessing and tracking data and objects. In Dynamics 365 for Sales, there is SOAP web service end-point known as Organization Service and a HTTP REST API known as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Web API. In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, the web service end-point is knowns as OData, a REST end-point based on open data protocol. The URL of the Organization’s Service end-points is used to generate service proxy classes. The URL of the OData end-point is used to generate OData classes.

Plug-in registration tool

Plug-in registration tool will be used to deploy assemblies containing the implementation code as separate packages.

Architecture

Integration between different systems has always been a challenge. Keeping the data and the system synchronized was never an out-of-the-box solution. We will try to keep our system architecture as simple as possible. We can distinguish different processes and states of the system.

The following components are parts of the solution:

• Dynamics 365 for Sales
• Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations
• Azure Active Directory
• Azure Service – WCF
• Azure Service Bus
• Subscription Listener
• Azure SQL – Master Data

In the next blog post, communication between the systems and the workflow among them will be explained in details. Stay tuned.