Consulting in 2025: How Partner Firms Can Future-Proof Their Dynamics 365 CE / CRM Practice
02 May 2025
In the world of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement projects, you have three choices. Configure, Customize or Extend.
1) Develop Standards: Like any art form from coding to painting, individuals have their own style of delivering specific needs. This offers diversity in options but also can quickly become an unsupportable nightmare.
- Configure Standards: The question might have a companion question, answer in pairs, understand the bigger picture that your answer drives.
- Customize Standards: Define how you name, update all components of a table, decide on form consistency, add UI/UX design love, label what is not in use ZNotinUse - [xxx].
- Extend/Development Standards: Document (someone will have to support this code in the future), don't get into cut/paste mode, organize to optimize, plan for the future, always consider performance, follow the Microsoft SDK.
2) As you are working on Phase I, plan for Phase II, Phase III, Phase IV etc. The idea is that the deliverable lives for many happy years to come. Include more than just BizApps, consider all of the Microsoft Stack.
3) Memorize, Read, Re-Read the Microsoft Roadmaps so that you don't build something that needs to die tomorrow. Include some review of the other Microsoft Stack product roadmaps.
4) We rarely have just a BizApps project (Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE Apps)), adopt the Microsoft Stack mindset. Modern Workplace integration (MS Teams, Phone, Excel, SharePoint, Outlook, Word, OneNote), Azure Components (Azure Key Vault, Azure Service Bus, Azure Synapse, etc.), Copilot across all data (All of the 140+ Copilots in or for and all the Agent possibilities with Copilot Studio), the world of Data and Big Data (MS Fabric, Azure Synapse, Power BI, Predictive Analytics, access to data).
5) Know Who's Who in the Zoo: Relationships provide more than just opportunity. They offer bridges to success. Get to know your Microsoft team members and their goals within the many, many different teams focused on the Microsoft Power Platform including the Microsoft CRM/CE Blackbelts, the Microsoft CAT Team, the Microsoft FastTrack teams for CE, Azure, SQL, etc. The Microsoft Support teams and so many more above and beyond the individual Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE app development teams.
6) Community: Stay in touch with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE and Power Platform communities. They are the ones that will communicate the latest issues, alert you to the pitfalls to avoid until fixed, scream at you the latest and greatest fits and why they are excited about it.