Introduction
Dynamics Mobile Documentation
Serverless solutions for the business
Overview
The Dynamics Mobile is a cloud serverless platform, which runs integrated mobile and web (a.k.a. backend) business applications regardless of the actual cloud provider.
Imagine a business, where a fleet of field workers visits customers every day and provides services and goods on the spot. Let's assume that there are also back-office operators at the headquarters of the company, accepting customer visit requests via email, phone, instant messaging and other channels and they need to schedule visits from field agents. It might be even more complicated if we need to track inventory levels for each product, plan routes, track the actual visits and visit compliance and so on and so on.
Dynamics Mobile platform allows the developers to skip the design, planning and maintenance of the IT infrastructure and focus on developing the business functionality, only. The developers can quickly develop a native cross-platform mobile app to for field agents, which communicates with a backend app accessed from a web browser by the back-office users. These two apps ( the mobile app and the backend app) can share common data model automatically synced and run over the platform regardless of the actual mobile OS or cloud provider. No need to program for iPhone and Android, not need to program for Azure or AWS.
Code once, run anywhere approach!
Applications
The functionality in Dynamics Mobile Platform is organized in applications ( e.g. apps). There are two types of apps - backend and mobile.
Backend Applications
They run in the web browser and require internet connection. They provide rich user interface, consume data from the platform's relational database and require internet to work. They are meant to provide complex business functionality for back-office users like supervisors , managers, clerks, administrators, experts and others, who need to work on a bigger screen and use powerful UI tools to accomplish their work
Mobile Applications
They are native mobile apps running on a mobile device (iOS, Android, Windows) , either using their own local mobile database or/and using data from the backend via internet - e.g. the mobile apps can work in a fully disconnected way if needed. The mobile apps are integrated with the backend apps - they can use the same data automatically. They are useful if the users need to have a specialized smartphone business app in their pocket or need a complete offline working mode.
App integration
Intra-app integration The backend applications running on Dynamics Mobile are integrated between them as they can use shared data model (e.g. one backend app can "see" the data of another app). The mobile apps can "send" and "read" data from the backend apps. The mobile apps can "cache" and use the data locally until they got connection and automatically sends the data back. This makes the development of multi channel/multi apps solutions easy and bring fully offline capabilities for mobile devices automatically
ERP Integration
External systems integration Dynamics Mobile apps (both backend and mobile) can "send" and "receive" data from external systems via common public REST API allowing data access for external systems.
There are already built-in general data integrations via native ERP add-ons for the following ERP systems:
Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 (and older)
Development Environment
The apps for Dynamics Mobile can be developed by anybody who knows about typescript and HTML.
The Dynamics Mobile application development framework can be downloaded and installed as NPM module. This NPM module allows development and publishing of backend and mobiles apps via Visual Studio Code, Theia or other typescript enabled dev environments with zero knowledge about cloud providers, iOS or Android development - all the details are handled by the platform.
Learn more about getting started with mobile development here
Deploying and running apps
The apps for Dynamics Mobile can be developed by anybody who knows about typescript and HTML.
The Dynamics Mobile application development framework can be downloaded and installed as NPM module. This NPM module allows development and publishing of backend and mobiles apps via Visual Studio Code, Theia or other typescript enabled dev environments with zero knowledge about cloud providers, iOS or Android development - all the details are handled by the platform.
Learn more about getting started with mobile development here
Ready apps
There are number of already developed apps, ready for use by end users. Please check the Dynamics Mobile Marketplace for list of ready apps
Geo location tracking and analytics
The Dynamics Mobile apps can "send" geolocation enabled events to the platform via simple API, which in turn is used in the ready app called "Dynamics Mobile Fleet". The Fleet app provides various tools and reports to manage and oversee and monitor the mobile fleet activities as they operate in the field. Third party developers can develop their own mobile apps to send geolocation info to the platform as well as backend apps to consume and analyze the geo-location events.
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