Difference between Dynamics instance and a Common Data Service environment

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Posted on by Community Power Pla...

We currently have three CDS environments:

Default

Sales CRM (prod)

Sales CRM (sandbox)

We are now looking to create CRM systems for other departments in the company, let's call them 'Department 2' and 'Department 3'. The data and customisations should be entirely separate, so I do not just want these two be new apps within our current environments. I would have done this by creating four new CDS environments:

Department 2 (prod)

Department 2 (sandbox)

Department 3 (prod)

Department 3 (sandbox)

This agrees with the documentation on creating CDS environments: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/multiple-online-environments-tenants.

I also found this though on adding Dynamics instances: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/admin/add-instance-subscription

So my question is, what is the difference between adding a Dynamics instance to a subscription and creating new CDS environments? Ideally I want each department to have their own Sales Team Member app that can be customised.

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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David Jennaway 716 on at

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The differences between a Dynamics instance and a Common Data Service environment is that the Dynamics instance will contain solutions with Dynamics functionality, and the CDS environment won't have these (and they can't be added at a later date).
There's no significance that Dynamics refers to an 'instance' and CDS an 'environment'. The terms are only different for historical reasons

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Thanks @DavidJennaway . The line between Dynamics and a CDS model-driven app is still unclear to me. I just tried creating a new CDS sandbox environment using the following settings:

Create a database for this environment: Yes
Enable Dynamics 365 Apps: No

An app has still been created with a URL containing 'dynamics' and much of the functionality that I associate with Dynamics (server-side sync, for example) is still evident. It seems you can have an app for all of accounts, contacts and activities without having a Dynamics instance?

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David Jennaway 716 on at

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Yes, that's right. A CDS environment includes common entities such as accounts, contacts and activities, and in general supports all the extension and integration capabilities of Dynamics.
Probably the simplest way to consider this is that the a Dynamics 365 instance is just a CDS environment with additional Dynamics-specific solutions and apps. Microsoft essentially restructured Dynamics to work this way when CDS v2 was released

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @Anonymous,
I think the line is pretty clear, but perhaps it's because I know the platform and history... Here's my attempt to clarify:
CDS
All Dynamics 365 apps (e.g. Sales, Customer Service) are built on top of CDS, so CDS is the "base" or we can say the core of the system. CDS (as the previous person said) contains default out-of-the-box entities such as Account, Contact and all the other entities to support the common/core capabilities (e.g. Office integration, interaction/activity management, security, etc). The standard/core/base entities are also referred as Common Data Model (CDM) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/. As you build custom apps and functionality on top of CDS or when you install 1st/3rd party apps (e.g. Dynamics 365 Sales) you are essentially extending CDS and its data model (CDM).

CDS Model-Driven App vs Dynamics 365
A model-driven is simply an app where the forms and navigation is tightly coupled with the entity/data model. You configure the UI based on an existing enterprise scale "template" (model-driven) instead of starting from scratch like in canvas apps.
To further supplement as I described above, Dynamics 365 is built on top of CDS and so, there's no direct relation with model-driven apps. Out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 apps built their interface with with model-driven apps. You can have Dynamics 365 system and extend it with canvas or model-driven apps depending on what your requirements are.

Sandbox version Production environment
Sandbox allows you more administrative tasks to be perform on it such as delete the environment whereas Production does not for obviously reasons.
Production environment is more performant than Sandbox. There used to have no performance differences but it's no longer the case.

"dynamics" in URL
This is true, but has to do with the history of CDS and Dynamics 365 aka CRM. I won't get into the history not to confuse you. I hope Microsoft does remove that dynamics in the URL because it is confusing to users.

Hope this helps!

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