Category: News and events

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!

June 23, 2017
Spring in The Dynamics 365 World
The recent Business Forward event with a keynote from Satya Nadella served as the launch event for the Spring 2017 wave of Dynamics 365 product functionality. If you didn’t catch the live stream, you can see the recordings of the various presentations here. Of if you just wants some snacks from the event, why not take a look at my Storify collection of tweets shared on the event backchannel:

Let’s explore some of the most exciting pieces of news that we know about the upcoming release.

I’d Like To Add You To My Professional Network on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is naturally a big focus for Microsoft, after paying some seriously big money for the network. The first commercial offering from MS on the sales side seems like more of an evolutionary step in bringing the LinkedIn Sales Navigator product closer to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. The familiar iFrames will still be how LinkedIn content is displayed in the context of accounts and opportunities, but now also the activities from LinkedIn will show up on the standard Social Pane of Dynamics 365 entities.

If you think of the old “democratizing social” message we’ve heard with capabilities like Microsoft Social Engagement offered at no extra charge, LinkedIn won’t follow exactly the same pattern. The bundle of Sales Navigator + Dynamics 365 Sales App (not Plan) now called Microsoft Relationship Sales solution still comes with a price tag that will not lead into everyone having unlocked LinkedIn tools and network data at their disposal. Not a huge surprise, since why would you give away this “new oil” for free to customers who’ve just bought the car from you? Those target groups who see value in these sales acceleration tools may still find this to be a better deal than the earlier offers.

The other new product seems to be a bigger step forward as MS enters the Human Capital Management (HCM) game with their Dynamics 365 for Talent app. Again, the foundation here is sure to have a lot of the LinkedIn recruiter functionality covered in a new coat of Dynamics paint, but at least based on the Business Forward live demo this looks like quite a thorough paint job. The sales guys will apparently still be kept largely in the familiar LinkedIn territory in terms of the user experience, but Talent seems like an “authentic” MS app following their design language.

There probably won’t be so much beef in Talent for the XRM people, but the ERP integration with existing AX/Operations HR features surely has great potential.

It’s The Insight That Counts

Talking about other Dynamics products outside of the XRM platform, one new entrant into the scene that has been popping up quite frequently on the recent slides is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Judging by what MS showed to the industry analysts at the BF event, there will be some UI changes from the current Preview that will bring this closer to Dynamics and further away from the initial “Azure Customer Insights” version that we saw last fall.

It’s been a bit difficult to evaluate the true capabilities of the Customer Insights application up until now, since actually connecting it with Dynamics 365 data hasn’t been possible earlier. Once all the Azure Data Lake and other elements that this application depends on are fully available across different regions, perhaps we’ll soon get some hands-on experience to contrast with all the big words that have been associated with Customer Insights so far. At least all the segmentation and visualization features appear to be much more targeted towards real life CRM scenarios than some of the more generic analytics capabilities in products like Power BI.

Speaking of which: I almost missed this announcement, but Power BI now as a connector to Customer Insights, which opens up some new scenarios. If the various analytics options didn’t have your head spinning yet, then the new Power BI Premium with on-prem server deployment options might just do the trick.

What About XRM?

