Data sharing framework
Cross-company data sharing lets you replicate (share) reference and group data among companies. Data integrity is verified before replication occurs.
Examples of cross-company data sharing and the basic logic:
- The same payment terms and payment day definitions are used across fifteen legal entities.
- The same terms of delivery are used across seven legal entities in three countries/regions.
- Records created, updated, and deleted in any of the companies within the policy will be replicated immediately, across all the companies.
- Fields that are not selected for sharing are maintained in each company and will not trigger any replication.
- As part of enabling a policy, it is optional to copy any existing records.
Cross-company sharing framework important aspects
The following aspects need to be considered before using cross-company data sharing.
- Use to replicate (share) reference, parameter, and group data between companies within an environment.
- Cannot be used for transactional data between companies.
- Data integrity must be verified before replication.
- Data sharing policy should be enabled after importing data in seeding company.
- Apply to production only after testing and validation sandbox environment.
- Data sharing policy can be updated or disabled.
- Cannot be used with dual write.
- Examples of cross-company shared data includes customers and vendors.
When to use cross-company data sharing feature?
Use cross-company data sharing for the following business scenarios:
- Sharing of simple reference and group data in a single deployment.
- Sharing among companies that have similar configurations.
- Sharing scenarios that have been explicitly evaluated by Microsoft.
Cross-company data sharing is not supported for the following scenarios:
- Franchising solutions, where thousands of records are shared across thousands of companies.
- Sharing of transactional records for reporting or management purposes, such as consolidations.
- Sharing across deployments.
- Complex scenarios, such as replication of subtype/supertype tables or tables that have date effectivity rules.
- Tables that do not have a unique index.
Other tools for data management
Other tools for data management are:
- Bring your own database (BYOD) – Export entities to your own database.
- Entity store refresh – For embedded Power BI reports.
- Process data package – A wizard functionality that consolidates multiple data packages in one bundle.
- Data validation checklist workspace –To track data validation processes across companies, areas, and people.
- Office add-in – Export and import data via Excel add-in using data entities.