Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations is a cloud solution, and even when it is available on-premise, the obvious high availability/disaster recovery solution would be to switch to Microsoft Azure. So, even when our solution is designed to be on-premise, we shouldn't write our integrations to access local area network resources.

All integrations should have a service endpoint that will be accessed by Dynamics 365 for Operations.

To facilitate writing integrations that are agnostic of the local network resources, Microsoft has evolved the Data Import/Export Framework (DIXF) in this release, to help resolve many of the integrations issues we will often face. It also opens up a much more integrated way in which we can communicate with Microsoft Office.

In this chapter we will cover the usage and extensibility options for data entities, and also how to interact programmatically with our data entities through OData.