Jukka Niiranen

Category: Featured posts

Highlighted content

  • Top 3 Themes for Dynamics 365 in 2018

    Top 3 Themes for Dynamics 365 in 2018

    This time last year I wrote my Top 3 themes of 2017 article on what were the major events and directions from the year for the Dynamics 365 ecosystem. The start of a brand new year always feels like the logical moment to reflect back on the past 365 days, so this sounds like a worthy tradition to keep going. Here are my Top 3 picks from 2018 and some thoughts on how they might influence the direction of the year 2019 ahead.

    Power Platform

    The biggest single announcement of 2018 came in March when the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and PowerApps platforms were merged into one. It wasn’t until July that we began to see the Power Platform term used in describing this new suite of tools that now is the way to extend both Dynamics 365 and Office 365 apps, as well as building brand new apps for customer specific scenarios.All of a sudden the technology that had been bubbling under in the Dynamics CRM corner room is now brought onto the main stage of MS business software show.

    The immediate impact was that XRM became CDS 2.0 (Common Data Service for Apps),which probably hasn’t been all that easy for non-Dynamics professionals to understand if they only paid attention to official MS information sources covering the topic. For the Dynamics partners a nice upside in this merger was PowerApps P2 becoming the “naked XRM” platform license they had been asking for many years (compared to the earlier Dynamics 365 Plan license for bundling CRM + ERP, which I don’t think was in as high demand).

    A more subtle but equally important change was the birth of model-driven app and canvas app concepts. No, not the marketing terms nor the division into two app types, rather the fact that these different client technologies now had a clear need to start approaching one another in terms of how they behave, what data sources they support and how they are administered. Examples of these have become visible through recent announcements like:

    It would be perfectly justified to call 2018 “the year of the platform”, considering how significantly the investments from MS side seem to have shifted from Dynamics 365 to the Power Platform. During 2019 we’ll see if the partner channel can follow along, to transform their offering into something more in line with the PowerApps story than the traditional CRM business models that have mostly been just revised for the cloud based environments during recent years.

    A similar challenge awaits the professionals who’ve been working in this business and now need to figure out how to put their existing skills into use in projects that may not even mention the Dynamics product name anywhere. Plenty of new skills will also need to be acquired for leveraging the broader toolkit. The recent announcement of Dynamics 365 exams certifications to be retired gives an indication of the looming new requirements that await the MCP’s wanting to remain current with their certification record.

    One Version

    My Nr. 2 theme from 2017 was the App/Plat separation that largely took place as part of version 9 release. Now that Dynamics 365 CE is running purely on Azure after all orgs get to v9, the next logical step is to start delivering new releases on it the same way a modern cloud native product would. PowerApps, Flow and Power BI have already been operating as a service with a single version for all customers and now the platform underneath Dynamics 365 as well as the Apps on top of it are set to transition into this model. The July announcement of how Microsoft plans to deliver predictable updates with continuous deployment for both Customer Engagement and Finance & Operations is another major event of 2018 that will shape the future of these product lines and introduce a new reality for customers who build their digital business processes on top of them. The old CDU process for version update scheduling is no more and everyone will get the April 2019 update bases on the public release schedule.

    (more…)
  • Unified Experiences in October 2018 Release

    Unified Experiences in October 2018 Release

    The October ’18 of Microsoft Business Applications is going to bring a whole bunch of exciting features, spread across the huge stack of products and apps that either make up or operate on the Power Platform. Much of them will be specific to an area that only some of the users or developers work with in their specific customer scenarios, but there are also going to be updates that will be visible to practically everyone. Here are some of those new experiences that we can expect to see within the next few months as the features are gradually released.

    App Navigation

    On the Model-driven App client side, there will be some changes to the navigation features in Unified Interface. Here’s what October ’18 update is going to look like for the end user:

    The product team has communicated the following changes:

    • Sitemap will now be expanded by default, so users don’t need to remember what icon stands for what entity/feature.
    • Recent and Pinned items will be more prominently displayed at the top. MRU (most recently used items) will now be a single list instead of the earlier entity specific MRU list.
    • Sitemap areas will be displayed at the bottom, with a more visible icon and area switcher feature instead of the tabbed area list on top in current version.
    • Command Bar icons will have more color and hover effects to highlight their interactive nature.
    • Both Sitemap and Command Bar color scheme will be changed to dark text on light grey background.

    These are great enhancements that are aimed at making the Unified Interface work more smoothly on the desktop browser specifically. They will not affect the mobile or Mail app, but only the screens that will have a width of 480 or more pixels. It’s awesome to see that even though the clients share the same infrastructure, not everything is forced to work exactly the same way on a big monitor vs. small phone screen.

    Hybrid Experiences on Unified Interface

    For existing Dynamics 365 CE customers who are working in the “classic” web client, the question of “can we do this in Unified Interface?” is a critical factor in deciding on the strategy of how to migrate users to the latest experiences available in the cloud. There’s a list of capabilities not yet on Unified Interface over on docs.microsoft.com that should serve as the starting point for any such planning. For a more forward looking list, the Unified Interface roadmap presented at MS Business Applications Summit 2018 is currently the best summary of what to expect:

    While there will be more and more entities and features natively supported on UCI, not everything from good ol’ Dynamics CRM is going to be rebuilt for the new client infrastructure – at least not yet. When you look at what’s happening on the broader Power Platform side, this prioritization makes a lot of sense, as porting over old UI controls as-is probably doesn’t fit with the long term platform vision. Still, you can’t just pretend that a few missing features like Advanced Find would NOT be critical to business users who’ve built their work processes around these core capabilities of Dynamics 365 CE.

    The short term solution will be to offer a “hybrid UI”, in which the controls not yet ported to UCI will be opened up in windows that render the classic web client UI. So, things like merge dialogs, personal settings, SSRS reports and Advanced Find will be accessible to users from within Unified Interface, with the existing feature set that they’ve come to expect in earlier versions. Of course they won’t be mobile friendly like the responsive UCI controls, but desktop users aren’t probably going to care all that much about this anyway.

    As we can see in the roadmap presentation, Microsoft aims to make Unified Interface the default experience first for new customers and shortly also to existing environments. There’s no need to panic over this change, though, as the plan is to introduce a “Side by Side” (SxS) option for administrators to define whether the classic web client is visible to users or not. If you have a good reason to not yet push everyone over to Unified Interface, you don’t have to – at least not with the Oct ’18 release.

