Dynamics 365 Sales Training May 2025

Microsoft Dataverse (formerly called Common Data Service) is actually the underlying data platform for Power Platform training May 2025 that powers a lot of Dynamics 365 apps!

It provides you with a secure, cloud-based database to go ahead and store your business data in a set of standard and custom tables (formerly called entities) that your apps can use. All your Dynamics 365 CRM modules (Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Marketing, Customer Insights – Journeys) can be considered as built on Dataverse. That Power Platform Dataverse training May 2025 ends up meaning that you can learn how they tend to share a common data model for your core records like your Accounts, Contacts, and Activities. This kind of centralized data foundation helps you really break down data silos and also makes it much easier for you to integrate processes across these different apps. For example, suppose a company’s sales reps, as well as support agents and field technicians are all together looking at the same customer and product records in one database and one place – rather than in separate disconnected systems. Dataverse empowers your Dynamics 365 apps to share information across all your applications, syncing your operations. All so you can have much smarter, real-time decision-making. For more information on Microsoft MB-280 May 2025 and other ways to understand Dynamics 365 Sales you may inquire within for more details.

Each application then goes ahead and operates from a single source of truth. This is making it easy for you to transfer data between apps (like, moving a customer record from Sales to Finance without losing your data). Microsoft Power Platform MB-280 training May 2025 refers to training on this awesome suite of low-code and no-code tools. These are Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages (formerly Dynamics 365 portals), as well as Power Virtual Agents (now upgraded to Copilot Studio). All of these work together with Dataverse and Dynamics 365.

Power Platform allows organizations to extend and customize Dynamics 365 quite beyond its own out-of-the-box capabilities. For example when using Power Apps, a company or org like yours can build custom modules or mobile apps that also tap into Dataverse data (perhaps like a lightweight canvas app for sales reps to check your inventory). With Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow), users can go right ahead and create automated workflows that react to Dataverse data. This can be like sending you an approval when a big opportunity is closed or integrating with your third-party systems. Power BI can just directly analyze your Dataverse data to create dashboards and even reports for insights across your Sales, Service, etc. Dataverse is essentially what you can consider the common data layer that unifies your Dynamics 365 ecosystem. Power Platform is the toolbox that empowers users like you to tailor, extend, and integrate Dynamics 365 apps (and even build brand new business apps) with a minimum of coding or programming.

When it comes to ETL: Extract, Transform, Load it’s about moving or integrating data for Dynamics 365 (or any database-driven system). Here you may often encounter the term ETL, which actually stands for Extract, Transform, Load. ETL is a sort of process/pipeline for your data migration and integration tasks. In the Extract phase, your data is pulled out from your source system (like extracting your customer records from a legacy CRM or even another Dynamics 365 instance). Next, in your Transform phase, data is: cleaned, mapped, converted into your desired format needed by your target system.

For example, consider how adjusting field names, data types, and applying business rules, or even filtering out unwanted records. Finally, your transformed data is Loaded into your target system (such as by inserting the records into your Dynamics 365 Dataverse environment). These steps can end up being executed sequentially or even in parallel pipelines. Often times, intermediate storage (like staging tables) might end up being used during transformation of your data. The whole goal of ETL is for your data from one system being accurately and efficiently transferred into your other system. That’s even if your two systems have different schemas or even data formats. This is so important in scenarios like migrating from your old CRM to Dynamics 365 Sales. Or when regularly syncing your data between Dynamics 365 and other kinds of databases/data warehouses for your reporting. A successful ETL process will end up handling things like data type differences, like key mappings (e.g. such as making sure that lookup relationships still point to the correct records). It can handle your data deduplication, and also error handling to make sure your target system ends up with more reliable, well-structured data. The ETL process essentially involves pulling your data from one or more sources. Then applying transformations/cleansing (such as filtering and joining), and then loading your data into the target database.

Data is Extracted from your source systems, Transformed (e.g. like by a transformation engine or staging area), and then Loaded into a target database.​

Scribe, SSIS, and KingswaySoft (ETL Tools for Dynamics 365)

When performing data migration or integration with Dynamics 365 Sales, there are a lot of tools out there available to carry out ETL processes.

