The Common Data Model is a library of entities that represent commonly used concepts and activities across business and productivity applications. CDM provides well-defined, modular, and extensible business entities such as Account, Business Unit, Case, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, and Product, as well as interactions with vendors, workers, and customers, such as activities, cases, and service level agreements. Anyone can build on and extend CDM definitions to capture additional business-specific ideas.
The Common Data Model standard defines a common language for business entities covering customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, product services, and will expand to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other areas over time. The goal of CDM is to enable data interoperability spanning multiple channels, service implementations, and vendors.
The CDM is undergoing a specification effort driven by Microsoft. The documents published here are a preview, and will be iterated on.
There are two primary ways to consume the information in this repository:
- Entity Reference Index
- Visual Entity Navigator for interactively exploring entities, entity extensions/inheritance, attributes, and relationships
Maintaining forward and backwards compatibility is a key goal of the CDM. Therefore, the CDM uses purely additive versioning, which means any revision of the CDM following an initial release will not:
- Introduce new mandatory properties on existing entities
- Rename existing properties or existing entities
- Remove previously defined properties
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