Preface

Hey, you! If you’re here, it’s because Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is part of your day-to-day life, either because you work on projects as an implementer (as an architect or consultant), or perhaps as an administrator or citizen developer of an organization that has Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement implemented.

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement enables organizations to control each point of contact that the customer has with it, from the Sales, Service (both Customer and Field Service), and Marketing standpoints, creating a unique and personalized customer experience. Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, formerly known as CRM, has evolved a lot during the past several years. Projects have changed from being mostly custom developed to almost no development required. A key challenge is not knowing the possibilities and limitations of the no-code/low-code approach with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, leveraging Power Platform. Because of this, solution designs often include duplications of native functionality or unnecessarily complex development.

This does not mean that Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement projects no longer require custom developments. Rather, the evolution of Power Platform enables us to think of new solutions that were not available before.

Power Platform allows us to extend native Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications in terms of UX, data processing, integrations, and automations, among others.

Understanding how the no-code/low-code project approach works in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, including what is possible with each of the Power Platform solutions, will help you to provide more value with your projects, increase productivity, and ensure a more scalable and maintainable solution.

Having no-code, low-code, and pro-code options presents us with three key challenges:

• The first is to understand what we mean by no-code/low-code.
• Next is understanding the possibilities of extending Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement with a no-code/low-code approach.
• And finally, to correctly triage different solution approaches in order to correctly identify when we can provide a solution with a native capability, when we should extend the project with a no-code/low-code approach, and when the best option for a solution is custom development.