In the 2020 Release Wave 1 release plan documentation we saw that Microsoft is finally going to bring technical licensing enforcement for Dynamics 365 Team Members into the platform. By launching specific App Modules designed to be used with the cheap Team Member license as well as building the mechanism for controlling which Service Plan entitles the users to access which App Modules, there will now be a clear line for what is and isn’t possible right within the system.
That’s how it is in theory. What about in practice? Let’s explore the Early Access features launched for 2020 Release Wave 1 on February 3rd and see how these App Modules are implemented.
Sales Team Member app
Since Sales is by far the most common business process that CRM systems built on Dynamics 365 Online are managing, let’s start from the dedicated Team Member App Module for this scenario. The pre-release documentation isn’t very extensive yet, but from there we can get the basic intention of this new app:
“At a high level, users with the Team Member license can perform the following tasks in the Sales Team Member app: 1) Customer management: work with accounts and contacts. 2) Lead and opportunity management: see leads or opportunities linked with accounts or contacts, or see other sales-related data. 3) Add activities, such as notes.”
Upon launching the app, we’re greeted with a familiar experience that looks like Dynamics 365 Sales, only it’s simplified to contain just 5 menu items in the sitemap: Activities, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities. If the dashboards menu was also included here, the app would resemble the kind of CRM system that most small organizations or teams actually need in real life.
If we’re using the app with the full access rights granted by a powerful security role like system administrator then there isn’t much that the Sales Team Member app stops us from doing. For example, creating or editing accounts is one of the rights that has been stripped away from the Team Member license, yet the app would happily show us a “New” button for adding accounts via this App Module. The secret lies in the Sales Team Member security role that comes with the solution. A view of the privileges for core entities looks like this:
Wow, that’s quite restricted indeed! Assigning only this role the users wouldn’t even permit viewing activities from anyone else, nor leads, or adding contacts. Let’s get back to the customization options later, but this is indeed in line with the description of what Microsoft intended the offer with the standard Sales Team Member app.
Customer Service Team Member app
The second experience is for Customer Service – but not in the way that you’d traditionally see the Customer Service App of Dynamics 365 being leveraged for assisting external customers. This Team Member app is intended for scenarios where the app users is actually the customer being served:
“With the entry-level Team Member license, you can now address self-service support scenarios for your employees using the new Customer Service Team Member app module. Employees can create cases for their problems, such as laptop issues, HR queries, and administrative needs, and interact with agents through the commenting feature. They can also search the knowledge base for solutions pertaining to their problems.”
Unlike the Sales Team Member App, this App Module isn’t installed by default. That’s probably a good thing, since I’d imagine the majority of Dynamics 365 customers are not using it as an internal helpdesk – although it definitely is a perfectly sensible scenario. If that’s what you’re doing, then the CS Team Member solution installation will need to be started from the Dynamics 365 Admin Center.
If we look at the same case record via the full form in the Customer Service Hub App Module, we’ll see quite a stark difference. The solution package for the Team Member app appears to contain a web resource called Incident_teammember_library.js that modifies the behavior of the case form in many ways, such as hiding the Business Process Flow, replacing the standard Resolve Case dialog with a much more streamlined version and who knows what else. The Command Bar also contains far less functionality than it normally would.
An interesting feature of the Customer Service Team Member app is the use of a default account that you can configure for the organization. The cases created via the Team Member app will automatically be linked to this account as the customer. The requirement for having either an account or contact as the customer has been a part of the MS CRM data model since day one, which has traditionally made the internal helpdesk scenarios quite tricky to implement – if the customers actually are users of Dynamics 365. Without any further documentation, I’m not quite sure what Microsoft’s vision has been for this new feature in the Customer Service Team Member app, since it looks like there isn’t any linkage to the internal customer (user) now in the case data model. If a person who provides helpdesk services would now assign the case to himself to work on, where’s the reference to the actual person who was in need of assistance?
The other available menu in the Team Member app sitemap, Knowledge Search, isn’t a reference to any entity but rather presents a dedicated UI for browsing published Knowledge Articles. Well, browsing isn’t maybe the right term, since the only option here is free text search for keywords, which will then return a list of articles if matches are found.
It’s good to keep in mind that certain features of Model-driven Apps in Dynamics 365 aren’t yet App Module aware – meaning they’ll be presented in the UI the same way regardless of which specific app the user has launched. Recent and Pinned items will contain data not included in the App Module, Advanced Find will show all entities that are visible to the user’s security role, the Assistant and (deprecated) Task Flow buttons will always be there in the top Nav Bar. Still, the core experience of App Modules can be restricted down to a limited subset of features, as demonstrated by these Team Member apps. When moving from legacy web client to Unified Interface, these type of targeted experiences definitely are something worth pursuing, rather than the oldskool CRM monoliths that contain a hundred and one items in the navigation.
Customizing the App Modules
Now that we know what comes out of the box for Team Member users, many customers will surely be asking what to do with the functionality in their CRM systems that isn’t represented in these standard App Modules. To understand the commercial boundaries better, let’s have a look at what the latest February 2020 licensing guide has to say about the rights of Team Members. We’ll start from Appendix A and the table that describes use rights for Team Members in Customer Engagement apps. (Yes, even though Microsoft product documentation says the term “Customer Engagement” is no longer used for online products, the licensing team hasn’t yet come up with a new term to replace CE in the licensing guide.)
To start off, Team Members still have the right to read all Dynamics 365 application data. Therefore every single entity you could possibly include within the Sitemap of an App Module could in theory be brought in there. Of course you would have to ensure via the security roles that no creation or modification of those records would be allowed. Also the reporting and dashboards features are explicitly stated as being available for Team Members, on page 11 of the licensing guide.
As for custom entities, we see that there are also edit/actions rights, but we have a “15 max” restriction in the table. What does that mean? The answers are given in Appendix D: Custom Entities.
We see that for a given app scenario, Team Members can create and modify records for up to 15 custom entities – per app. Where the lines are a bit blurry is the statement that this usage should “fit predefined Team Member scenarios”. As long as these custom entities are related to sales or customer service processes, I guess you’re on the safe side to add them to the standard Team Member App Modules that soon will be the only way for users with Team Member licenses to access Dynamics 365 – once the enforcement for first-party vs. custom apps is enabled in April 2020. Again, keep in mind that read rights are included for any entity, so the 15 custom entity limit couldn’t ever be technically enforced on the App Module level, based on how I interpret the licensing terms.
What if you really need to do more than what the Team Member license would allow? What if you’re building apps for your unique business processes that aren’t covered by any first party app in the Dynamics 365 suite of products? Then you should explore the possibilities of Power Platform and its licensing model. Power Apps Per User Plan is the platform SKU that Team Member never was intended to be. If you’d map all the current and future workloads that Power Apps could take over in your organization’s business applications portfolio, the value is likely to be much higher than what the customization of these Team Member apps could ever deliver.
Read more
Microsoft has published new documentation on Dynamics 365 Team Members license that outlines the user experience for accessing the App Modules, as well as the customization restrictions.
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