What Happened to Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

Posted by Jonathan Crowell

Nothing… sort of.  You may also be asking yourself “What is Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement?” I’ll address both questions.

As of November 1, 2016, Microsoft Dynamics CRM was renamed and became part of Microsoft Dynamics 365. The Dynamics CRM we have known and loved was more or less re-labeled and licensed in a different manner. At that time, there was set to be two “editions” of the CRM applications – Business and Enterprise. The Business Edition was geared towards companies with more basic requirements in Sales and Customer Service and aligned with then called Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, Business Edition, which is now called Dynamics 365 Business Central (see my blog “What Happened to Dynamics NAV” for more information on the evolution of Business Central). Things changed, as they do, and there never really was a business edition for CRM. Meanwhile, the Enterprise Edition offered more robust functionality in Sales and Customer Service, as well as more applications for Field Service and Project Service Automation. Marketing was somewhat of an unknown in 2016, as Microsoft positioned Adobe Marketing Cloud for “enterprise” needs, and was in the process of sunsetting Dynamics Marketing for a “business edition” version of the marketing app. You could license individual applications or plans for users who needed access to multiple apps, and there was tiered pricing for the plans if you had a large number of users.

Fast-forward to October 1, 2019, and the above seems like a faint memory. In true Microsoft fashion, the naming and licensing has changed, again. I’ll attempt to make sense of it all in this blog, but if you’d prefer to discuss these changes, we welcome you to give us a call (704-846-6750)!
Let’s start with the name. Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is the name, and it’s the full suite of “CRM” applications available from Microsoft. Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, and Marketing are all included within Customer Engagement. There are no longer Business and Enterprise versions of these applications, but rather “Professional” and Enterprise versions. Nothing has changed with the Enterprise applications, as far as functionality, and the Professional versions look and feel the same as Enterprise, but with limited functionality (mainly around what entities are included and extensibility – see our video on Professional vs Enterprise). As of now, only Sales and Customer Service are available as “Professional” SKUs. Licensing will be covered below, but before I do that, I want to address some of the under-lying technology changes for Customer Engagement.
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You may be aware of the concept of a Common Data Model (CDM). CDM is a way of standardizing your data structure and naming conventions – for example, customers and vendors in your ERP versus accounts in CRM – across all your business applications. The benefits are a single database with data from all the systems your organization utilizes, as well as the ability to extend that CDM platform to build your own line of business applications, and to report on all of this data through a business intelligence tool, like Power BI (see our Power BI for Sales video). Microsoft has incorporated the CDM concept into Customer Engagement, calling it the Common Data Service (CDS) for Apps. This is essentially the Microsoft PowerApps platform. Consider it this way, Microsoft has built apps for you on the CDS for Apps (Sales, CS, FS, PSA, and Marketing), and provided the ability to extend and build your own solutions on the same database. There’s a lot of power in that, because PowerApps (pun intended) is meant to be a “citizen developer” tool, meaning low-coding effort to create your own apps. No off the shelf software can cover every need for every organization, and this model promotes the idea of an xRM, or extended relationship management solution.
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Now, how do you properly license all this stuff? Again, I will do my best to write this out, but you should probably just give us a call (704-846-6750)! Let’s bullet point this out:

• First, let’s discuss the concept of “Base” apps and “Attach” apps. Base apps are the main application a user needs access to (I’m in sales, I will mainly work in the D365 Sales app) - $95 per user per month for Enterprise versions, $65 for Sales Professional, and $50 for Customer Service Professional
  • Enterprise and Professional apps do not share the same database, and are separate systems
  • When licensing Enterprise and Professional apps for the same user, the higher cost app is the Base
• For any additional applications the user needs full read/write access to, you will Attach those additional apps (I mainly work in the D365 Sales app, but I also need to create new and edit existing Work Orders in D365 Field Service) – an additional $20 each app, per user per month
  • PSA and Talent are not available as Attach apps, only as Base apps that can be attached to
  • You can license as many applications as the individual user requires for their job duties
• Team Member users have read access and minimal write access to the full suite of Customer Engagement apps - $8 per user per month
  • Please note that Base apps include Team Member use rights for the other applications, essentially providing read only access to the full Customer Engagement suite
• Dynamics Marketing is back as Dynamics 365 for Marketing! You can license this as a standalone solution starting at $1,500 per month, or Attach it to your existing Customer Engagement tenant starting at $750 per month.
  • Marketing is licensed based on the number of Contacts you will market to, starting at 10k contacts and going up
  • Marketing is a tenant wide license, however you will need to specify which users have access to the application
  • The Marketing Attach license requires a minimum of 10 Customer Engagement Base app licenses
• Because of this new concept, there are no longer “Plans” or tiered pricing. This is the “better together” licensing structure, where you only license the apps each user requires for their job duties
• And yes, it will be technically enforced that a user must have a Base app before assigning the Attach app license.
• There’s also Artificial Intelligence add-on subscriptions available that don the “Insights” moniker, where you can take advantage of pre-built A.I. models for Sales, Customer Service and Marketing

In conclusion, this is all very convoluted, and it’s probably going to change again at some point. But don’t get frustrated, that’s what we’re here for! If you are a current Dynamics CRM customer and are concerned about what these changes mean to you, contact us to learn more about your options. We can help you navigate the process of transitioning to Dynamics 365. If you are new to Dynamics 365 and are trying to make sense of all of this, give us a call! Our solution specialists can answer your questions and guide you towards the right option for your organization.

*This is an update to a previous blog.