At Sitecore Symposium 2019 this year, I collaborated with my coworker and friend Vsevolod Kolonistov to present the new Sitecore Commerce 9 connector for Microsoft D365 Retail.
We’d gained a lot of experience working with the prior version of the connector, so when it came time to modernize it to use the new Sitecore Commerce 9 infrastructure, we had a lot of advice and knowhow to share with the Sitecore Commerce team. We also wanted to share it with the rest of the Sitecore community, and where better to do that than at Symposium?
Sitecore Commerce and Microsoft D365 Retail are an interesting combination. While Sitecore Commerce alone is more than capable of powering B2C ecommerce websites right out of the box, if you also need to worry about physical points-of-sale or call center operations, you’ll need to pair it with another enterprise-grade tool. Which is where Microsoft D365 Retail comes in.
The integration is an interesting mix:
- Batch operations for syncing catalog information and product media
- Real-time operations for cart, checkout, and customer accounts
But I won’t go into all the details here — you can get the slides below.
Yes, Symposium was such a whirlwind that I’m only now posting the slides from the breakout session!
One thing I neglected to mention in the slides themselves, though it was covered in the Q&A session, is that the D365 Connector isn’t available from the Sitecore developer site directly. For now, if you’re interested, you’ll need to contact your Sitecore representative directly.
I’m curious to see how many other companies pursue this sort of integration. D365 Retail — a specialization of D365 for Finance and Operations — is still evolving rapidly. Microsoft wants it to be a enterprise-grade SaaS ERP, but you can still see a lot of the old Dynamics AX client-server architecture peeking through in places. I expect it to improve with time, though, so perhaps we’ll see more of this Sitecore-D365 combination in the future. If so, we’ve got the connector ready for it!
Dean Thrasher 