Dynamics 365 – App & Site Map Designer

Continuing from our previous post of Dynamics 365 features, today we will go through the App Designer and Site map editor.

App Designer:

Apps are solution-aware components which are designed to simplify the work experience of the users. Based on the CRM license apps like Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Project Service apps are given OOB.

App designer gives a CRM customizer ability to design apps tailored to their users/needs easily. Site map editor is integrated with app designer and simplifies the process of creating navigation and site maps with WYSIWYG designer.

App includes CRM entities which can be assigned to specific user roles. You can edit these apps from the default solution.

How do you create a business app: 

1. Navigate to settings->Application-> My Apps    
2. You can edit the default apps and publish or create a new one.
3. Click on Create app
4. Give the details of your custom app and click on Done.
5. This will navigate you to the app designer page.

What all can you add to your app?

You can add different components including entities, dashboards, business process flows, forms, views and charts.

Select each of them on the right.  You can either select from existing entities or create a new one as shown

All these will be specific to your custom application.

1. Here comes the need to configure your site map.
2. Just click on the arrow beside the site map, this will open a new window where you can configure the site map.
3. All you need to do is to drag and drop the areas, group and subareas.
4. Assign properties for each of them, save and publish. 

Now your custom app is almost ready without writing any code.

1. Go back to your app designer, click on save, validate and publish.
2. Validate feature is helpful as it will stop giving us major surprises when this goes back to the client. It validates and gives us proper errors, warnings and dependencies of entities we used in the site map.
3. Now you can navigate to your custom application from the menu

Click on manage roles and give the access to the security roles you need.

Who can create these apps?

By default, the user with “System administrator” and “System customizer” Roles can create these app’s and can assign them to other security roles.

If you need any other user to create these custom apps, make sure that they have the access to the “App” under “Customization” tab of the security role.

As an out of box feature, Dynamics 365 also provides security roles for default apps like Sales app access, Customer service app access etc.

You can give this “Business Analyst app access”role to the users who need access only to the Business Analyst app.

Note: This security role has organization level read access on the “App”

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