    Power Platform Admin Center

    While the aforementioned changes are mostly relevant to customers who have bought Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and are using it for either traditional CRM scenarios or more XRM style applications, it’s good to keep in mind that all these investments are actually done in the context of the greater platform. Starting from the July 2018 announcements, Power Platform is now an actual thing that Microsoft sells. To the developers and administrators it has seemed like a collection of separate product boxes of different shapes, but that experience is also about to get unified as the new Power Platform Admin Center is introduced:

    You can already access this UI from either the short URL admin.dynamics.com or the longer (official) version admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com. Today you don’t yet see too many actual admin screens of individual applications within the Power Platform Admin Center, as the menu items will mostly redirect you to existing admin centers for PowerApps, Flow, Power BI and Dynamics 365 CE. Things are going to change soon, though, as a brand new admin UI will reveal the various Dynamics 365 CE settings that you’ve earlier been able to only access from the classic web client:

    These images are taken from another Business Applications Summit presentation, “Key features coming to Microsoft PowerApps and Dynamics 365 admins”. Just like in the UCI session, there’s a great roadmap slide included that shows the stages via which the new features are planned to be rolled out:

    Now, you may not want to look at the detailed dates, since both roadmaps are already ancient history from over a month ago and things aren’t necessarily quite where the initial targets were set. Nevertheless, these are the features and experiences that will soon be out there. If you compare this to the traditional Dynamics CRM world in which many current on-prem customers with their v8.2 (at best) environments are operating in, then it’s in many ways like a whole new application platform to work with. MVP Scott Durow has drawn a great diagram of the new admin experiences in Power Platform that also helps in illustrating the huge shift that is taking place here. We’ve seen architecture diagrams like the one below for a long time now, but once the actual user experience for solution designers also starts to reflect this, I believe that will have a “powerful” impact indeed!

  • Exploring CDS for Apps Platform Licensing (PowerApps)

    Exploring CDS for Apps Platform Licensing (PowerApps)

    When Microsoft originally made the Spring 2018 release announcement for Business Applications products and essentially promoted XRM to be the Common Data Service for Apps, they didn’t yet disclose the finer details about how the CDS for Apps license model would work outside the Dynamics 365 Apps and Plans that we’re familiar with. On May 1st the details were revealed alongside the blog post “Which PowerApps plan do I need for model-driven apps and CDS for Apps”.

    In his earlier blog post, Frank Weigel announced that PowerApps Plan 2 officially became the platform SKU for CDS for Apps. In the updated PowerApps pricing page we can see that actually the license types and prices have effectively remained the same as they were before Spring 2018 release:

    The changes are mostly on the new Model-driven App side (formerly XRM), but since there’s now also a wealth of server-side functionality made available for PowerApps via the new CDS for Apps concept, it also affects the Canvas Apps designers. Let’s dive into the details and explore the license model from a few different angles.

    PowerApps for the Productivity Folks

    A customer who’s got Office 365 will already have the specific PowerApps license type included in that subscription. As stated by the Licensing overview page over on docs.microsoft.com, this allows them to create and run applications within the context of this service (O365), as well as connect to “common cloud services including Box.com, Facebook, and many more”. Not D365 and not CDS, but that still covers a lot of interesting scenarios for building an app to replace a manual process that used to run on email or Excel.

    Since it never was a “pure business app” like Dynamics 365 CRM and ERP products, PowerApps has grown into a highly versatile tool that connects with the more mainstream Microsoft services. You can embed them into a wide variety of places within your MS Cloud environment, like on Power BI dashboards or modern SharePoint pages. For your data collection forms, they are InfoPath on steroids. An Office 365 customer might therefore get pretty far with just mashing up the UI’s of different apps and storing data into less structured places like SharePoint lists or OneDrive files.

    If they’d like to introduce more solid capabilities for relational data modeling, process automation and granular security management, the PowerApps Plan 1 would unlock this scenario for €5.90 per user. With this the data could be managed in CDS for Apps database, a much more robust back end for a business application than simple lists in the Office tools. The users still couldn’t access any Dynamics 365 style UI, since Plan 1 doesn’t grant the access to Model-driven Apps. You would need to construct the required lists, forms, navigation and client side logic with the traditional PowerApps “maker” experience and publish it through the same channels as what the Office 365 users already have access to.

    This Plan 1 approach could be viewed as the first step up from the starting point where a knowledgeable power user or “citizen developer” had built a PowerApp with the license they already had via Office 365 and now the app needs to be adopted more widely within the organization. The new admins and designers of the app would need a Plan 2 license for €33.70 but the users could be assigned the cheaper Plan 1 license for €5.90 a piece. It shouldn’t be too difficult a business case to build if there’s real demand for the app and it either saves time or money in some business process that used to be a painful manual operation before Microsoft Cloud came along. If things work out well, these same P1 licensed users can then go and use any number of apps that the P2 power users design for them, since each P2 gets 2 databases with it and no limits on how many PowerApps you have on top of those.

    PowerApps for the Dynamics Crowd

    Dynamics 365 has a powerful, growing set of first party Apps from Microsoft, but sometimes there isn’t an app for that particular business process you’re looking to digitally transform with the help of MS Cloud. This is where the power of the platform comes to rescue and saves you from custom software development and maintenance efforts. Earlier this platform was called “eXtended Relationship Management” (XRM) but now we refer to it as the Common Data Service for Apps. We don’t even need to buy a Dynamics 365 license for it anymore, since we could just use PowerApps Plan 2 instead.

    What sets Plan 2 apart from Plan 1 is that you can work with the application data via the Model-driven App UI that is automatically generated for you when you design your data model. Sure, you’ll need to configure the details of it to deliver a pleasant UX, but you’re not forced into pixel-perfect design work of the Canvas App. Navigation is provided for you, there’s the full search capability, you can quickly configure dashboards, Business Rules can make your entity forms adapt to field data values, and so on. With the new Unified Interface your Model-driven App will adapt to any screen size, and the solution framework ensures you can easily transport your customizations across environments. The Model-driven sample apps will give you a quick idea of what a non-Dynamics 365 app on CDS might look like.

    There are limitations, though, and you’ll find them listed on the “license requirements for entities” page on CDS for Apps documentation. As mentioned, P1 users can’t access the Model-driven App UI, but they also aren’t authorized to access a Canvas App that runs on a CDS for Apps instance and uses entities that have real-time workflows or plug-ins associated with them. These require a P2 license, which unlocks the full XRM style functionality of the platform.

    Now, just because the Dynamics 365 first party Apps from Microsoft are built on the same platform as your custom Model-driven Apps, that doesn’t mean a PowerApps P2 license would fully cover their usage. There’s a list of restricted entities that are used in MS apps like Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, that you aren’t allowed to touch without the proper Dynamics 365 license. For example, you’re free to work with leads and opportunities, but you can’t use cases or knowledge articles in your custom PowerApps – because Microsoft said so.

    For an overview of the different license types and privileges, be sure to check out the great blog posts and ever so slick videos that MVP Scott Durow has created for explaning the topic of PowerApps to those of us who’ve got a Dynamics background.

    PowerApps vs. Dynamics 365 License Model

    Just because we now have something declared as Platform SKU on a Microsoft blog post doesn’t mean we get to skip the finer details laid out in the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide. Anyone working on the partner side must have experienced the amount of documentation that goes into performing changes to the licensing practices of Dynamics products. (Remember that deck about transition from Dynamics CRM to Dynamics 365? Of course you do, how could you ever forget…) I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to see more licensing related information emerge about the new PowerApps Model-driven Apps offering in the near future, as this initial announcement raises many questions that need to be answered before customers and partners can fully embrace the new platform opportunities. (more…)

  • Yes, XRM Is The New Common Data Service

    Yes, XRM Is The New Common Data Service

    In November 2016 I wrote an article on LinkedIn with the title “No, Common Data Service is not the new XRM”. This was my response to the speculation that had emerged from Microsoft’s announcement of a new cloud-native platform to store, model and integrate business data with other (cloud) applications. This platform called CDS was seen as a potential replacement to XRM that had been born into the good ol’ on-premises server world already back in 2003. Given the transformative power of SaaS and PaaS, it wasn’t such an outlandish thought to imagine the days of XRM bits being numbered, with a new Azure based alternative being prepared behind the scenes to take over.

