With Dynamics 365 Tenerife, Microsoft gets serious about its ERP API

The upcoming launch of Dynamics 365 "Tenerife", Microsoft's SaaS ERP solution for the SMB market, will carry its Dynamics NAV heritage forward, but will offer some signature improvements that will position it for the future. One of the less talked about but most strategic updates coming with Tenerife is a new and quickly maturing REST API layer that will tie the ERP solution to Microsoft Graph and Azure Active Directory and provide third party application providers with a standards-based interface for building reusable integrations.

The Tenerife development team has fourty four APIs available in preview today and at least fourteen more planned. Most of them offer a full range of options - create, read, update, delete (CRUD). And they plan to take the interface even further by exposing more sophisticated ERP-related actions that drive business processes.

With the Tenerife API, Microsoft representatives began revealing to partners at Directions North America that they are buillding a service that achieves industry standards and Microsoft best practices. For example, the new APIs use lower camel casing as a verified standard, they will make use of entity IDs in GUID format, and ETags will be used with any CRUD actions to ensure the calling service has the latest instance of an entity. And the API will return complex types with multiple attributes as children rather than separated, which aligns ...