A lot of them are pretty expensive, and require a lot of expertise to use. Whether you have never heard of these before, or have even used them and have had problematic results with them even after a large investment, you can inquire within on how we can help you with our custom Dynamics 365 migration solutions and services. Three popular options historically have been something called TIBCO Scribe, also SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), and KingswaySoft’s Dynamics 365 Integration Toolkit. Each of these has its own strengths and weaknesses:

Scribe: Scribe (which is originally from Scribe Software, now part of TIBCO) is a really specialized data integration tool that has for long been quite extensively used in the Dynamics community. It can provide you with a user-friendly, point-and-click interface to go right ahead and build data pipelines between sources and targets (with specific connectors for your Dynamics 365/CRM).If you want Dynamics 365 migrate without Scribe then you can ask us for more details on custom Dynamics Edge Dynamics 365 migration services without Scribe, including without using Scribe’s cloud-based version (which is often referred to as Scribe Online). Scribe also has some older on-premise software. This can include Scribe Insight, which has been retired as of around 2022 or so. Some strengths is that it is designed for citizen integrators or citizen developers meaning less coding is required. It has features like scheduling, like error handling, and notifications built-in, which is making it easier for you to start to automate your integrations that tend to recur. It is also quite fast for you to get started with it when using pre-built adapters. If you have two similar Dynamics 365 systems, you can go ahead and map all your entities and run a migration relatively quickly in some cases. However, cost can be quite a downside. Scribe is a licensed product (and is often priced per user or per connector), and Dynamics 365 migration tenant to tenant without Scribe can become more appealing in situations where Scribe can become very expensive,​ especially in certain kinds of Dynamics 365 environments or in some certain situations where lower cost options like Dynamics Edge Dynamics 365 migration solutions and services may even in some cases achieve your goals more effectively and with higher satisfaction and quality. For these kinds of options, you may inquire for more information.

Using Scribe for your own on-premises data might require setting up a particular on-premises agent to connect to the cloud service. There is also quite a bit of a learning curve on your end so you can fully leverage Scribe’s interface leading you to may want Dynamics 365 migrate tenant without Scribe if one is quite new to it though Scribe is often considered easier than raw SSIS development. Scribe can be a powerful all-in-one solution that is excellent for those who may want a ready-made tool and are willing to invest in potential licensing costs. It is often praised for getting the job done quite quickly with minimal custom code, in many situations.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS): SSIS is Microsoft’s enterprise ETL platform that comes with SQL Server. It is a general-purpose tool for building out your data extraction, transformation, and also loading your workflows (called packages). Strengths are that SSIS is very powerful and can handle your large volumes of data efficiently. If you already have a SQL Server environment, SSIS might come included for you, which might make it quite a cost-effective choice depending on the situation. Here there might be no extra software cost that’s beyond SQL licensing. You can support all kinds of data sources as well as transformations right out-of-the-box. With SSIS, you can go ahead and script a lot of complex logic in C# or even VB if needed. This can be giving you quite a high degree of flexibility for custom or bespoke transformation rules. When it’s optimized, SSIS packages offer super levels of performance for moving your data. However custom scripting can cost a lot of money, time, effort and high technical skill, so in some cases Dynamics 365 migration tenant to tenant without SSIS can still be far more appealing and in that case Dynamics Edge custom migration services for your Dynamics 365 environments and tenants may potentially be a better fit both cost wise and for accomplishing the goal in some situations even compared with SSIS.

With the right kind of use of your data flow transformations, SSIS can process even millions of records. Weaknesses are that SSIS by itself does not have a native Dynamics 365 connector in older versions, so Dynamics 365 migrate tenant without SSIS may be more interesting in some cases than integrating with D365 that sometimes requires either writing custom code (such as by using the Dataverse web API through script tasks) or even having to start using third-party adapters like KingswaySoft. This ends up meaning a higher technical skill requirement, so SSIS is usually considered a developer’s tool. The design interface (Business Intelligence Development Studio / Visual Studio) can be powerful but Dynamics 365 migrate without SSIS such as by using Dynamics Edge Dynamics 365 migration services can end up being more viable for some cases than the daunting SSIS interface and high technical skill set required for those not so familiar with data flow programming. Also, when you are deploying and scheduling SSIS packages it requires an SSIS server or some SQL Agent jobs, which is more infrastructure you may rather not have to worry about managing. SSIS is extremely capable but it may have a quite steeper learning curve and might be somewhat overkill for smaller, one-time migrations if not already in use regularly.

