Month: December 2019

How to integrate Business Central with Dynamics 365 Talent – part 2 (configure BC & Talent)

atotovic Business Central, Dynamics 365, HRM, Power Platform , , , , , , , , , ,

If you’ve already read my previous article about introduction in BC and Talent integration, then you probably expect the next part. I cannot put everything in one blogpost as it will be a huge one and it can be confused to track all details, so I decided to write it in parts. Today, I’ll write how to prepare Business Central and Talent and how to locate data/entities you will handle with.

As I’ve already mentioned in previous post, as we don’t need all HR capabilities in Business Central and we will use all of them in Talent, we will enter data directly to Talent and move to BC only data necessary for other areas in BC. We will move data to Employee table as this table will be used in other parts of BC.

As we will create new employees in Talent, we need to configure No. Series to be fit with Talent requirements. If you want automatic numbers, you need to be careful and to make it exactly the same as in Talent, but I’ll recommend to configure Employee number series as Manual Nos.; this will keep the same numbers in Business Central as we have in Talent and you will avoid all potential risks.

As connectors with Business Central, we will use API’s. Employee table, for example already exists as an API, but if you would like to connect something more, you will probably have to create custom API and custom connector.

What we can synchronize? As I said, minimum we need in BC is Employee table. And you need to find entity as a source in CDS (I’ll explain later). You can connect entities as following:

Business CentralTalent / CDSBC API
EmployeeWorker …employee
Alternative AddressWorker Addresscustom
QualificationSkill Typecustom
…… 

If you want to find all details about Workers data in Talent, the best is to use the following Worker entity relationship model. But the best is to integrate only what is really necessary… only what you will really use in Business Central.

As we need to locate Talent entities, you need to open list of CDS entities in PowerApps platform (you don’t need to do nothing in Talent environment and you can use it only if it will help you to better understand environment; for all integration purpose you will use CDS – PowerApp). When you open PowerApps web page, you need to choose environment created for Talent.

After that, you need to open Data and Find Entities. In Entities, you can easily find Worker entity as this is a place where we can find our information.

Opening this entity, you can address all necessary fields you want to use in integration. And how to do it, you will see in the following post.

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How to integrate Business Central with Dynamics 365 Talent – part 1 (Introduction)

atotovic Azure, Business Central, Dynamics 365 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When I think about new Business Central features, the first thing in my mind is openness for integrations. As a part of Dynamics 365 family, the main power of this solution is when it can work simultaneously with other. Because of that, I showed these capabilities in a few conferences. As I got lot of requirement to explain it in more details, I’ll write about good example of BC integrations with one other Dynamics 365 solution – with ‘Dynamics 365 Talent’.

‘Dynamics 365 Talent’ is a new Microsoft Dynamics HCM solution (new name ‘Dynamics 365 Human Resources‘). This solution was initially based on AX HRM, but now it is separated solution. As we can use it independently and this solution is really amazing HCM system, I think it can be interesting how we can integrate this solution with Business Central and make them as the powerful tool together… and with no code.

If you are thinking how to make it and how to make it with no code, the answer is using one of the Azure services – Logic Apps. As ‘Dynamics 365 Talent’ has entities on CDS and Logic Apps has connectors for CDS and for ‘Business Central’, only what we need to do is to map entities and fields in both systems and of course, to think abut business logic on the first place. Depends what is the primary reason for integration, we can choose some of the options:

  • integrate HRM core system with HR in Business Central
  • integrate Attract or Onboard apps in Talent with Business Central.

In second option, we will use HR module in Business Central and use only one or two parts from ‘Dynamics 365 Talent’. On the other side, in first option we will use core HR in ‘Dynamics 365 Talent’. In this text, I chose to explain the first option.

In this first text, I’ll just explain some basic concepts and you will find more details in the following texts with this topic.

Basic setup in Business Central

First, as we don’t need all HR capabilities in Business Central (we already have all of them in dedicated HR solution – ‘Dynamics 365 Talent’), we will move only data necessary for other areas in Business Central. In this example I’ll show how to move data to Employee table as this table can be used for example in a Payroll system or you can use this information in Fixed Assets card.

Locate information in Talent

Now when we have the basic configurations, we can continue with integration. First, we need to find where an employee’s data are saved in Talent. To find this we need to open list of CDS entities and we can do it using PowerApps platform.

When we have these basic information, we can continue with technical parts how to do it in a practice.