Common Data Model (CDM) Schema

The Common Data Model is a definition of standard 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 and service level agreements. Anyone can build on and extend CDM definitions to capture additional business-specific ideas.

Introduction

The Common Data Model standard defines a common language for business entities covering, over time, the full range of business processes across sales, services, marketing, operations, finance, talent, and commerce and for the Customer, People, and Product entities at the core of a company's business processes. 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.

Repository Layout

There are two ways to consume the information in this repository:

1. Entity Reference Index
2. Visual Entity Navigator for interactively exploring entities, entity extensions/inheritance, attributes, and relationships

Versioning

Maintaining forward and backward compatibility is a key goal of the CDM. Therefore, the CDM uses only additive versioning, which means any revision of the CDM following a "1.0" release will not:

• Introduce new mandatory attributes on previously published entities, or change an optional attribute to be mandatory
• Rename previously published attributes or entities
• Remove previously defined attributes

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Legal Notices

Microsoft and any contributors grant you a license to the Microsoft documentation and other content in this repository under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, see the LICENSE file, and grant you a license to any code in the repository under the MIT License, see the LICENSE-CODE file.

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