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Unlocking the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365

Michael Dohr von mscrm-addons.com gibt in seinem devjobs.at TechTalk Einblicke, wie das Unternehmen mit Dynamics 365 automatisch eine große Zahl an Dokumente erzeugen kann.

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Video Summary

In Unlocking the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365, Michael Dohr explains how his team extends Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform with Azure-hosted add-ons built around availability, scalability, stability, and simple self-service deployment. The core example is Documents Core Pack: non-developers design Word templates, generate documents like quotes, invoices, and service reports with Dataverse data, and automate delivery, storage (e.g., SharePoint), and processing via Power Automate. By highlighting real-world scale up to millions of documents per year, the talk offers practical patterns to streamline document-heavy Dynamics 365 workflows, reduce errors, and improve user adoption.

Unlocking Dynamics 365 at scale: Architecture, reliability, and document automation with DocumentsCorePack

What we learned from “Unlocking the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365”

In “Unlocking the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365” by Michael Dohr (PTM EDV-Systeme GmbH), we heard a concise, practice-driven blueprint for building, scaling, and operating production-grade extensions on top of Microsoft Dynamics 365. Speaking as the CEO of mscrm-addons.com, Dohr lays out the kinds of requirements that reliably surface in Dynamics implementations, the product capabilities that close the gaps, and the operational principles that let a 50-person team support more than 4,000 customers and 80,000 daily users worldwide.

Our recap focuses on the technical narrative: the document-centric problem space in CRM/ERP processes, the use of the Microsoft cloud (Azure), Microsoft Dataverse, and the low-code pillars Power Apps and Power Automate. The session’s core message is that document generation and delivery are not side quests; they are integral to robust business processes. “DocumentsCorePack” is presented as a deliberately engineered response to that reality.

“We look at what’s there from Microsoft and enhance it. We focus on productivity and usability – and we close functional gaps.”

The platform context: Dynamics 365, Dataverse, and the Power Platform

Dohr situates Microsoft Dynamics 365 (part of Microsoft’s Business Applications) as the backbone for standard organizational processes: CRM capabilities (customer data, leads, opportunities, service, marketing) alongside ERP scenarios. Data sits in Microsoft Dataverse. With Power Apps and Power Automate, Microsoft addresses the low-code/no-code space, enabling business users to create apps and orchestrate workflows.

He also notes two currents shaping product direction: the increasing presence of AI across the Microsoft stack and the low-code/no-code movement. For him as CEO, staying aligned with these trends means adapting products to where the platform goes, not forcing the platform to bend to products.

Who builds it: Global footprint, partner-led motion, clear product priorities

mscrm-addons.com is headquartered in Graz, Austria, with an office in Atlanta, Georgia, to support North and South America. The team counts around 50 employees from more than ten countries and has been in business for over 25 years. Reach comes through partners: more than 700 implementation partners deliver the solutions inside Dynamics projects.

How does a relatively small core team support thousands of customers? Dohr distills the answer into four product tenets that drive architecture and operations decisions:

Availability: Global delivery via the Microsoft cloud (Azure) with region choice to place services close to customer data.
Scalability: From five-user startups to enterprises with thousands of users, the system must stretch without breaking.
Stability: Document processes are often business-critical. The target is “100% uptime” – an ideal they get very close to in practice.
Simplicity: Click-and-go provisioning (minutes, not days), self-service configuration, and intuitive operation – for end users and for partners who deploy and run the solutions.

These tenets show up in product design and in the day-to-day operating model.

The underestimated problem: Documents across the entire customer lifecycle

The session puts documents front and center. If you map a typical Dynamics 365 sales and service cycle, documents appear everywhere:

Early engagement: Personalized information for leads
Opportunity management: Contracts, statements of work, requests for proposals
Quote phase: Quotes and purchase orders
Close and fulfillment: Invoices, payment and shipment confirmations
Service: Service reports, contracts, work orders

All of these documents need data from Dynamics 365 and Dataverse. And each has a destination: printing, emailing as PDF, storing in a document repository like SharePoint. In practice, document handling is therefore not a side concern – it’s an essential part of process design.

“In practically every Dynamics implementation you will see a need for documents at one point.”

