How to leverage the out of the box standard data packages available in Dynamics 365 for Operations

Greeting Friends,

I was recently asked on how to retrieve all the data packages available in Dynamics 365 for Operations so that we can setup a new legal entity and populate all the necessary configuration required for each module.
Before we get into the specifics on how to do it, let’s understand some of the key terminologies 

Terminology:

a. Data Entities

Data Entities is the basic building block for any data related activities which you need to perform in the new Dynamics 365 for Operations – be it your data migration, integration, reporting and so on. You can think of data entities as a view which encapsulates the complex relationship of your underlying tables and provides you with a simple way of managing the data. For e.g. if you look at the customer data model, the underlying tables form a complex relationship between Customer and Party relationships. But with data entity, you don’t have to worry about the complex relationships and just use one simple view for managing the customer’s data. Similarly, you have data entity for all other data models in Dynamics 365 for Operations. Out of the box, we have more than 1900 data entities as of November 2016, Update

b. Data Packages

Think of Data Packages as a group of data entities and primarily used for transporting your data entities from one environment to another. You can think of a package as a collection of data entities related to a standard functionality for e.g. We can have a data package called Number Sequence Setup which will have related data entities like Number Sequence code and Number Sequence Reference data entities. We have more than 250 data packages which are available out of the box

c. Process Data Packages 

Process Data Packages also known as PDP is a collection of data packages which can be linked to a business process. The PDP is then used to configure a business process or a group of business processes in one business process library.


How to Import the out of the box standard data packages available in Dynamics 365 for Operations

1. Go to LCS > Select your Project

Next, go to Asset Library > Process Data Package as shown below

Click on Import button in Process data package and pick the relevant Process Data Package update based on your environment

It will show status as “Publishing”

Give it like a minute and the status changes to Draft

Also, you can now look into the Data Package asset type and you will see all the standard data packages populated there as shown below:

You can click one of these data package files and download it and you can view the data entities which belong to that corresponding package