Design Custom App Using Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 provides different individual apps for the various functionalities compared to the earlier versions, where we had complete the zpplication to fulfill specific business needs.

We may simply start with Dynamics 365 for Sales app or any other app, which is based on our initial requirement and can add apps, if and when required. Now, we do have a dedicated app store. You can refer to more details here in my earlier article.

We can see all our apps, which we are using under My Apps.



Now, let’s say, we want to design our own custom app, where we want to combine a logical grouping of the existing entities. Let’s suppose that we want to create a custom app called Contact Center, where we want to manage customer contacts. We use steps given below to create our custom app.

1. Navigate to Settings->Solutions->New.
2. Let’s name our solution as Contact Center and setup your publishers and other required fields.
3. If you want to use custom image for your app, create image web resource first, we also change it later on.
4. Click New under Apps.
   
   
   
5. Enter the required details under App designer, as shown below and click on Done button (We are using custom image here)
   
    
   
   
6. Click on Site Map to configure Site Map for our custom app under App designer.
   
    
   
   
7. We can configure Area and sub area properties, using Property tab from right hand section.
   
    
   
   
8. We can add more Site Map components like Area, Group and Subarea, using Add button on top.
9. Click Save and Close button.
10. We can configure other components of our app by selecting them for example, which dashboard you want to show there, entity forms, view etc.
    
    
    
    
11. Once we are done with app design, click on Publish button to publish our app.
    
    Now, press F5 to refresh Dynamics 365 and now we should be able to see our custom app under My apps, as shown below.
    
    
    

If later on, we want to do any changes to our custom app, fr example, adding additional component, deleting app, we can edit it under our custom solution.

Stay tuned for more Dynamics 365 updates.