    Well, today we had the public launch of the Dynamics 365 Spring Wave in the Microsoft Business Forward event, which I summarized in my previous blog post. The most significant piece of news from this announcement wasn’t perhaps articulated so clearly in official Microsoft materials, so I’ll try and clarify it here and give some perspective on the what/why/how behind this change.

    XRM = CDS v2

    The platform known as XRM, which has served as the foundation for Dynamics CRM and later Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, is now reimagined as Common Data Service, CDS. Or more specifically, “CDS for Apps”, but more on that later. The key things to understand here are that A) nothing from the current XRM is being removed while B) existing CDS v1 environments are migrated onto CDS v2 that effectively is XRM.

    The adoption of CDS as a component of solution architecture for live customer environments has likely not reached a very high level up until this point. Originally introduced as a concept back at the time when the whole Dynamics 365 concept was launched in 2016, the purpose of CDS has remained too fuzzy for many customers to explore it further. At the same time, the feature set offered by CDS v1 hasn’t yet covered many of the scenarios that Microsoft partners would have likely used it in. You could say that in their noble attempt to connect many of the existing boxes in the business application architecture, Microsoft ended up inventing yet another box. Which is pretty much the fear I had in my first blog post covering CDS, which back in those days was still called Common Data Model (CDM):

    Being the giant corporation that Microsoft is, there’s bound to be both plenty of overlap between different products developed by different groups within the organization, as well as the occasional lack of alignment between the roadmaps to where each of their countless products is heading to. I’m sure there was a clear need for introducing a foundation for managing all that business data which the Power Suite tools (PowerApps, Flow, Power BI) had to intimately work with, instead of just relying on distant services via APIs. Viewed from this perspective, the idea of CDS must have seemed pretty awesome. When looking at the feedback coming from outside the MSFT firewall, though, it’s obvious that the V1 product didn’t quite manage to meet the mark:

    This Ain’t The XRM of 2011 Anymore

    A lot of work remained ahead if CDS was to be built into what the real world requirements from enterprise customers were. At the same time, the XRM cloud platform was being transitioned to run on Azure services and the new target architecture was to allow the separation of the built-in applications (Sales, Service etc.) from the core platform. The CRM “legacy” of XRM was about to become an optional component you could remove and not break things, with previously hard-coded features being re-engineered as either core platform capabilities or implemented as reusable pieces within the in-house apps’ solution packages, built with Custom Control Framework (CCF) and presented via the Unified Interface.

    The people at Microsoft who actually design and build the functioning technical product were sure doing all they possibly could to prepare XRM to take a bigger role than just that boring old sales pipeline management engine with Outlook integration we’ve seen since forever. The community that had worked with Dynamics CRM and seen its potential to deliver custom business apps time & time again in actual customer projects were always asking for MS to deliver a “Pure XRM” SKU, to make it a true platform. Whether it would ever happen, though, was not for either of those groups to decide.

    At the end, as we now can see with the announcement of PowerApps Spring Update, the leadership team at Microsoft ultimately came to the right conclusion. XRM was chosen as the platform that would power the further expansion of PowerApps becoming more enterprise ready with the support for building model-driven apps alongside the familiar canvas apps. From a licensing perspective, “PowerApps P2 officially becomes the new platform SKU, moving away from being a admin and maker focused plan to becoming THE plan for users of stand-alone model driven apps.” So, there we have it then: Pure XRM at last.

    So Long, XRM!

    A legitimate question that some of you might as at this point is:

    “If the CDS v1 platform is replaced with XRM, then why is everyone talking about Common Data Service still?”

    Are we seeing yet another marketing spin that tries to blur our vision from what the underlying technologies really are, like with the Dynamics 365 “it might be CRM or ERP and you’ll never figure out which one we’re  talking about” rebranding pains? Well, that was my initial though when I first learned about the plans for this platform merge, but I’ve later come to the conclusion that it is actually a fairly sensible decision to replace XRM with CDS.

    For those of you who have been in the Dynamics game for long enough time to recall the first moments when Microsoft started throwing around the term XRM, you might still remember the excitement that was collectively felt around that letter “X” for describing the bold journey of going beyond the standard CRM feature set. The thrill of creating your very first custom entity via the customization GUI – man, what a rush! This truly felt like the future of business application development at the time.

    Fast forward to where we are today and the excitement of data model and UI customization has been replaced by the anxiety to get as many different apps and services to talk with one another with as little effort as possible. It’s not that focused on the Relationship Management part anymore, and instead of “X” we have X^N different things we need to manage and connect with (some are even IoT enabled things). To describe what we’re actually trying to use XRM for today, the Common Data Service is a pretty fitting name in the end. We’re trying to bring some common sense into the sea of data that everyone is swimming in, and we’d of course prefer to consume it as a service like we already do with movies or transportation, for example. And as for the visible UI part of the application that user interact with – well, there just happens to be this concept called PowerApps out there already. So, “XRM Part 2” = CDS + PowerApps.

    I think we’re at a point where we really should look at the road we’ve traveled with our trust ol’ XRM Swiss knife, appreciate all those countless times that we were able to find a tool from it that got the job done, but accept the fact that from this point onward we’re going to need a bigger knife. Which we might as well call CDS for the server side & PowerApps for the client side.

    One More Thing…

    Just so things wouldn’t be uncharacteristically clear for Microsoft’s product naming tradition, what we’re seeing here is actually a bit of a “SkyDrive moment”. By this I’m referring to the episode where after renaming SkyDrive to OneDrive due to a lawsuit from BSkyB, Microsoft then proceeded with launching another product called OneDrive for Business. So, “One Drive, many meanings”…

    With CDS the scenario is that while the XRM platform has now been rebranded as Common Data Service for Apps, there’s already another product on the way, called Common Data Service for Analytics. Regardless of the word “common” in the name, these two platforms are unlikely to share many characteristics when it comes to the technology under the hood. Here’s how the MSFT Technical Fellow behind Power BI describes it:

    So, we’ll soon have two awesome products from Microsoft named according to the pattern “Common Data Service for X”, which we can easily distinguish from one another by using the terms CDS-A and CDS-… Oh. Right. Well, there’s always the next round of rebranding we can look forward to!

  • In Praise Of Code and No-Code

    In Praise Of Code and No-Code

    Two weeks ago Neil Benson wrote an excellent article on LinkedIn, as a response to a claim that everyone working as a functional consultant in a Dynamics 365 project team should also know how to write code. This really resonated with me and I shared the article, along with a bit of commentary of my own. My post, in turn, started to gain quite a lot of traction on the LinkedIn feed. It looks like we had touched upon a topic of great interest within the network of CRM professionals.

    If you read my post above, it pretty much summarizes the main points I wish to bring out in this discussion:

    1. There is much more to ensuring Dynamics 365 project success than being able to do hands-on software development.
    2. A big chunk of the value delivered by Microsoft’s cloud platform is not relying on custom code development.
    3. The remaining chunk that is custom code driven work should be left to professional developers and not copy-paste heroes.

