Glossary
Common Data Model
By Emil Björk · Microsoft business apps consultant, Gothenburg
Microsoft's standard schema for business entities, used as the starter data model for Dataverse and Dynamics 365.
The Common Data Model (CDM) is Microsoft's open, standardised schema for business entities such as Account, Contact, Product, Order, Invoice, and Employee. It defines tables, relationships, and semantic types that apps can share so data flows between them without bespoke mapping. Dataverse uses the CDM as its starter schema, which is why Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, and Power Apps can interoperate out of the box. CDM definitions are open and published on GitHub, and are also used in Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Lake, and a number of third-party data tools.
In practice, the CDM's value shows up most clearly when two Dynamics 365 CRM-side apps are adopted at different times: because Sales and Customer Service both build on the same CDM-derived Account and Contact tables in Dataverse, adding Customer Service to a tenant that already runs Sales requires no data migration or field mapping for the shared entities — the same customer record simply gains a new set of related records (cases) alongside the ones it already has (opportunities). Custom tables added on top can still follow CDM conventions (standard field names, relationship patterns) to stay consistent with the rest of the schema, though nothing forces a maker to do so.
Where confusion arises: the Common Data Model is a schema specification, not a product — "Dataverse" is the actual running database and platform, while "Common Data Model" describes the starter shape of the tables inside it. Extending Dataverse with genuinely custom tables that ignore CDM conventions works technically, but sacrifices some of the interoperability benefit that following the standard shape provides.