With the upcoming release of Dynamics CRM (version 9.0), or with the new Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, Microsoft is continuing to provide additional tools for customizing your solutions.
The short list below contains some of the new customization features that will be available in the new release…
Virtual Entities
We might have ways to integrate our data with external systems, but now with Virtual entities, we will be able to make integration with third party system easier through connectivity to service endpoints and built-in data retrieval methods.
Virtual entities are custom entities that retrieve data in runtime for external data sources and appear as regular entities in CRM (Dynamics 365) using an OData4 data provider which is included for connectivity help.
Virtual entities provide end users, customizers and developer the same type of access that they would have with custom entities. Data from virtual entities is available on forms and views, data grids, reports, dashboards or via the CRM SDK.
Sitemap Designer
Although sitemap designer was release in the previous version Dynamics 365, it now contains a few new features which include: setting the interactive dashboard as the default dashboard subarea for apps based on the Unified Interface framework; Copying of sitemap components; and support for miscellaneous privileges within app subareas.
Form and View Designers
The new form and view designers in Dynamics 365 provides a new intuitive design with drag and drop capabilities for arranging the fields on the form or view, inline access to fields and sections.
The view designer also provides single click sorting of fields, side by side configuration of filters and columns and sample data in grids that provide a near-runtime snapshot of the view.
MultiSelect option set
System Customizers now have the ability to add multi-select option sets fields to forms, views and grids. The MultiSelect optionset field provides the ability of adding multiple values, such as Country or State
