Data has become crucial for organizations to navigate swiftly through increasing customer demands and evolving market needs. Today, organizations receive data in various formats from various sources. It is imperative for businesses to process, analyze, and store this data to get actionable insights. As they say, Data is the New Power. You must know how to leverage this data to drive growth and offer personalized customer experiences.
Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft's brainchild, is a comprehensive analytics and data platform with highly useful features that give a new dimension to the available data. It offers services such as Data Engineering, Data Factory, Data Science, Real-Time Analytics, and Data Warehouse.
One of the best things about Microsoft Fabric is its single, unified platform that seamlessly assembles different services to simplify your analytics requirements. If someone asks what Microsoft Fabric is, it is a unified solution that perfectly encompasses various data-related activities, such as data movement, data processing, data ingestion, data transformation, real-time event routing, and report building.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, considers Fabric one of the most critical data products after the inception of the SQL server. It combines the functionalities of various Microsoft products, such as Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory, into a unified, single Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
On the other hand, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a comprehensive suite of ERP and CRM solutions, such as D365 Sales, D365 Marketing, D365 Supply Chain Management, D365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, D365 Human Resources, D365 Customer Service, etc. These D365 solutions can be tailored to your business requirements and empower businesses to streamline operations, automate processes, and make data-driven decisions.
To better understand Microsoft Fabric and how it works, we should review its key components. Let's do that.
Power BI, Microsoft's business intelligence platform, ensures businesses can access all the data in Fabric systematically to make better, data-driven decisions.
With Azure Data Factory, businesses can easily create and manage data pipelines. In Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory allows businesses to move data between multiple data sources and transform data quickly, such as filtering, cleaning, and aggregating data.
Data engineering is a comprehensive process that allows businesses to design, build, and maintain data infrastructures and systems for collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data. Microsoft Fabric will enable businesses to quickly schedule and orchestrate notebooks and spark jobs. The process also allows companies to create a Data Lake Store called Lakehouse to store data and use Apache Spark to transform and prepare processed data for data-driven decision-making.
Extracting actionable insights from the available data is crucial, and it can be done by performing a data science method within Microsoft Fabric using scientific processes, algorithms, and systems. The Data Science method allows businesses to explore data and build ML algorithms to find actionable insights for decision-making.
Synapse Data Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric gives businesses a unified experience in building and managing data warehouses and big data analytics. A fully managed, petabyte-scale analytics service combines SQL Data Warehouse and Apache Spark. It is a future-ready component that allows businesses to scale up their data analytics operations with a distributed architecture by handling and processing large volumes of data from various sources.
Do you want to process and analyze streaming data in real-time? Synapse Real-Time Analytics can do it for you. Businesses can quickly ingest, process, transform, and analyze any data source from 1GB to 1PB to visualize data and share insights with other stakeholders.
Dynamics 365 is one of the most potent suites, consisting of ERP and CRM systems. Tailored Microsoft D365 solutions can help businesses streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, improve transparency and efficiency, and make data-driven decisions. Let's look at some reasons for integrating Microsoft Fabric with Dynamics 365.
The best thing about Microsoft Fabric is the availability of a unified data platform with centralized data storage and management of D365 and other data sources. Furthermore, with a unified data platform, you can have data consistency and accuracy across the organization.
With Fabric's integration with Dynamics 365, you can use advanced analytics tools, such as Azure Synapse Analytics, to gain deeper, actionable insights and in-depth data analysis. Fabric's Power BI also empowers businesses to create comprehensive and visually appealing reports to understand data better.
Fabric's scalable infrastructure allows businesses to handle large volumes of data while optimizing performance and accuracy for D365 applications. The cloud infrastructure also minimizes downtime and improves reliability.
Automating processes with Microsoft Fabric can improve efficiency and productivity. Native integration also allows businesses to have a smooth data flow between Dynamics 365 and other Microsoft services.
Businesses can enjoy highly advanced security features available with Microsoft Fabric, such as encryption and access controls, data regulation compliance, and more, to protect sensitive data. You can seamlessly comply with various data regulation policies.
With Microsoft Fabric licensing, you can use other Microsoft tools, such as Teams, to collaborate smoothly with other team members and improve process management. This improves productivity, efficiency, and user satisfaction.
Leveraging Fabric's cloud infrastructure, businesses can optimize their operational costs. They can also better allocate their resources to reduce further costs and improve ROI.
As Microsoft continues evolving and updating its cloud services, Fabric's integration with Dynamics 365 stays up to date with the latest technological advancements. Also, the integration with D365 offers flexibility to scale up in accordance with the changing business needs and technological trends to future-proof IT investments.
There are two ways to integrate Microsoft Fabric with Dynamics 365 by utilizing Power Apps Maker Portal. Let's examine each one.
With this method, businesses can choose, manage, and add tables from Dataverse and D365 F&O. It creates a direct link from the Power App Maker Portal to allow users to select specific tables for integration.
Users can easily choose, add, and manage tables from Dataverse and D365 F&O. This method uses the Azure Synapse Link setup to offer more personalized control over table selection within Fabric.
(To use this integration method, you must have previously configured an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse.)
Both approaches are highly flexible and ensure Fabric's integration with D365.
If someone asks what Microsoft Fabric is, it is a comprehensive, unified, and robust data platform that allows businesses to handle, process, and analyze large volumes of data with accuracy. Its immense capabilities help businesses to bring superior data visualization for informed decision-making.
By integrating it with D365 solutions, businesses can leverage its capabilities to automate various tasks, get actionable, data-driven insights, streamline processes, reduce costs, and comply with different data regulation policies.
We have discussed Microsoft Fabric, its crucial components, reasons to integrate Fabric with D365 solutions, and two integration methods in detail. DynaTech is a leading Microsoft Solutions Partner, offering tailored D365, Power BI, and Azure solutions to skyrocket your business growth.