    There have been some very good arguments written in the comments section of the LinkedIn post, so I urge you to also view them for gaining greater perspective on the topic. I see a lot of resemblance with the “should designers code” meme in the original assumption that functional consultants would be able to do their jobs better if they also were familiar with developing custom code. Much of what has been said in the heat of that debate between coders and non-coders probably applies here, too:

    Alan Cooper’s four part article covers the dilemmas in general software development teams with such great insights and depth that I won’t even attempt to dive in the same direction here. In practical terms of a CRM project, when it comes to the availability of skills and experience needed in carrying out the wide range of tasks during the project’s lifecycle, the manager in charge of resources is always going to need to do some juggling. The less you ask the team members to juggle between completely different kinds tasks, the more likely they’ll able to focus on actual customer value generating activities rather than keeping all the balls in the air simultaneously. Here’s how Neil Benson put it:

    “Asking a functional consultant, with no formal computer science education or experience as a professional coder, to find and copy someone else’s JScript from Stackoverflow and paste it into your Dynamics solution is asking for trouble.”

    I don’t touch code myself but I do try to get my hands dirty on a wide variety of technologies. For example, today I spent a few hours getting familiar with Azure Service Bus, testing how without writing a single line of code I was able to push plugin execution context data into a cloud based message queue and work with it via a GUI in Azure Logic Apps. Now, I would never recommend myself as a person you should hire to set up your production ESB, but I do feel like I need to have a deeper understanding of these technologies than I could gain just by watching through the flashy demos in Microsoft keynotes. Seeing the different sides and reading/hearing what those with deep expertise on a particular technology have to say about it, that is essential. Going and actually trying to step into the shoes of an expert for that technology – probably an unnecessary detour.

    Skimming the bits from the top without diving deep into the dirty details of writing real code might sound like being afraid of all the complexity that awaits beneath the surface. However, the lack of code in a solution doesn’t mean that the complexity of the solution couldn’t be high. The CRM Tip Of The Day post “The story of the small change” perfectly illustrates the way in which individual configuration items built entirely via the graphical tools provided by MS can have dependencies that require you to have a rigorous testing process in place. It’s not just the changes of a system either, since you can easily use workflows and business rules to build a level of complexity into your business logic that doesn’t reveal itself in the test scenarios the consultant behind the design might have thought of. Whether you’re delivering the end product via code or configuration, bugs will sneak in there and eat away a part of your life – be it before or after production deployment.

    The argument for doing things via point’n’click configuration “because it’s so much faster to build” shouldn’t be the one and only argument. Yes, it is often much, much faster to put together the first iteration of a solution via graphical tools. This in itself can be a huge value for the business because you can validate the proposed solution quickly with the relevant stakeholders. Often you’ll only get to the actual requirements when demonstrating live parts of what the initial requirements said. Now, the main reason why Real Developers are often afraid of what “citizen developers” might come up with when given quick tools for building no-code apps is that they may lack the experience of seeing the full lifecycle of a business application. They’ll mistake the first PoC as being equivalent to the final production solution, with little thought given to the work that still remains ahead. This experience isn’t something you must necessarily gain via writing code yourself – a no-code functional consultant just needs to gain sufficient exposure to the various stages of the process via working as a part of the CRM project delivery team.

    I think we all need to be able to see “beyond code” when building solutions on top of platforms like Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Going full-on no-code in your design approach is probably going to unnecessarily limit the value that could be gained from an extensible application platform, forcing you to unsustainable workarounds and resulting in poor UX for the system end users. At the other end of the spectrum, always resorting to your custom built components before having a thorough analysis of the configuration capabilities and complementary cloud services found within your ecosystem of choice will likely increase the solution’s TCO and put the long term reliability of your complex business application at risk as changes in related processes, personnel and technologies occur over time.

    Please feel free to leave comments on how you see the role of code & no-code work evolving in Dynamics 365 projects.

  • Look Out for The End Of Outlook Client

    Look Out for The End Of Outlook Client

    It’s been a while already since Microsoft announced they were deprecating the Outlook Client for Dynamics 365. This announcement applied to the release formerly (and partially still) known as July 2017 Update, which everyone should rather be calling by its version number, i.e. v9.0. Since this version has only very recently become available for existing customers to schedule their CDU dates, it’s a good moment to remind everyone what this means in practice.

    You’ve Been Replaced By An App

    They all keep saying that robots will take away our jobs, but in the meantime it’s apps that are taking over Dynamics 365. Like I explained in my earlier blog post “What’s An “App” in Dynamics 365 Anyway?”, one of the many uses for the term “app” is now the way you integrate Outlook with your CRM system. Unlike the earlier COM add-in of Outlook Client for Windows PCs, this App will now work in any client environment – both in the browser and in mobile environments. That’s why the App is the future and the Client is the past. Well, actually that’s just one of the reasons, but let’s keep it simple for now, since the outcome remains the same nonetheless.

    So, if we’re just getting more of everything then isn’t this the easiest thing to sell in the world? It probably is a no-brainer for the IT guys who’ve had to struggle with the installation, configuration and updating of the locally installed Outlook Clients for years, as the administration overhead is reduced significantly. For the real end users of the CRM system, the perspective may differ, though. A user will immediately see the things that work differently with the App than they did before. Regardless of all the improvements, it will mean changes to their personal workflow, which is why you should pay attention to how the replacement is communicated and what support the users will need in this process.

    In your initial tests of the new features with a V9 environment and the App for Outlook, it’s good to keep in mind that this is still work in progress. The V9 Readme / Know Issues page has a list of technical glitches and unsupported environments for the App that is today still in Preview mode. It’s expected that by the time the current customers get their V9 updates the fully supported App version would also be available. Even with these hotfixes, you should prepare to see some usability gaps remain in the product for a while, as we’re dealing with a technology that’s fresh from the oven: the Unified Interface.

    In The Name Of Unification

    The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is one step on the long road towards a Unified Client Infrastructure. The earlier v8.x incarnation of the App was a limited side pane that would show information about records related to the email while browsing your inbox. The V9 App is a miniature app module built on the same Unified Interface that will power all the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement UI’s in the future. This means that the feature set available is far greater, with the ability for you to scroll through the entire contents of a contact form while remaining in your inbox – or even navigate to related records. Similarly the commands at your disposal will allow completing tasks like adding new competitor records into your CRM database from within the single UI.

    For anyone who’s used the Outlook Client mainly for tracking items from their mailbox, calendar or contact list into the shared Dynamics 365 customer database, this will surely seem like a big step forward in terms of the new contextual actions being offered. These users will have gotten used to opening a browser tab whenever they’ve needed to actually view and search the contents of the CRM database in full screen mode.

    Then there is the group of users who’ve been in the Dynamics game for a longer time – at least from the CRM 2011 version. Back in those days the whole concept of Dynamics CRM might have been sold to them as “never leave your Outlook”. These people may not have actually seen a lot of the UX enhancements that have taken place in the browser and mobile clients in the past few years, since to them CRM has always looked like this:

    A “next generation Microsoft Outlook Experience” revealed seven years ago. Yeah, you probably wouldn’t buy a Customer Engagement solution today that looked like an ERP built into Office 2010. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be power users out there who still rely on the feature set of the trusty old Outlook Client to keep them productive, because they have mastered the Ribbon, the panes, the tabs, the whole shebang.

