Opening Dynamics 365 CE for the first time can feel disorienting — nothing on screen looks quite like a typical website or desktop program. This chapter tours the four things you'll bump into immediately: apps, the site map, records vs. views, and the basic form layout. Nothing here is about building or customizing — that's the next course. For now, the goal is just knowing what you're looking at.
- App — a tailored experience (like Sales Hub) built on shared Dataverse data
- Site map — the left-hand navigation listing the areas in the current app
- View — a filtered grid listing multiple records at once
- Record — one specific item, like a single account or contact
- Form — the layout of fields, sections, and tabs for one record
Apps and the app picker
As you learned in Chapter 1, Dynamics 365 CE isn't one program — it's several apps (Sales, Customer Service, and others) sitting on the same shared Dataverse foundation. When you sign in, you're usually dropped into an app picker: a launch screen showing a tile for every app you have access to. Click a tile — say, "Sales Hub" — and you enter that app's own menus, dashboards, and way of organizing the same underlying data.
Switching apps doesn't switch environments or data. A sales rep who moves from Sales Hub to a Customer Service app is still looking at the same underlying customer records — just through a different app's lens, arranged around a different job to be done.
The site map — your left-hand compass
Once inside an app, the vertical strip of links running down the left side of the screen is the site map. It's the app's table of contents: entries like "Accounts," "Contacts," "Opportunities," or "Cases," each taking you to a different area of the app.
- Every app has its own site map, tailored to what that app is for
- Sales Hub's site map is built around selling
- A Customer Service app's site map is built around support cases
- Feeling lost? Check the site map first — it's always in the same spot
Records vs. views — one item vs. the whole cabinet
Two words you'll hear constantly are "record" and "view." Quick picture: imagine a filing cabinet full of folders, one per customer.
- A record is one folder — one specific item, like the Contoso Ltd. account or the "Sarah Chen" contact
- A view is a filtered stack of folders pulled out because they share something in common — shown as rows in a grid
Clicking "Accounts" in the site map, for example, doesn't take you to one account — it takes you to a view: a grid listing many account records at once, usually with a default filter already applied (like "My Active Accounts"). Click any one row to open that specific record and see its full details.
The basic form layout
Open an individual record and you're looking at a form — simply the arrangement of fields for that record type. For a Contact record, that might be name, job title, email, and phone number.
- Forms are organized into sections — a labeled cluster of related fields, like an "Address" section grouping street, city, and postal code
- Sections are often grouped further into tabs across the top, like "Summary," "Details," and "Related"
- Tabs let you jump between groupings of information without scrolling through everything at once
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| App | A tailored experience (like Sales Hub) built on shared Dataverse data |
| Site map | The left-hand navigation listing the areas available in the current app |
| View | A filtered grid listing multiple records at once |
| Record | One specific item — a single account, contact, or case |
| Form | The layout of fields, sections, and tabs used to display one record |
These five concepts — app, site map, view, record, form — cover almost everything you'll touch in your first few weeks in Dynamics 365 CE. Once they're second nature, moving between different apps and different companies' setups gets far less intimidating, because the underlying pattern never really changes.