The response: DocumentsCorePack as an end-to-end document stack

DocumentsCorePack emerges as a direct answer to these recurring needs, with three core capabilities – template design, document generation, and delivery – plus automation.

1) Template design for everyone, using Microsoft Word

The product embraces Microsoft Word as the template editor. The logic is straightforward: everyone knows Word; business users don’t need special skills to author layouts. mscrm-addons.com extends Word with an interface to Dynamics 365 so users can map the data they need into templates pulled from Dataverse. The result is that template design becomes a collaborative business task, not a developer bottleneck.

2) Document generation into the required target formats

Generation itself is deliberately uneventful: once you have templates, you produce documents in formats like PDF or Word. The engineering challenge is not the conversion; it’s delivering stable, fast, and reliable throughput across varying loads and document sizes.

3) Delivery and post-processing as first-class parts of the flow

Every document has a purpose. DocumentsCorePack explicitly bakes the follow-on steps into the same workflow: print, email as PDF, store in SharePoint, or whatever else the business defines. Delivery is not an afterthought; it is the other half of the job.

4) Automation via Power Automate

The largest lever is automation. Many scenarios require no human interaction at all: documents can be fully generated and processed automatically. That saves time and money, reduces errors, and enforces consistent, standardized communication. Power Automate provides the orchestration layer for these end-to-end flows.

“It’s often possible to completely avoid any human interaction to generate and process those documents.”

Architecture and operations: Cloud-native on Azure, regionally deployed

DocumentsCorePack is built as a cloud service and can, as of today, be deployed across “12 or 13” data centers worldwide – from New Zealand to the U.S. West Coast. This is not an abstract win; it addresses concrete needs:

Reduced latency by placing services near users and data
Regional hosting options
Load distribution and fault tolerance across regions

Interfaces target Dynamics 365, Power Apps, and Power Automate. Users can trigger document requests and configure what should happen to documents after generation – all within the service’s flow.

For partners and customers, provisioning, configuration, and ongoing maintenance run through self-service portals. Deployments should be up and running in “10 to 15 minutes.” This operations model (self-service over support tickets) is a major reason why a small company can scale globally.

The four product tenets, engineered

Availability: Think globally, deploy locally

Availability starts with deployment strategy. Choosing regional Azure locations that customers can select makes the service truly global. The engineering lesson is straightforward: plan data and user proximity as a first-class architectural decision.

Scalability: From “a few docs a day” to millions per year

Load profiles vary dramatically. Some customers generate a handful of documents a day; others generate millions per year – and sometimes single, extremely large documents with “thousands of pages.” The system must absorb these extremes without blocking other users. Dohr specifically calls out the goal that a massive single job should not stall concurrent users. From an engineering viewpoint, this implies clean queuing, prioritization, and fair-use resource allocation.

Stability: Business processes must not stall

When documents are business-critical, outages surface immediately as support tickets. The team “aims for 100% uptime,” acknowledging that it’s unattainable in the absolute but close in practice thanks to the cloud. For product teams, the takeaway is that runtime resilience is not a later add-on; it’s a first-iteration requirement.

Simplicity: Lower friction at deployment and during operations

Simplicity is a force multiplier: web-based provisioning, self-service configuration, intuitive UX, and a learning curve anchored in Word reduce adoption friction. In Dynamics projects, that translates into higher user adoption and better ROI for the entire solution.

Real-world usage that drives architecture

An Australian customer generated “close to 8 million” documents in 2022 – certification reports for smoke alarm tests. That number illustrates the throughput extremes the system must handle.
In other scenarios, a single process generates a document with “thousands of pages.” The system must ensure that other users don’t wait for that job to complete.
Across the broader mscrm-addons.com portfolio: more than 4,000 customers in over 80 countries and 80,000 daily active users, enabled by 700+ partners.
Specifically for DocumentsCorePack: “more than 3,000 active customers,” 40 in the enterprise range (more than 1,500 users), and again “80,000” daily users.

These numbers aren’t marketing decoration; they carve the architectural path: load management, efficient parallelism, and fail-safe operations – and a product strategy that serves both the long tail of small tenants and the peak demands of the largest installations.

A reusable approach for Dynamics teams

We distilled a practical, platform-aligned approach for teams ready to professionalize document processes in Dynamics 365. The steps mirror the building blocks described in the talk and translate them into a typical project cadence.