    The End Is Near …ish

    Microsoft has stated that by the time V10 rolls out, the client UI pictured above won’t work with Dynamics 365 anymore. That’s kind of understandable we consider that the Unified Interface will also replace the web client at some point in the future – possibly at the very same moment. If that is the case, we might not yet be all too close to the final removal of the Outlook Client yet.

    There’s going to be a lot of work needed before every last bit of legacy client infrastructure will have been replaced with the UCI based components. Microsoft remains committed to the guidance they’ve given to customers about the update schedule, which states there should be two new releases per year. However, we don’t really know much anything about at what point in time the next major release will arrive. Even things like rebranding Dynamics CRM to Dynamics 365 were handled over a minor update of v8.2, so who knows if we’ll see v9.1, v9.2, v9.3 etc. before the plug is finally pulled on the Outlook Client and (presumably) a whole bunch of other deprecated features in V10.

    It also remains to be seen whether Microsoft intends to evolve the desktop experience of using Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. For example, at the moment the documentation states that the offline functionality is available via the phone and tablet apps. The table app for Windows 10 could of course be used on a regular PC as well, but it’s not completely unrealistic to expect some more targeted client applications appear for the desktop environments. When it comes to the App for Outlook on a PC, the current version still installs an add-in to manage your contacts, for example. So, just because the UI controls are being unified now, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’d be forced to use an “oversized phone app” on our big monitors.

    No More Updates – But Don’t Forget To Update!

    Even though the Outlook Client is now deprecated and there will not be any feature enhancements made to it, that doesn’t mean it would be completely left to rot. In fact, it is very important that once your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement instances moves up to V9 also your Outlook Clients are using the latest version. This version is now the 8.2.2.137 Update for Dynamics 365 for Microsoft Outlook, available for download here. Yes, it’s V8 and not V9, but don’t let that mismatch distract you.

    You see, with V9 the XRM platform has moved up to using TLS 1.2 protocol for securing the connections between the clients and the server. The earlier Outlook Client versions do not support TLS 1.2 and the V9 server will not accept anything but 1.2 as the cryptographic protocol, which means you’re going to need the latest bits. If you have developed your own clients or code that relies on an earlier TLS version, then be sure to read this in-depth description provided by Matt Barbour of the possible errors you’ll encounter with V9 and the ways how you can avoid those by recompiling your code.

    Update on 2018-01-29: Deprecation of Deprecation

    Against all odds, Microsoft actually decided that they would reverse their previous decision to deprecate the Outlook Client. Read the following blog post and draw your own conclusions:

    Continued support for Outlook add-in (Dynamics 365 for Outlook)

  • Microsoft Flow and Dynamics 365 – My Slides from CRM Saturday Oslo

    Microsoft Flow and Dynamics 365 – My Slides from CRM Saturday Oslo

    Watch out: the Citizen Developers are coming! They are armed with easy to approach GUI tools like Flow, PowerApps and PowerBI, and they aren’t afraid to connect to any of the 160+ cloud apps that you may or may not know your organization is using to solve everyday business problems that the traditional IT projects have failed to serve.

    This is the common story you hear when Microsoft talks about this new generation Business Platform and how it powers the hottest of the hot buzzwords: digital transformation. While it certainly represents a big shift in the capability to deliver new business apps, there is at least an equally significant impact these tools can have to the more centralized efforts of building organization wide solutions for managing business processes and data – meaning CRM system deployment and development. With this in mind, I set out to explore the current state of Microsoft Flow in regards to how it can be used together with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. The results of this study and some of my personal thoughts on how Flow changes the way we deliver CRM projects can be found in the following presentation:

    In these slides you’ll find information about topics such as:

    • How does Flow relate to other MS technologies like Common Data Service (CDS)
    • What traditional CRM process automation scenarios could Flow be leveraged in
    • Is the new Dynamics 365 V9 capability of embedded Flows the replacement to now deprecated Dialogs
    • Why Dynamics workflows are still easier to work with than Flows
    • What licensing and administration considerations do you need to keep in mind with Flow
    • Microsoft Flow vs. Azure Logic Apps, what should you use where

    The actual presentation took place last weekend in Oslo, Norway, where I was invited to speak at the CRM Saturday event. It was the first such event that I had the opportunity to participate in and found it to an awesome experience! I had a great time meeting both the local Dynamics 365 community members as well as spending time with the very knowledgeable speakers and fellow MVPs. A big thanks to Microsoft Norway for graciously hosting us and to the community hero Marius Agur Pedersen for making the event possible in the first place!

    If you aren’t yet familiar with the CRM Saturday concept, I suggest you go check it out and keep an eye for future events where Dynamics 365 community members can get together and exchange ideas on how to make the world a better place for CRM professionals and customers alike. Do also keep an eye on the #CRMSaturday hashtag on Twitter for the latest buzz around the events and information shared from the presentations. At least Mohamed Mostafa and Jonas Rapp have also made their sessions’ slide decks available and I’m sure there’s plenty of other blog posts out there that have been inspired by these events.

  • All You Need to Know About Dynamics 365 v9.0 (For Now)

    All You Need to Know About Dynamics 365 v9.0 (For Now)

    The truth is out there. “There” meaning the social networks in this case. Unlike with previous beta programs (TAP’s or whatever they used to be called), the July 2017 release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (in short, “CRM”) was announced to the world in a three day event called Preview Executive Briefing that didn’t come with any NDA ties. As a result, the content from the live stream of these 37 sessions presented to us by the product team PM’s was free to be tweeted out into the world.

    That’s exactly what happened then. Community members like #CCOGNETTABOT didn’t settle for only capturing screenshots from the sessions into their own OneNotes but also shared it with the world under the #MSDyn365 hashtag. As the amount of information was approaching Big Data, I in turn tried my best to capture the most relevant pieces of the social stream and compile it into Storify. Not only did we end up getting a “best of” from the slides and live demos, also the most interesting Q&A responses from the product team were recorded here.

    Below is a link to each individual Storify collection, as well as the embedded story for a preview (ha!) of the content included there (if you’re viewing this on survivingcrm.com and not Dynamics Community).

    Day 1, 2017-06-20

    Topics included Unified Interface (earlier names “Unified Client” or UCI), mobile, field service, Unified Resource Scheduling (URS), CafeX, Social Engagement (MSE).

    Storify: Microsoft Dynamics 365 July 2017 Release Preview, Part 1

     

    Day 2, 2017-06-21

    Business Edition for sales & marketing (i.e. differences compared to Enterprise Edition), event management, LinkedIn, portals, USD, App Modules, Virtual Entity.

    Storify: Microsoft Dynamics 365 July 2017 Release Preview, Part 2

    Day 3, 2017-06-22

    Customer Insights, Organization Insights, Relationship Insights (notice a pattern here?), business process automation (BPF, MS Flow), multi-select option sets, security and compliance, Web UI refresh (for Enterprise Edition), Application/Platform separation (“solutionizing CRM”), Power BI, Data Export Service (DES), Common Data Service (CDS).

    Storify: Microsoft Dynamics 365 July 2017 Release Preview, Part 3

    What’s Next?