KingswaySoft Integration Toolkit: KingswaySoft is actually a third-party solution that works with your SSIS. It is sort of a collection of SSIS adapters/connectors specifically designed for your Dynamics 365 (and many other kinds of systemsyou may have). When you start installing KingswaySoft’s toolkit into your SSIS environment, you can get drag-and-drop connectors to read/write your Dynamics 365 data (using Dataverse API under the hood) all without having to write custom code . In some situations though, this may vary. Strengths is that it combines the performance and flexibility of SSIS with a much easier setup for D365 integration in some situations. While you can achieve codeless data integration/migration using KingswaySoft on SSIS in many cases, with Dynamics Edge custom services like Dynamics 365 migration tenant to tenant without KingswaySoft you can Dynamics 365 migrate without ETL using alternative methods in our customized packages which may sometimes be more appropriate, effective, and even cost less than using KingswaySoft, SSIS, Scribe or other similar expensive third party solutions. This is depending on your scenario and you can ask us for more information about it. KingswaySoft typically licenses per server so for large deployments it can be substantially cheaper than Scribe​, however it can be expensive to use ETL tools unless you are essentially a vendor of these kinds of services or are very familiar with ETL – and even so, there’s some cases where there are still more cost effective and more satisfactory options which you can inquire within about.

While many consider KingswaySoft + SSIS a go-to solution if they have SSIS expertise, it might rely on SSIS. In that case Dynamics 365 migrate tenant without KingswaySoft such as through migrate Dynamics 365 with custom Dynamics Edge migration services may still be more appealing since otherwise the user experience might still be too closely tied to Visual Studio for your preferences, and the concepts of data flows might also be less approachable for non-developers. You still may need to know how to build an SSIS package, even where coding is not required. There have been specific cases where certain kinds of authentication scenarios posed challenges for some people. For example, some users had some issues using KingswaySoft with ADFS/on-prem SSO authentication in some types of hybrid and other kinds of online environments. Some users had issues with requiring to make custom scripts or even mappings, even when using solutions like Scribe, KingswaySoft or the like – and in that case, you may want to consider simpler solutions that may even end up being more cost effective and easier for you to use such as custom options Dynamics Edge might have available for you.

Migrating Dynamics 365 Sales Data: Alternatives Beyond Scribe/SSIS/KingswaySoft
If you need Dynamics 365 migrate without KingswaySoft to migrate your data from one Dynamics 365 Sales instance to another (whether it is moving to a new organization, consolidating your environments, or transitioning between your tenants) you may sometimes prefer not to use Scribe, SSIS, or KingswaySoft, there are several other approaches such as those offered by Dynamics Edge D365 migration services. While you can also consider some other third-party solutions, you may also instead consider to contact Dynamics Edge for custom Dynamics 365 data migration, instance migration and tenant migration services which may be lower cost and more targeted to your use case than Scribe, SSIS, KingswaySoft or anything else described on this page.

Before you contact us, see if some of these simple, free solutions can help you. If you’re not moving tenant to tenant, see if a simple Power Platform Environment Copy can help you. For many same-tenant scenarios, the easiest method is often to just use the Power Platform Admin Center’s environment copy feature. If you have a source environment (for example, a production Dynamics 365 Sales environment) and need a replica in the same tenant (for testing or as a starting point for a new instance), you can do what’s called perform a full copy. This can duplicate all data, users, and customizations into a target environment​. If you are having any issues with this, Dynamics Edge can offer consultation and help for your scenario. There are some situations this may not work as easily as it may seem. For instance, keep in mind environment copy works within the same tenant and region – that is, you cannot directly copy to a different tenant, and there may be additional caveats that apply – if you think these caveats might apply to you or you otherwise encountered some issues you may contact Dynamics Edge for additional help.

