How a New Zealand IT Firm Delivered a CRM-Integrated Tutoring Platform With Zero SQL Dependency?

Custom .NET API Layer | Automated Payment Processing | Full CRM Data Access Without Opening the Back End

At a Glance

Industry

Financial Services (Wealth Management)

Service

Dynamics 365 CRM Consulting | Salesforce Migration | Power Automate Automation

Challenge

Two disconnected CRM platforms, duplicate client data, and manual re-entry across every workflow

Solution

Full migration from Salesforce to Dynamics 365, with Power Automate workflow automation and portfolio system integration

Key Result

60% reduction in manual data entry within 60 days post-go-live

About Client

Our client was a New Zealand-based IT company engaged by an end client to build a purpose-driven web application. A tutoring platform where students could connect with tutors, fund sessions, and direct a portion of those payments toward charitable causes chosen by their tutors.

The application required Microsoft CRM 2011 to serve as the data backbone, replacing a conventional SQL Server setup. Aegis was responsible for developing the CRM customisation layer and the API bridge that would make CRM data accessible to the web front end.

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The Challenge

The project presented several compounding challenges from the outset:

The client had a clear picture of the desired user experience but had not defined back-end requirements. This required an agile delivery approach with iterative scoping throughout.
The Aegis CRM team's prior experience centred on JavaScript customisation, workflows, plug-ins, and reports — not API development against CRM data objects. This was new territory.
95% of the entities in the CRM were custom-built, requiring plug-ins, custom workflow activities, and workflows to be developed in parallel with the API layer.
The UI team needed a clean, fast interface to CRM data — but the CRM's native query performance, if called naively, would have created unacceptable latency for end users.
Requirements evolved throughout delivery. The codebase had to remain flexible and extensible without accumulating technical debt.

The Solution

Aegis designed and delivered a three-layer architecture to connect the web application to CRM data cleanly and efficiently:

Layer 1: MS CRM 2011 Application

The CRM was configured with a fully custom entity model covering tutors, students, sessions, payments, and charitable causes. Plug-ins and custom workflow activities were built to automate back-end processing — including session status updates, balance calculations after payment or cancellation, and email notifications for session confirmations and cancellations.

Layer 2: Custom API (DLL)

The core engineering challenge was building an API layer that would act as an intermediary between the CRM and the web front end. This layer translated CRM entities into clean, typed .NET objects that the UI team could consume without any knowledge of CRM internals.

Key design decisions in the API:

CRM calls were minimised at every point. The team audited every function to remove redundant queries and batch what could be batched.
All lookups, option sets, and constants were handled through dynamic configuration — not hardcoded values — so changes in CRM did not require API redeployment.
Unit tests were written for every function, allowing the UI team to integrate against the API with confidence and without repeated back-and-forth testing cycles.
The API was structured for extensibility: new entities and relationships could be surfaced to the front end by adding functions to the existing pattern, not rebuilding the layer.

Layer 3: ASP.NET Web Application

The front-end team consumed the API layer to render the user interface. Aegis was not responsible for UI development, but the architecture of the API was designed to map directly to UI data requirements — reducing the integration overhead for the front-end team and shortening overall delivery time.

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How did we deliver it?

The team followed an agile delivery model across four phases:

Phase 1: Discovery and Architecture

Before writing a line of code, the team spent time mapping the application’s entity model, process flows, and data access patterns. This included reviewing the client’s UI wireframes to understand what data the web application would actually need — and in what shape.

Phase 2: CRM Configuration and Plug-in Development

Custom entities, fields, and relationships were built in CRM. Plug-ins and workflow activities were developed to automate the back-end business logic — balance calculations, status transitions, and notification triggers — ensuring the web application never had to implement that logic directly.

Phase 3: API Development

Functions were developed iteratively, aligned to front-end requirements as they were confirmed in each sprint. The team coordinated closely with the UI developers to ensure the API surface matched what was actually needed — not a generic data layer, but a purpose-built interface for the application.

Phase 4: Integration and Testing

The API was tested independently using unit tests before being handed to the UI team. This separated the integration from the debugging cycle, allowing both teams to work in parallel during the final phase of delivery.

Results

Metric	Result	What Drove It
Manual data re-entry	60% reduction	Power Automate automation across approvals, invoicing, and onboarding
Duplicate client records post-migration	Zero	Pre-migration deduplication and Dataverse validation rules
Time to full advisor adoption	Within 60 days	Role-specific training and structured change management
CRM platforms in operation	1 (down from 2)	Full Salesforce decommission post-migration
Portfolio system integration	Real-time	Dataverse-connected integration replacing manual cross-system lookup

The client reviewed the delivered solution and confirmed the performance and code quality exceeded their expectations — particularly given the pace of delivery and the volume of requirement changes absorbed during development.

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Key Takeaways

Start with a data audit.	Duplicate records and broken workflows compound every problem downstream. Clean data first, migrate second.
Ecosystem fit matters.	The firm already runs Microsoft 365. Dynamics 365 layered onto that stack natively — no new tooling, no new habits.
Automation must follow process design.	Power Automate delivered results because the workflows were mapped and validated before any code was written.
Change management is not optional.	Role-specific training and a 60-day support window turned a technical go-live into a genuine adoption.
Consolidation reduces cost and complexity.	One CRM platform is cheaper and easier to maintain than two. Decommissioning Salesforce removed both licensing cost and operational overhead.

Technology Stack

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM
Microsoft Dataverse
Portfolio Management System Integration

Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint)

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Client identity is confidential. Project details verified through internal delivery records. Reference available on request.