1) Process inventory: Where do documents arise, and why?

Map every document touchpoint across the lifecycle (lead, opportunity, quote, purchase order, invoice, service report, contract, work order).
For each document, define purpose and downstream actions: print, email (PDF), store (e.g., SharePoint), and which Dataverse fields are required.

2) Template design in Word: Empower business users

Use Word as the familiar authoring tool so business teams own layout and content.
Bind Dataverse fields into the template (via the Word interface provided by mscrm-addons.com).
Iterate quickly with business stakeholders until layout, content, and variables are stable.

3) Regional cloud deployment, self-service first

Choose the Azure region that best matches user/data locality to minimize latency.
Rely on self-service portals for deployment and configuration – the goal is “up in minutes.”

4) Delivery and post-processing as part of the flow

Define what happens right after generation: print, email as PDF, store in SharePoint.
Make these steps part of standard workflows to enforce consistency.

5) Automation with Power Automate

Identify scenarios that require no human interaction and move them into automated flows.
Hook into Dynamics 365 events (e.g., status changes) to trigger generation and delivery without manual clicks.

6) Operations and scalability

Plan for divergent load profiles: a few docs/day, high-volume batches, and very large single documents.
Ensure long-running jobs don’t block others (fair scheduling and load balancing).

This approach reflects the principles on display in the talk and underscores the key idea: documents and their downstream actions form an end-to-end process that should be automated and run at scale.

Product traits that matter in Dynamics projects

From Dohr’s walkthrough, several DocumentsCorePack traits stand out – and serve as selection criteria for engineering teams:

Word-based templates: Reduce the barrier for business users and free up developer capacity.
Direct interfaces to Dynamics 365, Power Apps, and Power Automate: Fit natively into the Microsoft stack.
End-to-end process thinking: Generation, delivery, and storage as one flow.
Cloud operation across multiple regions: Puts the service close to users and data, easing global rollouts.
Automation by default: Saves time and money, reduces errors, and boosts consistency.
Self-service portals: Simplify deployment, configuration, and ongoing maintenance – crucial for partners and admins.

Engineering insights we’re taking forward

Build on familiar tools: Choosing Word for templates is a UX decision with outsized impact on adoption and time-to-value.
Treat delivery as first-class: Producing a PDF is easy; delivering it reliably and embedding it into the business flow is the real work.
Automate wherever possible: Power Automate is the natural orchestration layer for removing manual steps and enforcing standards.
Design for extremes: Millions of documents per year and thousand-page singles aren’t edge cases; they’re design constraints.
Scale the team through self-service: When deployment and configuration don’t require engineering intervention, the organization scales through product, not headcount.

Culture and team: The “how” behind the “what”

Even as a dev shop, mscrm-addons.com puts visible effort into team dynamics and communication. Dohr highlights team-building activities (go-karting, a Mallorca cruise, a running team, and a yearly tennis tournament in the U.S.). It’s a reminder that availability, scalability, and reliability are produced by people and processes – not just by code.

References and breadth of adoption

Dohr mentions references like “Giberit” and “System Air,” and underscores the customer breadth: from small shops to enterprises with thousands of users. That breadth explains the architectural choices: a solution that can reliably serve diverse load and complexity profiles needs strong defaults, clear operating models, and disciplined simplification.

Closing: Engineering for the full potential

“Unlocking the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365” distills what robust product engineering in the Microsoft ecosystem looks like – and how to turn a recurring, often underestimated problem (documents) into a standardized, automated, globally scalable process.

Our key takeaways for engineering and platform teams:

Anchor in the platform: Dynamics 365 + Dataverse + Power Platform is the spine; extensions should fit it natively.
Documents are processes: Templates, generation, delivery, and storage belong together – ideally automated.
UX through tool choice: Word as the template medium empowers business users and lightens the engineering load.
Architect for load: Deploy regionally, parallelize fairly, and anticipate failure modes from day one.
Self-service as a force multiplier: Fast provisioning (minutes), configuration via portals, low operational friction.

In Dohr’s own framing, “unlocking the full potential” comes from pursuing productivity and usability, and from closing functional gaps – underpinned by availability, scalability, stability, and simplicity. DocumentsCorePack is a concrete example of that principle applied to a critical slice of business processes: documents.