Integrated customer Search in two separated Dynamics 365 instance (CDS)

[Gowrikaran]

Hi Guys,

I have a requirement for Integrated customer Search in two separate Dynamics 365 instances (different Org). I appreciate your advice on this.

The customer has 2 Dynamics 365 instances and both are in different Organisation and they wanted to search the contact records and view on other CRM.  users have read access to both systems.

both systems are D365 online

What will be possible ways and best option?

[EricRegnier]

Hi @Gowrikaran,

Out of the box there is no way to search both instances/organisations through out of the box CDS/D365 search capabilities. Here are a few alternative options:

1. Integrate contact from org/instance 1 to org/instance 2 and vice-versa. To integrate you can leverage data flows with it completely configuration. You can add a custom "Source" field to tag where the contact orginates from.
   More on data flows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/common-data-service/create-and-use-dataflows
2. Create a custom canvas app to search on the two CDS/D365 instances and display the results in one grid. You can then embed this app in D365 and/or make this app available to users on the app page and/or app URL they can bookmark

Hope this helps!

[DavidJennaway]

To add a bit more to the previous post, there are a couple of considerations with option 1 (integrate data from each instance to the other):

• It's relatively simple to integrate the contact data, but if the users also want to be able to see related data (e.g. activities), you'd need to integrate this, and this starts to get a lot more complex
• The user would open up the copied record, rather than the original. This should be fine if they only read the data, but if there is an expectation to edit the record, then again life gets more complex. If this were the case, I'd prefer to force the user to go back to the original source record to make changes - you should be able to do this by generating a field to link back to the source record

[EricRegnier]

Thanks @DavidJennaway for supplementing. Definitely @Gowrikaran you'll have to analyze exactly which entities to sync up, you might also have related entities (custom or out-of-the-box like Address), but suggest to keep it simple first or even prototype to see if it's a viable solution for you and your organisation. 

Best

[Gowrikaran]

Thanks, @DavidJennaway  for your advice. yes  we just wanted to search and then cal link back to originated system to view the data and related data 

[Gowrikaran]

Thanks @EricRegnier , Thanks for your good suggestion.