What Is the Common Data Model and Why Use It?

If you have ever needed to integrate data from multiple systems and applications, you know how costly and time‑consuming it can be, because each integration project often requires a custom implementation due to the lack of a common data language.

Common Data Model (CDM) simplifies this process by offering a shared data language for business and analytics applications. Its metadata system allows data and its meaning to be shared across Microsoft Power Apps, Power BI, Dynamics 365, Azure, and other services.

What Is in the Common Data Model?

Beyond the metadata system, CDM includes a set of standardized, extensible data schemas published by Microsoft and its partners. These predefined schemas consist of entities, attributes, semantic metadata, and relationships that represent common concepts and activities such as Account and Campaign , making data creation, aggregation, and analysis easier.

The diagram below shows some of the standard entities available in CDM. More information can be found in the CDM repository on GitHub.

https://aka.ms/cdmposter

Why Use the Common Data Model?

Imagine you have three business applications for materials, manufacturing, and sales, each with its own representation of an Account entity. By adopting CDM, you build data in a standardized format using CDM’s standard entities, attributes, and relationships, allowing all applications to consume the same data while still supporting custom extensions specific to each app.

If you need to create a fourth application, the data is already prepared in the CDM schema, letting you focus on business logic instead of data “swamp” and sticky transformations.

Historically, application development and data integration have been tightly coupled, but with CDM and its supporting platforms, they can occur independently:

Application manufacturers/developers – whether using code‑first platforms or low‑code/no‑code tools like Power Apps or Power BI, they need to store and manage their application data.

Data integrators – responsible for pulling data from various systems for application consumption.

CDM simplifies data management and application development by unifying data into a known form and applying structural and semantic consistency across multiple apps and deployments. The key benefits are:

Structural and semantic consistency across applications and deployments.

Simplified integration and disambiguation of data collected from processes, digital interactions, product telemetry, and human interactions.

A unified shape that allows existing enterprise data to be combined with other sources for app development or insight generation.

Extensibility to customize the model by extending the schema and CDM standard entities to fit organizational needs.

Common Data Model in Action

CDM is influenced by the data architecture present in Dynamics 365 and spans a wide range of business domains. If you are a Dynamics 365 customer or partner, you are already using CDM.

Thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and their partners use CDM for their solutions, building services and products on top of the CDM architecture.

Organizations in industries such as healthcare collaborate with Microsoft to extend CDM through industry accelerators, adding domain‑specific concepts (e.g., budgets, currencies) to the standard entities, thereby enabling easier interoperability for vertical solutions.

The article concludes with links to community resources, discussion groups, and social media channels for further learning and networking.