What is the Dynamics 365 CDM?

Note (2025): This post was written in 2017 and reflects the technology landscape at that time. Since then, Common Data Service (CDS) has been renamed to Dataverse, Microsoft Flow is now Power Automate, PowerApps is now Power Apps, and the Dynamics 365 product names have been updated (e.g. "Dynamics 365 for Operations" is now D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management). The vision described here — a unified data platform connecting business applications — has been largely realised through Dataverse and related technologies like Dual-write.

In today's world where data has become a new commodity, businesses can gain significant benefits and competitive advantages by being able to quickly integrate new data sources and gain valuable insights from them. By connecting and processing more data, a business can better engage with prospects and customers, build predictions and workflows, and get a better view of how to improve its products — which attracts more users and can eventually generate even more data.

In the old days, data management and integrations were typically very complex projects — expensive and time-consuming, requiring specialised technical skills from developers and system administrators. Those integration projects, even if successfully implemented, would typically be quite limited in their functional abilities and would require additional effort from business users to maintain the interfaces. If those integrations were also poorly documented and the original developer was not available to explain how the integration was deployed, it became even harder to maintain and nearly impossible to upgrade when new technologies came along or new business requirements arose.

The New Microsoft Stack

Today, Microsoft has a completely new stack of technologies to make it simple, robust, and quick for businesses to integrate with new data sources, share data across existing business applications, and build new business logic or workflows on top of it. These technologies are Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, CDS, and Dynamics 365.

Microsoft Flow helps create multistep workflows using a number of business-related tasks. For example, you can create a push notification when you receive an email from a customer, or create an entity in Dynamics CRM after an approval.

PowerApps provides a simple tool for business analysts and SMEs to build and share business applications. PowerApps uses connectors to get data from a variety of data sources, many of which are cloud services (like Google Drive, Dropbox, Twitter, or Office 365). CDS makes it easy to integrate business data from those multiple sources.

CDS is the Common Data Service, which helps integrate data using the Common Data Model (CDM) concept. As you can see, CDM is a key component of this technology stack. The main idea of CDM is to provide a separate database with a number of unified entities that are common to a variety of business applications — such as contacts, products, and suppliers. CDM can also be seen as a common schema connecting other databases and apps.

Simplified Integration

Essentially, this means that custom development is not going to be required for most integrations. For example, consider the scenario where a new account is created in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and needs to be created in Dynamics 365 for Operations as well as Dynamics 365 for Finance. For this scenario, Microsoft Flow already provides a standard out-of-the-box template integration that can help connect the data. In addition, CDM templates give you flexibility throughout the integration setup to define steps, conditions, loops, and more.

Now, also consider how this simplifies data migration scenarios where you need to migrate master data from legacy systems and eventually make it available to a variety of business applications, including reporting tools such as Power BI.

In the next series of posts, we will write more about getting data into the Common Data Model, the Dynamics 365 data integration feature, and how it can be used in real business cases.