Whether adopting a Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution to automate sales, manufacturing, customer service, or other business functions, it’s key to ensure it is future-proof to maximize the return on your investment. After all, such a solution can feature new functionalities and scale with your business needs seamlessly, while remaining durable, efficient, and secure.
In this article, experts from Itransition, a Dynamics 365 support partner with over 25 years of experience in IT consulting and development, provide four recommendations to help you future-proof your Dynamics 365-powered solution.
1. Follow a structured approach to solution design
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The reliability of Dynamics 365 software hinges on its architecture, which represents a blueprint defining the structure and component relationship of a solution. To design a robust Dynamics 365 architecture, companies can adhere to the architectural principles of Success by Design, a proprietary Microsoft framework for building and implementing Dynamics 365 software. The framework is built around three architecture design pillars:
Processes
When creating the architecture of your solution, you should review and document the business processes you plan to optimize. Once you’ve built a process architecture, decide how to translate it into Dynamics 365 system processes (whether to adopt standardised processes provided by Dynamics 365 out-of-the-box or create custom ones from scratch). If you aim to build a practical and long-lasting solution, you should think of implementing out-of-the-box processes foremost, as it will help reduce your company’s dependency on customizations, which can be costly and hard to maintain.
People
After you map your process architecture and define the optimal way to match it with Dynamics 365 system processes, you should focus on business users who will use the new system. First, define their specific roles within the system – sales stakeholders, production stakeholders, internal admins, and others.
Once you’ve done that, assign their roles within the Dynamics 365 system, such as basic user, office collaborator, or system administrator, to define who can access and interact with confidential data or resources and in what ways. A clear definition of security roles will help you create a reliable identity architecture design for the solution and thus make the software more secure in the long run.
Data
Among other things, you need to decide how you will store, organise, and use business data in the new system to define the global data architecture for the Dynamics 365 solution (typically, specific data architecture design decisions are dictated by companies’ internal data management and governance policies). After making one or another data architecture choice, you should focus on data modeling, an essential step in database design.
While there are different data model options, adopting the Common Data Model (CDM) can be optimal for companies seeking a standardised approach. CDM is used across the Dynamics 365 ecosystem, which allows different Microsoft apps to exchange data seamlessly. With CDM, users can access and operate the data in Dynamics 365 more easily, create new data entities or automated workflows without coding, and integrate existing corporate data from third-party sources faster, which can foster data democratization in your company and improve its technological flexibility.
2. If you use custom code, ensure its quality
Dynamics 365 is a multi-functional software suite with many useful features available out-of-the-box. Nonetheless, you might still require customizing the product, such as creating custom forms, plugins, or process workflows, to cover 100% of your business requirements. As considerable product customisation can make your solution too challenging to maintain, especially if poorly done, your team must have a strong focus on code quality.
For instance, it is critical that developers ensure custom code is standardized and thoroughly documented, as this makes it easier for teams to understand and operate within the codebase. Also, your team members should conduct regular code reviews (at least once a week or two) to check each other’s code for wrong formatting, duplication, and other errors in order to ensure that it adheres to your corporate quality standards.
3. Incorporate load testing into your overall testing strategy
As mentioned previously, future-proof software can scale seamlessly, meaning it can handle a growing number of users, data, and transactions simultaneously without performance issues. To ensure that your Dynamics 365 is truly scalable, performing thorough load tests before it goes live is critical.
In practice, teams can test your solution using the Azure Load Testing platform, which provides many useful features for running and monitoring software performance tests. With its help, teams can develop realistic scenarios that simulate user activity within Dynamics 365 solutions, configure varying traffic conditions and user loads, and monitor relevant testing KPIs, including memory usage and database performance. After analyzing test results, teams can identify specific performance issues and bottlenecks and take measures to mitigate them.
4. Monitor and improve your Dynamics 365 solution continuously
It is also important to note that software future-proofing is an ongoing process that should not end after the solution goes live. To ensure the efficiency of Dynamics 365 solutions in the long run, teams must audit them regularly from different perspectives, identify room for improvement, and continuously enhance the solutions.
Suppose you use a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations solution. In such a case, your team can use Microsoft’s Optimization Advisor to track identified performance issues (such as too slow runtime of business processes) and gain recommendations on how to fix them. If you use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, teams can use a tool called AL Profiler to identify poorly performing custom code, refactor it if needed, and improve its efficiency.
Teams should also monitor Dynamics 365 licensing and operating costs starting from the solution launch to optimize TCO and ensure the solution remains cost-efficient over time. For example, teams can use Azure Application Insights to track the usage of telemetry data in finance and operations apps, monitor the associated costs, and identify opportunities to reduce them.
Besides, teams need to systematically monitor software security to ensure the solution can efficiently withstand malware threats, data loss, and other cyber risks, and take relevant measures to strengthen the security. In this regard, the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center can be handy. It provides teams with security information and event management (SIEM) capabilities, helping collect audit logs related to system events and user activity. It also offers extended detection and response (XDR) functionality, allowing teams to detect existing and emerging cyber threats efficiently.
Final thoughts
If your company plans to adopt a Dynamics 365 solution, you have to make sure it can remain efficient and resilient in the long term, and the Dynamics 365 implementation best practices listed in this article can be helpful in this regard. Also, your team should support the solution properly after the release to ensure it remains reliable, secure, and high-performing over time.
If your in-house IT team lacks the experience and skills to provide support efficiently, consider involving a Dynamics 365 support partner in your project. A reliable partner can provide support and maintenance services for your solution to detect and eliminate performance, security, and other issues in a timely manner. It can also help you extend existing software functionality and perform configurations to increase the business value generated by your solution.
The article titled “How to future-proof your Dynamics 365 solution” was authored by Roman Davydov, Technology Observer at Itransition
About the author
Roman Davydov is a Technology Observer at Itransition with over five years of experience in the IT industry. Roman monitors and analyses the latest technology trends, helping businesses make informed software decisions that align with their strategic goals.