This is the first in a series of blogposts devoted to Dynamics 365 Business Central. In the coming weeks, we’ll cover integrating Business Central with Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (CE), as well as the integration with Microsoft Outlook and even some known issues and workarounds with that integration. In today’s post, we’ll start with the integration between Dynamics 365 CE and Business Central.

Prerequisites and Getting Ready

Dynamics 365 Business Central: https://businesscentral.dynamics.com

Dynamics 365 for CE: https://OrganizationName.crmx.dynamics.com Note that Organization Name in the URL is the name we have selected for our application in this example. This is of course customizable and is always validated for uniqueness within the respective data center.

Open Dynamics 365 CE. Copy the URL in the address bar and share with active users.

Next, open Dynamics 365 Business Central. Please keep in mind that if you have two different admin accounts for your applications, you must use two different browsers – one for each application. Alternatively, you can use the same browser, but one must go InPrivate mode for each application.

Before we get started with using the apps, we need to make sure we have all the necessary setups in place. Go to https://portal.office.com and visit the Active users page:

On this page, we can see the active user I used to sign in and function (Cecilie Norgaard is the display name). I have created an admin user where I originally set up Dynamics 365 for CE and for Business Central – the same admin user in both applications. Also note the second user (display name is bc). More on this in a minute…

If I click on it, I will be able to see Product licenses assigned to it and Roles. In this example, Cecilie Norgaard is the user; she has the role of Global administrator.

As mentioned above, I also needed to create another user, which I called bc. If I don't create two users, I will run into problems with the synchronization, and it won't work properly. This integration user cannot be the same user that enters data into CRM. Once the setup is complete, the licenses may be removed for this user.

Click Add a user and fill in the necessary fields. For Roles, assign it Global administrator.

Now we've got two users: bc and our admin, Cecilie. That is all that needs to be done in the Admin Center of Office 365. Once that is done, switch back to your Dynamics 365 for Business Central application.

What Can Be Synchronized

The integration can handle a defined set of tables that are listed below.  Note that some are considered bidirectional, while some data can only be synced in one direction:

Business Central	Sales	Synchronization Direction
Salesperson/Purchase	User	Business Central		Sales
Customer	Account	Business Central		Sales
Contact	Contact	Business Central		Sales
Currency	Transaction Currency	Business Central		Sales
Unit of Measure	Unit Group	Business Central		Sales
Item	Product	Business Central		Sales
Resource	Product	Business Central		Sales
Customer Price Group	Price List	Business Central		Sales
Sales Price	Product Price List	Business Central		Sales
Opportunity	Opportunity	Business Central		Sales
Sales Invoice Header	Invoice	Business Central		Sales
Sales Invoice Line	Invoice Product	Business Central		Sales

We will discuss how to integrate BC with CE in the next post in this series. Stay tuned and happy Dynamics 365’ing!