Chapter 2: Using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Framework for Success

Microsoft Project Operations is built upon an overall framework that Microsoft calls its Microsoft 365, Power Platform and Dynamics 365 frameworks. Formerly Microsoft Office 365, the Microsoft 365 framework enables the entire experience for users of Project Operations. This means that users sign in to their portal and upon authentication are presented with all the applications they are licensed to access. The Power Platform is the development platform which Dynamics 365 CE is built.

This chapter is designed to outline the interconnected environments of Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Finance and Operations solution. The result should be that as you begin deploying and utilizing Project Operations, you will be able to quickly license, set up, and configure the baseline configuration.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following concepts:

• The Microsoft 365 framework
• The Microsoft Power Platform...

The Microsoft 365 framework

The Microsoft 365 framework is a fully encompassing solution that is available across Home, Business, Enterprise, and Education customer types. Microsoft 365 is, for many businesses today, an all-in-one solution that provides an underlying IT infrastructure that is highly secured with multi-factor authentication and defends against cyberthreats such as viruses, malware, phishing, ransomware, spam, and other threats. This means that as a business, you are able to leverage Microsoft technologies that protect your data, secure your devices, and manage your access.

Built on top of this are the applications that are available from Microsoft, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and many others; these are common to the daily tasks of users. Furthermore, Microsoft Teams collaboration provides the ability to easily chat, share files, add calls and meetings, and much more, to make team collaboration easy and effective.

The solution is delivered on a...

The Microsoft Power Platform framework

Imagine being able to harness the potential of yourself, your team members, and others in the firm! Microsoft's Power Platform (https://powerplatform.microsoft.com/en-us/) does just this! The Microsoft Power Platform allows you to harness the skills and abilities of citizen developers and contributors within the firm, which can offer success to the team. This is accomplished by utilizing the low-code/no-code capabilities of the 
Power Platform.

The Microsoft Power Platform provides the ability to use Microsoft tools and technologies to perform the overall cohesiveness of the solution. With the Microsoft 365 environment, you have already authenticated with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), which tells Microsoft what you are licensed for and which apps and data sources you have access to.

The Power Platform turns this into a cohesive solution by adding much-needed functions such as reporting and analytics (Power BI), development...

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE

How do you build an app that needs to tie together the sales organization with the operational project planning and the accounting department? How do you build an application that needs the security of Microsoft Azure coupled with the framework of Microsoft 365? How do you extend that functionality across all devices and user types and through workflow and power applications?

The answer is Microsoft's development platform called Dynamics 365 CE, formerly called Dynamics 365 Customer Relationship Management. Upon its release, Microsoft's CRM platform was adopted by many people who chose to utilize it not only for CRM but also for additional functionality around the sales processes. Microsoft has previously called this the eXtensible Relationship Management (xRM) solution.

Today, the development environment that was Dynamics xRM is now a totally encompassing development framework that you can use to build a totally extended environment on top...

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

An exciting element of Project Operations is that it is an end-to-end solution from sales through delivery through accounting. This means that the solution must deliver upon the accounting requirements of a professional services firm! This is no small feat!

Historically, some professional services firms have implemented Finance and Operations to accomplish only part of what Project Operations does. This means that previously, customers have spent their efforts setting up a robust project accounting system to perform WBS and resource management, time and expense entry, billing and invoicing, and many other functions. The challenge they incurred was that this configuration was heavily accounting-oriented, which limited the scope of the number of users who could effectively contribute to the solution. This is why having purpose-built user experiences that match the need of the users working in the system is beneficial to a professional...

The Unified environment – Project Operations apps

As we proceed into the next chapter, we will learn that there are three different deployment models of Project Operations to be chosen from. These deployment models will greatly influence how you use the solution going forward. Therefore, it is beneficial to dig a little deeper into the environment.

For the curious-minded, let's demystify this. When looking at the Unified environment, it is easy to forget all the capabilities across the Microsoft 365 framework that are working in your favor to give you a world-class project operations solution:

Table 2.1 – The components of the Project Operations solution

All of these functionalities are available in a browser of your choice, through your phone, tablet, or any other device with modern browser interfaces. Let's understand the preceding table in detail:

• The first column represents the common Microsoft 365 apps that are in use...

Summary

Microsoft Project Operations was purpose-built for professional services firms' complex and sophisticated requirements. As an integrated end-to-end solution, Project Operations provides project, program, and practice managers with an overall integrated and easy-to-use solution for day-to-day operations. Project Operations solves the problem of disparate systems and disconnected work.

First, we learned that Project Operations is built into the Microsoft 365 framework so it leverages the sophisticated IT infrastructure that Microsoft provides. This controls your security, manages threats, and protects data.

The Microsoft 365 apps help with your daily workloads, including Outlook, Excel, and all other Microsoft Office apps. We learned that as part of the Microsoft 365 applications, we leverage Project for the Web as the task management core solution for planning resources and tasks.

We also identified how the Power Platform with its various components provides...

Questions

1. Which Microsoft app provides you with document management in the cloud?
2. Which structured document management solution in the cloud is used for more formalized contract and document retention?
3. Which app is used in Project Operations to track and manage tasks?
4. Which app is used in Project Operations to modify the site map of CE and is also capable of making your own applications?
5. Which Project Operations app gives you full functionality?
6. Which Project Operations app just has time and expense functionality?
7. True or false: Project Operations is only licensed on a 3-year contract.
8. True or false: Project Operations requires Dynamics 365 CE for Sales.
9. What is the accounting backend that is used in Project Operations?
10. What is the purpose of deferred revenue and revenue recognition?
11. What is project profitability?

Further reading

• Matthew Weston, Learn Microsoft PowerApps, Packt Publishing, 2019 https://www.packtpub.com/product/learn-microsoft-powerapps/9781789805826