If your organisation is running on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain or Commerce (we call these the 'F&O' apps) then your data will be sitting in its own safe & secure database.
If your organisation is also using or planning to use Microsoft D365 Customer Service, D365 Sales or D365 Field Service (we call these the 'CE' apps) then the data those applications use is also safe & secure, just in a totally different database (called Dataverse) that is not the same database as the 'F&O' apps use. How exasperating!!
It doesn't take a data scientist to realise this is not ideal in todays connected world where omnichannel operations are so prevalent and a de facto of any start-up in 2023. So Microsoft came up with a solution to connect the data using a feature they called 'Dual-Write'.
So Dual-write is an out-of-box Microsoft infrastructure that provides near-real-time interaction (importantly this is NOT a Realtime system, there is a small time delay to be considered) of data between customer engagement apps (CE) and finance and operations apps (F&O). It provides tightly coupled, bidirectional integration of data between those 2 databases.
Depending on how you configure it, data changes in finance and operations apps cause writes to Dataverse, and data changes in Dataverse cause writes to finance and operations apps. This automated data flow provides an integrated user experience across the apps, but when deciding to use this you must decide which data will flow and test how quickly that works in your tenant! Your business process should not be held up waiting for some data to 'appear' ideally.
Dual-write has two aspects: an infrastructure aspect and an application aspect.
Infrastructure
The dual-write infrastructure is extensible and reliable, and includes the following key features:
synchronous and bidirectional data flow between applications
synchronization, together with play, pause, and catchup modes to support the system during online and offline/asynchronous modes
ability to sync initial data between the applications
combined view of activity and error logs for data admins
ability to configure custom alerts and thresholds, and to subscribe to notifications
intuitive user interface (UI) for filtering and transformations
ability to set and view table dependencies and relationships
extensibility for both standard and custom tables and maps
out-of-box setup experience for new customers.
Application
Dual-write creates a mapping between concepts in finance and operations apps and concepts in customer engagement apps. This integration supports the following scenarios:
integrated customer master access to customer loyalty cards and reward points
unified product mastering experience awareness of organization hierarchy
integrated vendor master access to finance and tax reference data
on-demand price engine experience
integrated prospect-to-cash experience
ability to serve both in-house assets and customer assets through field agents
integrated procure-to-pay experience
integrated activities and notes for customer data and documents
ability to look up on-hand inventory availability and details
project-to-cash experience
ability to handle multiple addresses and roles through the party concept.
This robust framework links F&O + CE environments and enables these powerful but different business applications to work together.
Here are the top reasons why you should use dual-write:
The dual-write infrastructure follows the no-code/low-code principle and doesn't take a genius/data scientist to setup (it can be done initially in 20minutes!)
Dual-write provides tightly coupled, near-real-time, and bidirectional integration between finance and operations apps and customer engagement apps.
Data from customers, products, operations, projects, and the Internet of Things (IoT) can automatically flow to Dataverse through dual-write.
The dual-write infrastructure follows the no-code/low-code principle and doesn't take a genius/data scientist to setup (it can be done initially in 20minutes!)
So what are the drawbacks?
The obvious challenge is that it is not 'real-time' but that said it can be very very very fast! We have seen it being near instantaneous.
When you have connected F&O and CE apps via dual-write the people managing the environments needs to be told this and they must take care of this when either environment is subject to changes, or in the case of testing subject to rebuilding...
Not all data changes in either app can be passed across dual-write:
Changes must be in a transaction
Changes are triggered only if the fields are listed on the mapped fields form viewable within in the finance and operations app
Business events must be registered for the data source that is mapped
The following items cannot be handled by business events
Changes to the data source that aren’t mapped.
Changes to the data source that are mapped but not registered for the data source.
Changes to the data source that are mapped but not registered for the entity.