How the use of custom apps can improve Dynamics 365 & the overall user experience

Before we delve deeper into this topic, we think the best thing to do would be to discuss why you would create custom apps in the first place? 

It can often be the case where your Dynamics 365 solution can become overloaded and hard to navigate when performing certain processes & functions. To give an example of this, some users in your business may need specific views, dashboards as well as customised entities and other users in your business may not require this. Added to which, many business processes will be different between the functions of your business and may confused other users. 

If the site map of your Dynamics 365 solution gets too overloaded, it can be troublesome for users to find the information they need and can also slow down the speed of work. 

The way round this you ask? Custom Apps. These are the best way to improve what different teams in your business can access within your Dynamics 365 environment. 

Now, we know why your business should create custom apps, we are now going to look at precisely what they are in simple terms. 

Custom apps bring together processes and data contained within your Dynamics 365 environment depending on the requirements of the users. Therefore, rather than having all entities, dashboards and forms available in the core Dynamics 365 app for all users to access, you can pick and choose which processes each user group can access in the app. 

Better still, every custom app that you create is usable across all different devices and can also be accessed offline via mobile. 

Now we know why your business should create custom apps and what they are, we are now going to delve into how you go about creating custom apps. 

In order to get started the administrators of your system in house can go into the app designer and create as many apps as you need. The easy-to-follow tile-based designer enables admins to make adjustments in the app. Also, you will find that no matter how many apps you build, all the data will be stored in the Dataverse in the same cloud environment. 

So, what things do I need to consider when building a Dynamics 365 custom app? 

The details of the app 

You will find that each app can have a different name, image as well as description to enable users to identify which one they require. As you progress and map more processes to Dynamics, you will find that these are able to be managed within lean custom apps which takes the added complexity away from existing apps. 

The sitemap 

Easily define the app’s navigation by updating the sitemap where required. Pull together similar processes and define what users need to be able to access on a regular basis. This will enable unnecessary elements to be removed from the site map to speed up the work rate of users in Dynamics 365. 

The components 

By being able to choose from a customised set of tables, views, dashboards, processes and forms, customer apps give you that added flexibility to create personalised experiences based on data that is of use to these workgroups. 

The search options 

The administrations of your system will specify which Dataverse tables will be queried in the app.  

Next Steps? 

If you are a business that is looking for a Dynamics 365 custom app, Power App or looking to improve your processes through Microsoft Power Automate then please contact our team of Dynamics 365 experts now! 

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