If you think you are considering Dynamics Edge’s custom Dynamics 365 migration services, including streamlined offerings for copying or moving across tenants that may in some cases be cheaper and more cost effective than using Scribe, KingswaySoft or the like, then here are some possible things you may want already prepared and ready to provide as information to us to make the process potentially even easier to start.

Suppose scenarios like mergers or acquisitions where you want to go ahead and bring over an entire Dynamics 365 org into a new tenant. This comes with some prerequisites.

If you need only partial or granular migrations or copies rather than copying or moving the whole environment, and still even so also don’t want to use ETL tools, SSIS, Scribe, KingswaySoft or similar, we also may have some options for you, inquire to us for more info on this.

Third-Party Solutions (Beyond Scribe/KingswaySoft)
There’s more alternatives out there like MuleSoft, Informatica, and Other Enterprise iPaaS (but these can get very expensive fast). There are a lot of enterprise integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) offerings that can migrate Dynamics data. Consider MuleSoft (owned by Salesforce) and Informatica as two heavyweights. They might have some connectors for Dynamics 365 and can sometimes be used for migration. They are expensive and require skilled developers/consultants to set up. Using them just for a one-time Dynamics-to-Dynamics migration might be quite overkill unless your organization already licenses them. These are better used for complex multi-system migrations, and even for those you may want to check the options we offer which may be more targeted and appropriate to your use case and also cost less, including Dynamics Edge services we can provide for your multi system migration or integration scenarios between your Salesforce, Oracle, on-prem SQL and other systems.

SmartConnect by eOne Solutions: SmartConnect is an integration tool often used in the Dynamics GP/Business Central world, but it also might support your Dynamics 365 CRM. It is somewhat similar to Scribe in that it provides a UI for you to define data maps and has some scheduling, etc. Companies that have been long-time Microsoft ERP customers sometimes use SmartConnect for CRM <-> ERP data sync or even for some of their migrations. It could be an alternative if you just prefer its interface or if you happen to already own it. However, it might be more expensive than some services we offer and you can inquire to us about our services involving Dynamics GP, SL, Business Central, AX, Finance and Operations and more.

Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot: AI Assistant for Sellers
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot training May 2025 sometimes also known by the monikers of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales or the separate Viva Sales add-in is how you can learn to use Microsoft’s modern powerful generative AI-powered assistant that enhances productivity for you and your salespeople. It does this by streamlining all kinds of routine tasks for you. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales training May 2025 helps you with how to integrate with Dynamics 365 Sales and how to work across Outlook and Microsoft Teams to bring your CRM data and work directly to where your sellers need it.

Sales Copilot can start summarizing an email thread in Outlook with your CRM insights already added. The AI-generated Summary by Copilot can highlight for you key points from your customer email, even showing sales insights pulled from Dynamics 365 (e.g. opportunity status, and related data)

​Your seller can quickly grasp the situation without reading the entire thread. Email Summaries and Drafting is where Sales Copilot can read long email threads and produce for you a concise summary of the important points. This can be helping your salesperson quickly catch up on your multi-reply conversations.

In Outlook, a “Summary by Copilot” banner can appear for your lengthy emails, and with just one click, your sales rep can get just a paragraph outlining who, what, and any relevant commitments or asks present in that thread. Also, Copilot can draft email responses for your seller. For example, if your customer asks for some more information about your product, your seller can go ahead and use Copilot to draft a reply email. Here your modern AI can generate a proposed message (which the seller can also even tweak) based on the specific context from Dynamics 365 (like the product details, like past interactions) and your email thread. This can save you a lot of time composing routine emails. Your reps then remain in control but can have a starting point that is well-informed by your CRM data.

Copilot Meeting Preparation and Follow-up means that in Teams or Outlook calendar, your Sales Copilot helps reps prepare for meetings by gathering relevant information. Your rep can ask Copilot (by chat interface in Dynamics 365 Sales) something like “Prepare me for my meeting with Contoso tomorrow,” and after that Copilot can immediately pull up the latest notes, opportunities, and even relevant news about that account!