    This v9.0 is a major release, not just by the version number but by the sheer amount changes happening in the platform, the client, the apps and the services connected to Dynamics 365. Most of this will NOT arrive in July, instead it’ll be rolled out via Private Preview and Preview programs towards the eventual GA. I believe it’s definitely the right thing to do, seeing the number of moving parts involved here. Also, the investments made to the platform are specifically designed to make it more modular and less of a monolith that you have to upgrade in one big bang. Oh, and v9.0 is online only, with on-prem updates coming for the applicable areas after these things are tested in the cloud.

    You can still sign up for the preview program here. In fact, if any of this Dynamics 365 stuff is of interest, you MUST sign up, or risk being left seriously behind. After three long nights of watching the non-stop live stream from the Preview Executive Briefing of v9.0, at least I feel like I’m now just starting to know what I don’t know. No single developer ninja or superhero consultant can grasp all of this, so it’s important that you also make it a team effort and spread out the responsibility of keeping yourselves educated. My advice would be for everyone to review these summaries from the three days, let people pick out the areas that seem most interesting/relevant for their current and potential projects, then agree to start poking around with the preview environments and reading the related documentation as soon as they become available. And most importantly: share with the world what you have learned!

  • Dynamics 365: The Next Chapter of MS Cloud Business Apps

    Dynamics 365: The Next Chapter of MS Cloud Business Apps

    Have you heard about this brand new thing called “Dynamics 365” yet? If you attended or followed the WPC 2016 conference, I bet you have, since it was the big headline news for Microsoft’s partners and corporate customers that kicked off their FY17. Satya Nadella spent a significant part of the WPC keynote explaining how Dynamics 365 is the service through which his vision of reinventing business processes comes to life. So, obviously there’s got to be some big things packaged into this new offering. But putting the visions aside for a moment, what exactly does this service contain in practice?

    WPC16_keynote_Dynamics_365

    In short, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is both the same old and brand new when it comes to the underlying components. As presented by many of the tech news sites, essentially Dynamics 365 is about taking the previous Dynamics CRM & ERP products and bundling them into a single cloud service. Comparing it to “the other 365”, meaning Office, it’s not an entirely different approach than taking established server applications like SharePoint & Exchange and making them easier to purchase via a single Office 365 plan. While the name is different and the tools to administer the applications are specific to the subscription service, beneath the portal there are many of the same bits as you could have on your own servers, too. In the case of Dynamics 365, you’ll be mostly getting the latest versions of CRM and AX/NAV from the Microsoft cloud.

    “Ok, so we’ll have a new SKU to purchase Dynamics products from the cloud. A bit like the earlier bundles for Sales Productivity then, where you bought CRM, Office 365 and Power BI for a discounted price. Got it, can I now go back to chasing nearby Pokémons with my phone ’cause I’d really want to catch them all?” Well, if you ask me, I think you should look a bit deeper into the Dynamics 365 story to understand how it really will impact CRM as a product as well as the ecosystem around it. I too was initially a bit skeptical about this whole thing when reading the first press release from Microsoft, but the more I’ve investigated the pieces of information available at this early stage, the more I’ve started to believe that what we have here isn’t a mere product marketing stunt but rather the next major chapter in the story of Microsoft Dynamics applications.

    Satya’s Masterplan

    One year ago when Microsoft announced that they were going to tear down the silo of MBS (Microsoft Business Solutions) and merge Dynamics product teams into C+E (Cloud and Enterprise), Nadella said he wanted to “enable the company to accelerate ERP and CRM work and bring it into the mainstream C+E engineering and innovation efforts.” It took a while before saw what this “mainstreaming” really means, but I believe Dynamics 365 is the major output from this process that started with the restructuring. It is elevating the Dynamics product offering from being just an app you can order via the Office 365 portal and turning it into a proper destination of its own.

    Back when I was starting my first gig as a Dynamics CRM consultant in 2010, I distinctly remember the day after I had returned home from the Convergence conference in Prague. I was about to sign the contract with my new employer and was riding in a cab with my boss to be, catching up on the latest tweets (with my Windows Mobile 6.0 device and whatever apps we had back then). I came across Microsoft’s announcement of Office 365 and said to him “have you heard about this already, might be kind of a big deal for the business”. Well, the business of my upcoming employer was largely about hosted MS business applications and it turned out to a big deal indeed, as the rationale for offering local CRM or Exchange instances eroded much faster than most service providers were willing to understand – let alone for them to adapt to this new reality.

    Connecting_your_solutions_small

    How I see this relate to the recent Dynamics 365 announcement is that when you stop to think about the tools we work with these days, it’s not just about the cloud as a delivery channel. If it were enough for the customer organizations to just use their business applications via a browser, from a server environment managed by someone other than your own IT department, then we’d still probably be happily working in the BPOS era of application servers hosted by “someone out there”. In reality, it rarely is about the servers or even the server application bits. It’s about services: how they can be consumed and how information flows between them. Sure, someone of course needs to set up the services, but once that problem has been solved (e.g. Dynamics CRM Online removing the need for manually installing customer specific CRM instances) it’s time to start solving problems higher up in the value chain. This, I believe, is what Microsoft is aiming to achieve with Dynamics 365. Making it more than just the sum of its parts, by lowering the barriers between the apps and encouraging customers to build solutions that consist of a network of apps – from MS and ISVs. The new AppSource portal is therefore a very important part of the Dynamics 365 story (even though at launch time it’s not yet that much better than the infamous Dynamics Marketplace).

    Front to the Back with Dynamics 365

    Once launched later this year, Dynamics 365 will be available as two editions. The Enterprise Edition will be made up of Dynamics CRM modules and Dynamics AX, whereas the Business Edition is being built on top of Project Madeira (brand new cloud version of Dynamics NAV, from what I know). Details about the pricing haven’t yet been disclosed, but at WPC there were slides shown that outline the different plans that the Enterprise Edition will offer. Since the Business Edition is clearly a lot more “work in progress” at this stage, and because it might not even contain any of the Dynamics CRM functionality (if I read the WPC materials correctly), it’s best for us to focus on analyzing the Enterprise Edition.

    Dynamics_365_vs_current_SKUs

    Looking at it from a CRM perspective, the platform formerly known as Dynamics CRM is being broken down into smaller modules that can be purchased separately. We’ve already seen how the recent CRM Online enhancements like Project Service and Field Service have been introduced as separately licensed modules (and their trials are now distributed via AppSource), but with Dynamics 365 this will be taken even further. A sales user can be assigned only a license to the “Sales app”, rather than needing a “CRM Online Professional” license to manage their opportunity pipeline. Even without knowing the price points for per app licenses in Dynamics 365, it’s easy to see that the barrier for consuming application features from the cloud will be lower when you can only select what you want. In the on-premises world the traditional “all you can eat” model of Dynamics CRM licensing probably made sense, but if Microsoft now has the option to make their cloud service available in various different shapes and sizes, why wouldn’t they?

