How to create your first data source in CI-D

The Customer area in CI-D's sitemap is where your customer profiles (unified profiles) will live, once you've set them up (more on that in an upcoming article).

In a freshly installed CI-D, the Customer area is empty - as no unified profiles (customer profiles) has been created yet. But, if you click the Customers entry in the site map, the system will tell you what you need to do in order to create customer profiles:

1. Create data source(s)
2. Run the Unification process
3. Let the Search & filter index build

As you can see, step 1 is to create one or more data sources, and how that's done is what I will walk you through in this article.

Optional: in Power Apps navigate to the Contact table in your environment, and note that the table has no Customer Profile column. When the full process is complete, the contact table will have a look up to a new table, Customer Profiles

If you communication in CI-J is contact centric, the first data source you create in CI-D should be contacts (the contact table in Dataverse)

To create your first data source

1. In the sitemap navigate to Data sources
2. Click Add a data source

The Add a data source wizard opens, and you are presented with a handful of connector options. The connector we will use in this example is the Microsoft Dataverse connector (it attaches to your Dataverse data)

1. Click the Microsoft Dataverse connector
2. Provide a name for your new data source, e.g., "DataverseTables"

Then click Next to move to the next step in the wizard

The wizard will list all of the tables you have in your Dataverse environment, with no table(s) selected.

Select only the tables you need.

In this walk-through we will select only the contact table (but if you have other relevant tables, e.g., custom tables with transactional data, you should select them too in this step)

When done selecting click Save

The data source has been created, and is being refreshed (CI‑D ingestion consumes the latest data available from that data source)

The refresh has been completed

Optional: in the sitemap navigate to Tables, select the contact table, and verify the table contains contacts.

That's it, you have created your first data source in CI-D.

This article

is the second article in the "How to install and Configure Customer Insights - Data" series. You can find the first article here:

1. "How to install Customer Insights - Data" - link

Keep an eye out for the third article "How to create customer profiles in CI-D"