Differences between customization and personalization in D365

What is customization?

• The term customization means that, as a functional consultant, you have already identified a gap in your customer’s requirements and identified a solution that needs to be created to address the gap.

• Because Finance and Operations apps has locked the code for standard functionality out-of-the-box, developers are no longer able to use the over-layering concept. This means that modifying standard code is no longer possible. However, developers on your team can use extensions to customize the standard functionality of Finance and Operations apps to address the customer’s business requirements.

• After meeting with your team members and discussing with the customer, you decide to extend the functionality of Finance and Operations apps by, perhaps, creating new entities, user interfaces, tables, and more.

• The developer team will then identify the entities that need to be extended and possibly create new entities to find a solution that addresses the gap.

What is personalization?

• Changing the user interface by, for example, adding or removing fields to meet a customer’s requirements may be achieved by using the built-in Personalization feature of Finance and Operations apps.

• The main goal of personalization is to deliver content and functionality that matches a specific role, user, or group of users’ needs, without customizing Finance and Operations apps.

• Always try to avoid customization and extensions and use personalization where possible. This is because customization and extensions can result in higher costs during implementation.

• It is important to point out that not many business users change default settings. Often, it is the manager of each department of your customer’s business that needs a specific user interface, or functionality to be imposed for their staff.

• It’s worth noting that customization and extensions, as well as personalization, require work and maintenance over time.