    Even though there will be more individual apps to choose from, the main value proposition of Dynamics 365 is in the possibility of making the whole end to end business process visible to the users. Traditional licensing silos between the front office CRM system and the back office ERP system have often led to scenarios where employees need to ask another employee to check information from a system they can’t access – or needing to work with limited snapshots or static reports rather than the real-time dynamic data from the business application. Microsoft surely recognizes this as a great opportunity to move customers gradually away from using legacy ERP systems by offering a cloud platform where the licensing model is no longer determined by the server application barriers but rather the workloads of the users. The Enterprise Edition contains a “Dynamics 365 for Team Members” plan that covers read rights to each and every application, from marketing to operations (the ERP part), which specifically addresses the information silo issue.

    How Can It Actually Work?

    Knowing that all the CRM and ERP applications under the Microsoft Dynamics umbrella have been completely separate products with little in common when it comes to architecture, how is Microsoft going to turn these into a single business application platform all of a sudden? Well, that is the billion $ question to which we don’t yet have an exact answer, but let’s speculate a bit while we await for it.

    Microsoft has announced that underneath the Dynamics 365 apps there will be a platform layer called Common Data Model. On the official Microsoft Dynamics blog this CDM is described with the following words:

    The common data model is a cloud-resident business database, built on years of experience with our enterprise customers. It will come with hundreds of standard business entities spanning both business process (Dynamics 365) and productivity (Office 365). The standardization and consistency of schema enables partners to build innovative applications and to automate business processes spanning the entire business process spectrum with confidence their solutions can be easily deployed and used across Microsoft’s entire customer base.

    Hmm, okay, so there’s at least going to be a new database in addition to the application specific databases of CRM and AX, as we can see from the Dynamics 365 architecture image below. The promise of a “standardized, consistent schema”  also implies that at least the OoB entities will be connected across CRM and AX without any additional configuration effort required. Now, how exactly the integration of custom entities can be configured, or how the platform will handle the business logic involved in each connected app is something that isn’t very clear at this point.

    Dynamics_365_architecture

    Surprisingly enough, the most detailed information about CDM was first released not via the Dynamics product blogs but on the Power Apps blog. The post PowerApps and the Microsoft Common Data Model gives us the first practical view into what functionality the CDM part of the platform is expected to deliver. Some examples:

    • CDM will encompass not only CRM and AX but also the data model of productivity apps like Outlook.
    • CDM will include complex data types like address and auto-numbering.
    • CDM will contain features familiar to CRM admins, like field level security and auditing.

    Dynamics_365_Common_Data_Model

    Once the CDM Preview arrives in August we’ll hopefully get to explore the contents and functionality of this data model via the PowerApps Studio at least, even though Dynamics 365 itself will probably arrive a bit later. On another PowerApps blog post, it was announced that there will be a Dynamics 365 specific SDK, which should be launched in preview mode before the year ends.

    Why does the PowerApps team work so actively in bringing this information available? There’s a simple explanation: PowerApps, Power BI and Flow are a fundamental part of the Dynamics 365 product offering. They are included in the Enterprise Edition plans and they form the new business application platform that supports the 365 apps on top of them – to the extent that there is now even a dedicated site to describe the capabilities of these three products.

    Business_process_orchestration_small

    Since business process orchestration is fundamentally a cross-application domain, it makes a lot of sense that you don’t only rely on the workflow process engines found inside applications like CRM. Also, if you’ve tried to leverage these three tools with current Dynamics CRM Online application, it soon becomes obvious that working with the relational data and specific data types of CRM is not where Power BI, PowerApps or Flow currently excel. Therefore what CDM as part of Dynamics 365 can offer for the business process orchestration tools to make the interaction easier is surely very welcome.

    Farewell to On-prem

    All of this you see coming available for Dynamics 365 is exclusive to the Microsoft cloud. Period. While you could of course take many of the individual technologies like Dynamics CRM and build custom integrations to your own servers, a single commercial offering licensed and managed by Microsoft will not become available for that environment.

    In the past Microsoft has been using the “power of choice” as an argument on why investing in Dynamics CRM technology is a safer choice than going with a cloud-only platform like Salesforce. Six years ago when CRM Online was launched that certainly was an important benefit of the MS stack. Even though the business world is a lot more “cloud ready” today, there still are many scenarios where a service hosted outside the borders of the customer’s country is not a valid option. Nevertheless, the power of choice isn’t such a clear differentiator anymore if pretty much everyone is making the same choice. For those organizations who are able to move ahead at the speed of cloud, there just has to be a fast track available. Sure, CRM Online has already been developing at a faster release cadence than CRM on-prem, but with Dynamics 365 the ties are officially cut now.

    AX_cloud_firstIt isn’t a completely new situation, even within the Dynamics product family. From what I know about Dynamics AX, the latest “AX 7” version has been designed not only as a “cloud first” but pretty much “cloud only” approach. The application architecture has been heavily redesigned and now relies on services from Azure, so it’s not something you could ever install on a Windows Server. The strategy for on-premises support is based on the Azure Stack product, which will allow customers to run a version of the same services on their very own servers. (In related news, the Azure Stack release plans have recently been revised: it won’t arrive for another year yet and it will require specific hardware when it finally does.)

    Does the announcement of Dynamics 365 mean that no investment will be made to on-premises Dynamics products anymore? No, at least according to the official statement from Microsoft. CRM, AX and NAV, meaning the in-house application layer of Dynamics 365, will continue to be developed, sold and supported. For example, AX 2012 will be supported until 2021 which gives some indication about the expectations Microsoft has on when existing on-prem ERP customers would really be able to adopt the new cloud offering of Dynamics 365. I bet that the hybrid scenarios will be taken into consideration as well when driving the adoption of the 365 cloud service.

    Still, if you’re looking for the latest Microsoft product innovations and integrating your business applications with the coolest new services, it’s hard for me to see how remaining in the on-prem land would be a viable option anymore. While new server versions will still keep on coming, having a new product feature that doesn’t require you to be running Dynamics 365 is probably going to become an exception rather than a rule. Already many of the latest CRM Online features have been built on Azure based services (offline sync for mobile, Relevance Search, machine learning in product recommendations) and the 365 cloud platform is going to make it even easier for MS to hook these things up to their business apps. The gap is just going to grow wider and wider.

    What Will Happen to XRM?

    Looking at the Dynamics CRM application specifically, there’s been a reasonably good parity between the Online and on-premises editions when it comes to the core XRM platform features. With all of these new integration points and platform layers now being developed for weaving together the complete Dynamics 365 service, it raises the question of whether the “core” really is inside XRM anymore or is it being actively replaced by something completely different?

    While I don’t think Dynamics 365 signals the death of XRM, it certainly does give a clear indication about how it is positioned in Microsoft’s new business application platform architecture. It’s what the individual apps are still built on (sales, project service, field service, portals, Voice of the Customer and so on) but it may not deliver the full user experience anymore. The users may interact with data through a purpose built PowerApp rather than the standard CRM client apps. The business process automation may jump across different apps via Flow, with CRM workflows handling only a part of it. The process metrics will frequently be monitored and analyzed with Power BI charts and not the CRM dashboards. I don’t think the 365 platform will overnight replace too many of the traditional XRM features, but it will undoubtedly set a boundary for feature development at Microsoft’s end if the new capabilities could be leveraged also outside the XRM apps.

