Maison Consulting Internship
Three months at a Microsoft Dynamics Gold Partner in Karachi, doing the kind of work that doesn’t show up on GitHub: CRM configuration, ERP integrations, Power BI dashboards, and a lot of client calls that turned into requirements documents.
The Company
Maison Consulting & Solutions specializes in ERP and CRM solutions built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem, serving over 300 clients globally. My supervisor Anas Rehman, a Customization Consultant with a computer science background from NED University, managed my day-to-day work.
The infrastructure was hybrid: on-premises servers for certain legacy clients, Azure-hosted for newer deployments. I spent most of my time in the cloud half.
What I Actually Did
CRM configuration and integration. The most involved work was connecting Dynamics 365 CRM workflows to Azure Logic Apps for automation. When a client’s sales team closes a deal, a Logic App triggers downstream processes: notifications, record creation in Finance and Operations, scheduled follow-up tasks. Debugging these pipelines (usually by reading Azure’s execution history logs and tracing which condition branch failed) was how I learned that enterprise integration is mostly about handling the cases where data doesn’t arrive in the shape you expect.
ERP integration. I assisted with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations module integrations, specifically data migration tasks: mapping client legacy schemas to D365 entities, writing transformation logic, validating record counts post-migration. Not glamorous, but the kind of work where a mistake in a transformation rule means thousands of records in the wrong state.
Power BI development. Several clients needed dashboards pulling from D365 data. I built reports using the Power BI connector to Dynamics, wrote DAX measures for aggregations (sales by region, pipeline by stage, aging AR), and set up scheduled refreshes. One recurring problem: clients who asked for “everything on one dashboard” ended up with dashboards too slow to load. Narrowing scope was usually the right call.
SharePoint. Two internal collaboration portals, one for a client’s procurement team. Mostly list configuration, permission management, and integrating SharePoint document libraries with the corresponding D365 records.
Client communication. This was probably 30% of the role. I sat in on requirements calls, took notes, and turned conversation into spec documents. The gap between what a client says they want in a meeting and what they actually need is rarely zero. The useful skill is asking “what decision are you making with this data?” before designing any report.
What I Took Away
The Microsoft ecosystem (D365, Azure, Power Platform) is large enough that you can spend years in it and still encounter unfamiliar modules. The internship gave me a working mental model of how the pieces connect, which is more durable than knowing any specific feature.
The testing and QA process, tracked through Azure DevOps, was the first time I worked with a formal bug-tracking workflow. Bugs had reproduction steps, expected vs. actual behavior, and severity levels. That structure forced clearer thinking about what “broken” actually means, which I’d underestimated before.
The part I found genuinely hard: translating client requests into technical specs without losing the intent. Clients describe outcomes, not configurations. Figuring out which combination of D365 customizations produces the outcome they described requires understanding both sides well enough to translate between them. I got better at it over three months, but I wouldn’t claim I had it down by the end.