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What is Dynamics 365 guidance?

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Welcome to the various types of guidance that Microsoft provides for Dynamics 365. Get an overview of already published content at Dynamics 365 guidance documentation, and submit new content here.

Overview

In this section, we provide an overview of what we mean with the term guidance.

Microsoft uses the term guidance for design patterns, reference architectures, deployment diagrams, and other recommended approaches to implement Microsoft services in an organization. Solution architects, administrators, functional consultants, and many more use the content to start conversations or implementations. For Dynamics 365, we add end-to-end business process descriptions, and best practices for how to configure and set up Dynamics 365 for an organization.

Microsoft believes that every business is in the business of creating great customer experiences. To achieve that, business applications must do more than just run your back office, marketing, supply chain, or even field operations as discrete entities. We recognize that businesses don't just implement technology solutions, they implement business applications to solve real-life business problems. These investments are often coupled with an expectation of a return on investment, a reduction in total cost of ownership, or another perceived and measurable business objective. The end-to-end business processes content will help guide your implementation to success faster and easier.

Find related content at Power Platform guidance documentation and the Azure Architecture Center. Also, the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure contains proven guidance and best practices that help you confidently adopt the cloud and achieve business outcomes.

End-to-end business processes

The term business process covers a wide range of structured, often sequenced, activities or tasks to achieve a predetermined organizational goal. The term can also refer to the cumulative effects of all steps progressing toward a business goal. In our articles, we illustrate this sequence of steps in flowcharts. Dynamics 365 is a suite of applications that are designed to help organization meet the organizational goals aligned to a variety of business processes focused on specific industries.

We've structured our business process content into four levels:

  • End-to-end scenarios
  • Areas
  • Business processes
  • Patterns

Learn more at About the business process guide.

Implementation guide

This section contains guidance for how to implement solutions that include Dynamics 365. The original Dynamics 365 Implementation Guide introduced the term Success by Design with the four stages:

  • Initiate
  • Implement
  • Prepare
  • Operate

The new guide adds an earlier stage to that list:

  • Strategize

    All implementations should have a well-rounded implementation strategy that delivers on the promise of digital transformation. The section also covers the environment strategy, and the organizational strategy.

Learn more at Introduction to Dynamics 365 Implementation Guide.

Implementation tools and samples

In this section, we provide an overview of the resources in the Dynamics-365-FastTrack-Implementation-Assets GitHub repo. The tools and scripts are sorted by the Dynamics 365 apps that they support, or the technology or concept that they apply to.

Learn more at What are the implementation tools and samples?.

Administrative process guide

This section provides best practices for ongoing administrative tasks, such as data management, reporting and business intelligence, servicing the solution, and other aspects of administrative tasks.

Patterns

This section is still pretty slim, but we expect to publish some of the patterns we've seen that admins and consultants use to bring Dynamics 365 solutions to life.

Reference architectures

This section is still empty, but we hope to build a library of reference architectures to help our customer and admins get deployments and integrations right.

FastTrack

Microsoft FastTrack for Dynamics 365, our customer success service designed to help our partners' customers implement and go live so they can realize business value faster. It is an onboarding program run by the product engineering team that offers best practices, tools, resources, and expert advice. The customer will gain valuable insights with solution implementation, onboarding, and continued education.

Product documentation

Wherever you are in the guidance content, the navigation panel shows links to the core docs for each Dynamics 365 app or service. You can also find these links on the Dynamic 365 documentation hub page.

Get notified about changes through an RSS feed

To subscribe to a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed of all updates to the Dynamics 365 guidance content, use the following link:

RSS

Note

The RSS feed returns a list of the 100 articles most recently updated. The list is sorted by date, but it can take up to a week before the most recently updated articles make it to the list.

Tell us what you think

On the learn.microsoft.com website, each documentation article encourages you to provide feedback. We've changed the mechanism a couple of times based on, well, feedback. Currently, we ask you to choose the Feedback action below the article's title. Give the article a rating, and write a comment if you want to. The feedback goes straight to the article's author and the team that owns the docs.

Contribute

Our content is available as Markdown and YAML files in a public GitHub repo. A benefit of GitHub is the ability for you to contribute to the content that the Microsoft team provides. There's good advice and best practices published in the Microsoft Learn contributor guide. Learn more at Contribute to Microsoft content for Dynamics 365.

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