Dual-Write is an out of box feature in the MS Dynamics 365 F&O (Finance and Operations), which facilitates data integration between F&O and Dataverse/CE (Customer Engagement) apps. The integration enables businesses to have a single source of information between various functions like Sales, Customer service, Finance, and Operations, this is possible as dual-write helps keep related data in Dataverse with near real-time updates.
In this blog, we will get to know what is dual-write, its architecture, what are the system requirements, limitations and what are the basic features of dual-write.
How Dual-Write Works ?
According to Microsoft: Dual-write comprises two components: an infrastructure component and an application component.
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
- Reliable application lifecycle management
- Out-of-box setup experience for new customers
Architecture
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.
Simple illustration showing the steps involved in enabling dual-write setup for syncing data between F&O and CE apps.
- Initial sync – The process of syncing existing data in either one or both F&O and CE environments.
- Live sync – The process of syncing data between mapped entities based on the configuration to sync like, create, update, and delete in either one of the environments
- Configuration of the dual write setup includes linking of environments, mapping entities, setting up users, who have the control processes, and setup error logging and notifications.
- Error logging and alerting can be configured to notify application users of events which need their attention and help trouble shoot issues or failures in syncing of data.
Key points to note:
- Managed from inside F&O
- Setup per entity
- Bidirectional
- Syncs are executed per entity
- Near real time
- Uses data integrator in backend (for initial sync)
- Both online and offline mode support.
- Requires nil to minimal engineering effort
Following are some of the advantages of Dual-write, which make it a compelling choice to customers, when there is a need for syncing of data between D365 F&O and D365 CE apps.
- Data from customers, products, operations, projects, and the Internet of Things (IoT) automatically flows to Dataverse. This connection is rather compelling if businesses intend to use Power Platform.
- To get started with using dual-write, customers do not need any engineering efforts as it follows no code/low code approach, and just needs the extension of standard table-to-table and create custom mapping.
- It also supports both online and offline modes.
- Bi-directional data flow between Finance and Operations and Customer Engagement Apps
- Ability to sync initial data between the apps (if you had one App running and deploying the other one from scratch)
- Start, pause, and catchup the sync at any time as required for offline/online modes
- Covers both standard and custom entities
- Notes and activities are expanded to support both customers and the internal system users
System requirements for dual-write
The setup of a dual-write connection has the following requirements:
Finance and operations apps that have build version 10.0.9 (10.0.383.20013) (Quality update) and platform update 33 or later.
Customer engagement apps that have platform version 9.1.0000.11732 or later.
Limitations
Dual-write has these limitations:
- You can’t run dual-write and the Prospect to cash solution for Data integrator side by side. If you’re running the Prospect to cash solution for Data integrator, you must uninstall it.
- Dual-write setup is not supported on trial instances of finance and operations apps.
- Dual-write must be used to integrate a single finance and operations app instance and a single customer engagement app instance.
- Dual-write currently has an initial synchronization limit of 40 legal entities.
- Dual-write live synchronization has a limit of 250 legal entities
- Dual-write does not support cross-company data sharing
- Dual-write requires that the finance and operations app and the customer engagement app must be in the same Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant
- Dual-write requires that the finance and operations app and the customer engagement app must be deployed in the same Microsoft Azure datacenter.
- Dual-write is not triggered by the doInsert, doUpdate, and doDelete events of finance and operations apps. Use the Insert, Update, and Delete events in finance and operations apps when you want to trigger dual-write
- Dual-write doesn’t support distributed transactions. For example, if the product receipt posting process is cancelled, dual-write might create the product receipt in Dataverse but not create it in Supply Chain Management.
Dual-write is a vast area, the above blog is just an introduction and watch out this space for a series of blog posts covering other significant areas.