It can provide you a relevant summary of the opportunity status, the key stakeholders, and your recent activities for your seller to be able to feel prepared to walk into client and stakeholder meetings so well informed. After the meeting, if there’s any recording or transcript (from Teams), Copilot can also check that out and help you summarize the call and even draft follow-up emails for you or update your Dynamics CRM with some new notes and action items. This can drastically cut down on the time you spend on all kinds of post-meeting admin tasks.

Imagine Data Insight and Entry in Context where Sales Copilot brings your CRM data into the tools your sellers use each and every day (like Outlook). When a seller is composing email in Outlook to your client, Copilot can go right ahead and display related information from Dynamics 365 directly in the sidebar. This can be things like your contact’s title, company’s pipeline status, open opportunities, or even some relevant recent support cases. Your seller has what they need at their fingertips and does not have to keep on switching between windows to look up data. Copilot can also go ahead and capture your new data easily. If a customer’s email might contain a brand new phone number or might be asking for something that should actually be tracked as an opportunity, your seller can go ahead and use Copilot to start creating or updating records in Dynamics 365 even without having to leave Outlook or Teams. That really breaks the barrier between Dynamics CRM and daily communication tools.

Get AI Guidance and Insights far beyond summarization, where Sales Copilot provides you with on-the-fly recommendations. It might suggest you with next best actions, like “It’s been 7 days since you last emailed this prospect, would you like to follow up?” or show you relevant sales literature to share. Microsoft has also been adding AI-driven insights. For example – your Copilot can analyze the sales pipeline you have and point out relevant deals that might be at risk or even remind your seller of tasks that are overdue. Upcoming features might include AI-generated dashboards for your managers to track your team performance and automatic content recommendations (like perhaps suggesting a relevant product brochure when your customer asks a related question)​

With Natural Language Q&A in Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot check out how a relevant chat interface where your sellers can ask questions in plain English (or supported languages) can make a huge difference. For example, something like “Show me a summary of the Fabrikam opportunity” can prompt Copilot to generate for you a brief overview of that record. Including pulling key fields like your deal size, your close date, and even recent updates into a nice conversational answer for you. A seller might ask, “What are the latest notes on my top deals?” and Copilot can help you compile the relevant recent activities. This saves so much time clicking through so many multiple records. It’s like having a smart assistant just for you who can read the CRM data and even answer questions or compile information for you on demand. Sellers can also go ahead and use predefined prompts from Copilot’s prompt guide for some more common inquiries, further simplifying your interaction with the system​.

Imagine a sales rep, Alice, has received an email from a customer while she’s on the road. The thread is long and also involves another colleague’s replies and seems tedious to read. With your Sales Copilot, at a glance Alice gets a summary. “The customer (ABC Corp) is interested in 300 units of X product, budget $250k, needs a decision by Dec 15, and asked for a formal quote.” Copilot also goes ahead and notices from your CRM that this customer also has an open opportunity for this product and that the last relevant interaction was a demo 10 days ago. With that level of relevant detail given in just a few key statements, Alice can hit “Draft reply”. With that, Copilot can just generate an email response perhaps thanking the customer, even confirming that a quote will be provided shortly, and maybe even going further to including brief, relevant product info. Alice can review all this to possibly tweak if necessary, and send a relevant personalized response email in minutes rather than writing this all from scratch. After sending all this, Alice can click “Save to CRM” and then Copilot logs the email and updates the relevant opportunity with a note about your customer’s request and timeline. In such a short span of time, Copilot just helped Alice comprehend, respond, and even update records, letting her move on to her next task so much faster.

Sales Copilot is your AI co-seller that reduces your busywork. It means no more trawling through past manual notes to remember the context or so many details. It’s far less manual data entry, and far quicker turnaround on communications. By leveraging modern generative AI and your Dynamics 365 data, doing just that empowers your sellers to focus more on strategy and customer interaction and less on manual administrative overhead. As Microsoft continues to enhance Copilot, it’s expected to become even more well adept at helping your sellers even further (perhaps by analyzing call sentiment or predicting win probabilities). For now, all the key features like email and call summarization, helpful content generation, and data on-demand make Sales Copilot such a valuable daily companion for anyone like you who may consider or even already be using Dynamics 365 Sales​. To figure out how to make the most of this, contact Dynamics Edge for how we can help you make Copilot and other modern AI work well for you.