Microsoft Dynamics 365 connection

Overview

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based business application platform that combines Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) along with productivity applications and AI tools, to bring end-to-end smoother and more controlled operations, better growth potential and reduced costs.

This Adobe Experience Platform destination leverages the Contact Entity Reference API, which allows you to update identities within a segment into Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 uses OAuth 2 with Authorization Grant as the authentication mechanism to communicate with the Contact Entity Reference API. Instructions to authenticate to your Dynamics 365 instance are further below, in the Authenticate to destination section.

Use cases

As a marketer, you can deliver personalized experiences to your users, based on attributes from their Adobe Experience Platform profiles. You can build segments from your offline data and send these segments to Dynamics 365, to display in the users’ feeds as soon as segments and profiles are updated in Adobe Experience Platform.

Prerequisites

Experience Platform prerequisites

Before activating data to the Dynamics 365 destination, you must have a schema, a dataset, and segments created in Experience Platform.

Refer to Adobe’s documentation for Segment Membership Details schema field group if you need guidance on segment statuses.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 prerequisites

Note the following prerequisites in Dynamics 365, in order to export data from Platform to your Dynamics 365 account:

You need to have a Microsoft Dynamics 365 account

Go to the Dynamics 365 trial page to register and create an account, if you do not have one already.

Create field within Dynamics 365

Create the custom field of type Simple with field data type as Single Line of Text which Experience Platform will use to update the segment status within Dynamics 365.
Refer to the Dynamics 365 documentation to create a field (attribute) if you need additional guidance.

An example setup within Dynamics 365 is shown below:

Register an application and application user within Azure Active Directory

To enable Dynamics 365 to access resources you will need to log in with your Azure Account to Azure Active Directory and create the following:

• An Azure Active Directory application
• A Service principal
• An application secret

You will also need to create an application user in Azure Active Directory and associate it with the newly created application.

Gather Dynamics 365 credentials

Note down the items below before you authenticate to the Dynamics 365 CRM destination:

Guardrails

The Requests limits and allocations page details the Dynamics 365 API limits associated with your Dynamics 365 license. You need to ensure that your data and payload are within these constraints.

Supported identities

Dynamics 365 supports update of identities described in the table below. Learn more about identities.

Export type and frequency

Refer to the table below for information about the destination export type and frequency.

Connect to the destination

To connect to this destination, follow the steps described in the destination configuration tutorial. In the configure destination workflow, fill in the fields listed in the two sections below.

Within Destinations > Catalog search for Dynamics 365. Alternatively you can locate it under the CRM category.

Authenticate to destination

To authenticate to the destination, select Connect to destination.

Fill in the required fields below. Refer to the Gather Dynamics 365 credentials section for any guidance.

• Client ID: The Dynamics 365 Client ID for your Azure Active Directory application.
• Tenant ID: The Dynamics 365 Tenant ID for your Azure Active Directory application.
• Client Secret: The Dynamics 365 Client Secret for your Azure Active Directory application.
• Environment URL: Your Dynamics 365 Environment URL.

If the details provided are valid, the UI displays a Connected status with a green check mark. You can then proceed to the next step.

Fill in destination details

To configure details for the destination, fill in the required and optional fields below. An asterisk next to a field in the UI indicates that the field is required.

• Name: A name by which you will recognize this destination in the future.
• Description: A description that will help you identify this destination in the future.

Enable alerts

You can enable alerts to receive notifications on the status of the dataflow to your destination. Select an alert from the list to subscribe to receive notifications on the status of your dataflow. For more information on alerts, see the guide on subscribing to destinations alerts using the UI.

When you are finished providing details for your destination connection, select Next.

Activate segments to this destination

Read Activate profiles and segments to streaming segment export destinations for instructions on activating audience segments to this destination.

Mapping considerations and example

To correctly send your audience data from Adobe Experience Platform to the Dynamics 365 destination, you need to go through the field mapping step. Mapping consists of creating a link between your Experience Data Model (XDM) schema fields in your Platform account and their corresponding equivalents from the target destination. To correctly map your XDM fields to the Dynamics 365 destination fields, follow these steps:

1. In the Mapping step, select Add new mapping. You will see a new mapping row on the screen.
   

2. In the Select source field window, choose the Select identity namespace category and select contactId.
   

3. In the Select target field window, select the type of target field that you want to map your source field to.

   • Select identity namespace: select this option to map your source field to an identity namespace from the list.
     

   • Add the following mapping between your XDM profile schema and your Dynamics 365 instance:

     XDM Profile Schema	Dynamics 365 Instance	Mandatory
     contactId	contactId	Yes

   • Select custom attributes: select this option to map your source field to a custom attribute that you define in the Attribute name field. Refer to Dynamics 365 documentation for a comprehensive list of supported attributes.
     

     IMPORTANT

     If you have a date or timestamp source field which is mapped to a Dynamics 365 date or timestamp target field, ensure that the mapped value being is not empty. If the value passed is empty you will encounter a Bad request reported while pushing events to the destination. Please contact the administrator and try again. error message and the data will not be updated. This is a Dynamics 365 limitation.

   • For instance, depending on the values you want to update, add the following mapping between your XDM profile schema and your Dynamics 365 instance:

     XDM Profile Schema	Dynamics 365 Instance
     person.name.firstName	FirstName
     person.name.lastName	LastName
     personalEmail.address	Email

   • An example using these mappings is shown below:
     

Schedule segment export and example

In the Schedule segment export step of the activation workflow, you must manually map Platform segments to the custom field attribute in Dynamics 365.

To do this, select each segment, then enter the corresponding custom field attribute from Dynamics 365 in the Mapping ID field.

An example is shown below:

Validate data export

To validate that you have correctly set up the destination, follow the steps below:

1. Select Destinations > Browse to navigate to the list of destinations.
   

2. Select the destination and validate that the status is enabled.
   

3. Switch to the Activation data tab, then select a segment name.
   

4. Monitor the segment summary and ensure that the count of profiles corresponds to the count created within the segment.
   

5. Log in to the Dynamics 365 website, then navigate to the Customers > Contacts page and check if the profiles from the segment have been added. You can see that each segment status in Dynamics 365 was updated with the corresponding segment status from Platform, based on the Mapping ID value provided during the segment scheduling step.
   

Data usage and governance

All Adobe Experience Platform destinations are compliant with data usage policies when handling your data. For detailed information on how Adobe Experience Platform enforces data governance, see the Data Governance overview.

Errors and troubleshooting

Unknown errors encountered while pushing events to destination

When checking a dataflow run, if you obtain the following error message: Bad request reported while pushing events to the destination. Please contact the administrator and try again.

To fix this error, verify that the Mapping ID you provided in Dynamics 365 for your Platform segment is valid and exists within Dynamics 365.

Additional resources

Additional useful information from the Dynamics 365 documentation is below:

• IOrganizationService.Update(Entity) Method
• Update and delete table rows using the Web API

Business.Adobe.com resources