Looks like there are shiny new applications coming for the Dynamics 365 product portfolio, some of which are leveraging the Common Data Service (CDS) as the backbone. It makes a whole lot of sense to use the latest technology for brand new apps, but that doesn’t mean the XRM platform would have been forgotten. To get a glimpse of what the Spring release will be introducing on this front, you can head over to the Dynamics 365 Roadmap site and pick an XRM based app like Sales, then see the “In Development” lane. Below are a few examples of the items currently listed:
- Virtual Entities. “With Virtual Entities, System Customizers and Developer have the power to build complex business applications to view external data in Dynamics 365 at runtime without having to make multiple copies of the data.”
- Portal interaction tracking. “Track your customer’s interactions with your Portal and funnel it to Dynamics 365 Customer Intelligence to plot a 360 view.”
- Support Azure AD-B2C for Portal authentication using a single sign-on (SSO) configuration.
- Source code for Portals. “A one time release of Portals code will be released to the Microsoft Download Center under MIT license for developers to download. This feature enables Portals to be deployed to Dynamics 365 on-premise environments, and allows developers to customize the code to suit their specific business needs.”
Expect to see the list grow as we move closer to the planned release date. A lot of great features have already been presented in MS events, like in-context Flows in Dynamics 365, or improvements to the user experience. If you want to be the first to gain access to the upcoming features, then be sure to check out the recently announced Dynamics 365 Insider Program.
May 14, 2017
From MS CRM to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Last year when Microsoft officially launched their Dynamics 365 commercial offering, it marked the end of the Dynamics CRM brand. Initially launched as “Microsoft CRM” in 2003 and then rebranded as “Microsoft Dynamics CRM” in 2005 (see the first 10 years of the platform’s history in this blog post), the acronym “CRM” had become a big part of the identity for the ecosystem surrounding the software product. Nevertheless, there were fair arguments for why those three letters had gradually become a bit of a liability for the rapidly expanding cloud business applications platform that now reaches far beyond the familiar CRM grounds. My point of view can be found from the post “The End of CRM as (Microsoft) Software”, which turned out to be one of my most popular writings in 2016.

So, out with Dynamics CRM and in with Dynamics 365. Problem solved! Except that this time around the rebranding had a bit wider reaching impact, due to the fact that it covered not only CRM but also the ERP side of the house. And not just one but two ERP’s: AX and NAV. With the catchy names “Microsoft Dynamics 365, Business edition” and “Microsoft Dynamics 365, Enterprise edition”, MS has almost managed to hide the fact that each of the editions consists of two completely separate application platforms. A bit like what they did with Office 365, which seemed to have worked out very well for MS, so not a surprise we’re seeing the same playbook in action again.

In this new world, we now have the concept of an “App”. You could, for example, license just “Dynamics 365 for Sales, Enterprise edition” if you don’t want to manage cases, or “Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, Enterprise Edition” if leads and opportunities are not on your radar. Financially the incentives for buying the complete “Plan 1” with all the Apps is quite strong, though, so the App model may not become a big part of the conversation after the customer has made the license acquisition and the real fun begins – as us “consultants formerly known as CRM consultants” surely are well aware of.

The real question that remains is: what exactly do you have once you’ve bought the software license? Unless you opted for the full suite of Plan 2 and also acquired the ERP application called Operations (in the Enterprise edition), you’re dealing with a subset of Dynamics 365 that does not have any name. If you go XRM and create custom entities, they do not exist inside the walls of “Sales” or “Customer Service” specifically. They’re in “CRM”, just like 90% of the platform functionality exists across all the Apps.

Why using the generic Dynamics 365 name can become confusing is that you can’t assume any text containing it to be about the ex-CRM part of it. It might as well be about ex-AX or ex-NAV. If you go and look at the SDK documentation on MSDN or the newer site at docs.microsoft.com, all they talk about is “Microsoft Dynamics 365”.

As long as you have a long history of working with any of the three platforms, you’ll probably be able to identify what the text you’re reading refers to after a while. But what about all the newcomers that the Dynamics ecosystem needs to attract, in order to continue on its growth trajectory? How will they know what applies to which platform? As an example, here’s what the new MB2-715 certification exam page originally looked like:

“Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online Deployment”. Mmm, yeah, so will this cover both CRM and AX? If you would ignore the CRM old logo with the “Sails” that have actually been discontinued since WPC 2015 announcement already (and can still found in some Microsoft sites & services), the actual description text of the exam never once mentions if its about CRM or ERP. By scanning through the related course material on Dynamics Learning Portal, the word “CRM” is completely avoided in every place – even though it’s obviously all about our beloved platform. The reason of course being that there hasn’t been anything sensible available to replace CRM with, if you stick to the official MS branding guidance.

