Safyr for Microsoft Dynamics 365

We are delighted to announce that Safyr for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) will be available in December.

It’s been a while since we added a new data source type to the list of systems Safyr can work with, and that’s about to change.

ERP application software market share

We’ve had capability for Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM for some time, but we’ve had to turn away customers who wanted metadata from their Dynamics 365 applications to be loaded into Safyr and then used for data catalog and other projects. That will change now that Safyr for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is available. The increasing number of enquiries for Dynamics 365 we have received reflects the growth of Microsoft as an enterprise packaged application vendor.

Dynamics AX and CRM are ‘on premise’ applications. Dynamics 365 is very much ‘in the cloud’ and requires access to its metadata via an API to liberate the kind of metadata that a Safyr customer requires. Safyr for Dynamics 365 utilises a partner technology that extracts the metadata from a Dynamics 365 instance using the metadata API to get at the Microsoft Dataverse (previously known as the Dynamics Common Data Service or CDS) which is where the relevant information is stored.

The result is a set of metadata very similar to what our customers have come to expect from our other ‘source’ applications like SAP and Salesforce.

Safyr for Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports Microsoft Dataverse (CDS) based applications like Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM). Non-Microsoft Dataverse based applications like Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, Business Central, etc., are not currently supported.

Here are a couple of screenshots that give examples of what you can expect to see when you use Safyr with Dynamics 365.

The first shows a list of all the tables, with the usual Safyr properties for relationships and row counts. You can see for example, that this particular Dynamics 365 application has 670 tables. The ‘Account’ table has relationships with 58 Child tables and 15 Parent tables. Drilling into any of these tables would provide more details about the table structure and relationship.

The standard Safyr features for making Subject Areas apply to Dynamics 365 just the same as for any other of our supported systems. This makes is easy to create subsets of the metadata which reflect the needs of your project. And, of course you can make use of these Subject Areas in other products and formats through any of Safyr’s export formats.

This of course includes our ERDiagrammer which helps you to visualize Dynamics 365 tables and their relationships to each other as illustrated in the image below.

And metadata from Dynamics 365 can be used to provision Data Catalog tools such as Collibra, Informatica and Alation or populate data modelling tools like ER/Studio, erwin DM and SAP PowerDesigner. Safyr also supports export to a number of industry standard formats such as JSON, CSV, XML and Excel.

We will be releasing Safyr for Dynamics 365 in December 2020. If you would like more details please email us at info@silwoodtechnology.com.