    The arrival of a Dynamics 365 SDK means that the wider ecosystem of partners and service providers who wish to connect with customer organizations using Dynamics 365 may well choose to integrate their apps via this new API and not the XRM specific Web API, as modern and RESTful as it might be. Without knowing the exact services available in 365 it’s of course impossible to say yet what functionality would move to the CDM part of the platform, but since the whole point of CDM is to make it easier to connect cloud apps together, that’s where much of the development effort will naturally gravitate towards. Extending a specific 365 app like Sales with new UI level functionality will surely still require XRM developer skills, similarly as modifying the Operations app’s logic requires knowledge of X++ (the programming language for AX). Now, if you’re an XRM developer with no experience of AX, imagine being tasked with building a custom feature that needs to talk with both the Sales and Operations apps. Would you rather dive right in to learning X++ or start by exploring the common 365 platform SDK instead? Exactly. That’s how our solution design practices get disrupted: first gradually, then suddenly.

    XRM_cow_managementHonestly, the direction that Microsoft appears to be taking with Dynamics 365 makes perfect sense to me, and I see it as a brighter future for Dynamics CRM to be a part of this cross-application business platform – rather than a self-sustained “any relationship management” toolkit. No matter how awesome it is, XRM can’t do it all. It could certainly use a lil’ help in certain areas where Microsoft has more advanced tools available. If the new platform gives a wider set of options for me when designing solutions for customers then sign me up for it! Even if the administration experience or depth of functionality may not be on quite the same level when working with a set of connected applications sitting on top of CDM rather than a single XRM solution, it’s probably a price worth paying in the long run.

    Dynamics 365 explains a lot of the shortcomings with the current pieces of the MS cloud puzzle. Like: why must Power BI try and consume the CRM Online data via the slow OData endpoint when Microsoft could surely open up a shortcut between their two clouds? Well, here you go! The answer is that instead of taking the easy way out, a brand new Azure based architecture has been designed to support the current and future needs of CRM and other cloud business apps. It’s impossible for us outsiders to know all the different dependencies that the Dynamics 365 product strategy has had on the CRM feature roadmap, but it’s easy to imagine quite a few of them. I’m not expecting the floodgates to open with the initial release of Dynamics 365 this fall (more likely it’s a preview than a fully baked V2 platform), but I do expect the pace to pick up as the new strategy is executed on the commercial delivery side.

    How we’ll be able to transition an existing organization from Dynamics CRM Online to Dynamics 365 and connect to the Common Data Model is going to be a big question. I’m not worried about the application functionality really, as it might well be just a simple CDU experience of upgrading to the latest version. On the data model side, If there are some “best practices” implemented in CDM that don’t align with the customer specific entity model and attributes, then some refactoring of the existing CRM solutions may well be needed. While there may not be an immediate need to switch over, in the long run I expect there to be a number of services that target CDM specifically which cannot be used with a “legacy” CRM Online environment. As funny as it sounds, we may have indeed reached a point in the Dynamics CRM lifecycle where even the cloud based environments need a bit of a “reboot” to reach the next generation business application platform compatibility.

    It’s Always a Journey

    If we look at the history of Microsoft’s CRM software starting from 13 years back and analyze how the platform has evolved over time, we can see that up until the past couple of years, the progress made has been fairly product focused. Setting aside the app vs. platform debate on what the product is really about, the core package of what a Dynamics CRM server does has remained the same on a high level since the start, and I’d assume the story on the ERP side isn’t radically different either. It’s the world around it that has transformed into something quite different, and it’s this interface with the outside world of other apps and services where the most exciting stuff is happening.

    On the product code base level, Microsoft tried to merge their in-house CRM with the four acquired ERP products already over a decade ago with Project Green. As we now know, this never resulted in any “One Microsoft Dynamics” type of a platform nor new products being brought to market. When Satya Nadella (CVP of MBS at that time) was asked about why the ambitious initiative appeared to have stalled in 2007, his response was “we don’t have the goal of just convergence for convergence’s sake”. I can believe that while technically not an impossible task, there just wasn’t a clear enough business benefit for the customers to make them want to move into a single code base product merged from five existing applications, knowing how disruptive the migration could have been for their day to day operations. Fast forward ten years to the Dynamics 365 announcement and the business case now looks a lot more solid in this cloud era. Although the initial release of Dynamics 365 this fall is likely to be more of a preview than a fully functioning business application platform, it will already be a lot further in terms of visible platform harmonization than what Project Green achieved.

    While it’s easy to label almost anything in the IT business these days as “digital transformation”, there are quite a few signs that Microsoft is serious about aligning their set of different cloud products into a comprehensive toolkit for companies wanting to build and operate those digital business processes. How transformative will the end results be is something that we’ll see in time as the Dynamics 365 platform materializes. Whatever happens, Surviving CRM will be there to report on the progress of this journey!

    For a summary of what other community members have shared around the Dynamics 365 announcement and sessions from WPC, please have a look at this Sway presentation I’ve compiled from the #Dynamics365 tweets:

  • My CRM User Experience Presentation at eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw

    My CRM User Experience Presentation at eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw

    If you’re a Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner in EMEA then eXtremeCRM is definitely an event you don’t want to miss. This spring the event was arranged in Warsaw, Poland, and I had the pleasure of not only attending but also contributing to some of the content at the conference. Together with 8 other CRM MVPs, we all presented in our own sessions, did a joint “ask the MVPs” showcase and also got the chance to talk with many of the awesome Dynamics CRM community members at our Team eXtreme Pitcrew booth. Thanks to everyone who came around to compete in a lap of Forza 6 with the MVPs!

    eXtremeCRM2016Warsaw_Team_eXtreme_Pitcrew

    It was the first eXtremeCRM event where I was not only attending the breakout sessions but also speaking at one session of my own. The topic that I ended up covering was something that has been touched upon also in this blog a few times: user experience of CRM systems. In addition, the focus of my presentation was specifically on the no-code configuration possibilities and how they can impact the solution UX, in good and bad. (It seems to be a common misconception among the MVP’s that I would know something about writing custom code, when in fact I’m almost illiterate when it comes to the CRM SDK. But anyway…). You can find my presentation slides below, or access them via this direct link to Docs.com.

    In my session I covered quite a wide variety of topics. To start with, I wanted to address the business impact of CRM system UX and provide some tools for demonstrating why user experience not just about application usability but really about the organization’s ability to deliver great customer experiences. Then I reviewed some of the basic CRM customization best practices that we all should keep in mind when configuring our solutions (but which are all too easy to forget when dealing with schedule constraints in CRM deployment projects). I then explored the concept of how Dynamics CRM could be made to feel more responsive to the end user’s actions via tools like Business Rules, Quick View Forms and Real-time Workflows. Finally I highlighted the importance of continuously maintaining the UX of a CRM environment when both the platform, the usage patterns as well as the ecosystem around it keep on evolving at an ever increasing pace in the cloud.

    At eXtremeCRM there’s never a shortage of interesting sessions to attend, nor the amount of great new CRM roadmap insights that Jujhar Singh and the other members of Microsoft’s organization are there to share with the community. In an attempt to capture some of the highlights from the event, I compiled them into the following Sway presentation that includes content shared on Twitter via the #eXtremeCRM hashtag.

    That’s all for today, but do check back for the next blog post where I’ll be sharing some of the results from the Voice of the Customer survey that we did for the MVP session at eXtremeCRM.