This is just silly, and being the brutally honest consultant that I am, I also voiced my concern over on Twitter about this. In fact, there was already an earlier discussion I had with some of the community members about this lack of proper product names for us to use. Nick Doelman wrote a great blog post about this, so go and check it out for context. Yesterday, when I was again browsing through a list of the latest DLP materials, though, I came across a term that I had been expecting to see in public facing Microsoft sites for quite some time now. Here it is:

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. There we have it, folks! The MB2-715 exam description was updated not just with the new logo but also a name that properly describes which particular platform the exam is about. I’ve seen this term being unofficially used among MSFT personnel, but now we get a search engine hit for it that’s not just partner content.

What do I think of the name? I believe it’s the right compromise to make, given that CRM must go and XRM is too technical for the wider audience. It’s most likely not a brand that Microsoft is too thrilled about promoting, but it’s a name that must exists – because there aren’t really any other good options around. The way I see it, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement isn’t so much the result of a grand vision but rather it has been born out of necessity. And I for one am perfectly happy with starting to use it, if indeed this becomes the third name for the XRM platform. Not the Apps, but the thing that was MS CRM and Dynamics CRM back in the days.

So, should I now rush out to buy a suitable domain name for “Surviving Customer Engagement”? Hmm, I think I’ll hold off from any rash decisions, since the kind of changes that we saw with the Dynamics 365 launch last year are maybe good for grabbing media attention but not the optimal approach if you just want to get your message across to the Dynamics community. CRM will be around for a while, even though we may gradually need to shift towards using a bit different vocabulary when talking about the business application platforms that we work with.

March 9, 2017
I’m Back! …In The CRM Rocks Podcast

Happy New Year to all the Surviving CRM readers! Yes, it’s been a while since the last post, so I’m only kicking off 2017 in February this time around. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be anything of interest happening in the Dynamics 365 – quite the contrary. In fact, there’s so many things going on all at once that even the most hardcore XRM fans may need to take a quick breather to let things sink in and figure out where to focus their energy next in the #MSDyn365 space.

Those of you who having been following this blog for a longer time may have come across a few podcasts that I’ve been recording with my buddy Markus Erlandsson. CRM Rocks is where it’s at, and I’m glad to let you know that Markus invited me into his virtual recording studio for the fourth time. Together we did the 50th episode of CRM Rocks: The State of Dynamics 365 (Sales) in 2017.

Some of the topics we discussed during this episode include the following:

We still have “Surviving CRM”, “CRM Rocks” and many things related to the term CRM – even though in the official Microsoft lingo the product name Dynamics CRM is no more. How are things working out in real life for this?

How is Dynamics 365 really different from the Dynamics CRM Online cloud service we had just a moment ago? Is it all just a new licensing scheme invented by Microsoft? And what’s the future of XRM with all these shiny new Azure services like CDS hovering over its head?

How have the Field Service and Project Service extended the footprint of C… sorry, Dynamics 365? With both Operations and Financials apps surrounding the XRM apps, what’s the resource management story? Will everyone’s ERP’s be in the cloud now?

What’s been happening on the Social front lately? How can we expect the huge money spent on LinkedIn acquisition to start showing up in the Dynamics product portfolio? Will the Singularity arrive once the LinkedIn data and MS algorithms are fused together?

Finally: what the **** is going on with the Marketing apps? What will come after Dynamics Marketing, how is it going to be delivered and to whom? And why is MS pushing Adobe Marketing Cloud as a preferred solution over their own or ISV products?

That’s easily more than an hour worth of geek talk, but Markus managed to squeeze it into 56 minutes. So, if that sounds like your cup of audio, then go and listen to the latest CRM Rocks episode.

February 14, 2017
Reflecting on Dynamics 365

The past couple of months leading to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 commercial launch have been interesting, to say the least. A lot of things happening, but in a way that hasn’t been all too easy to grasp. I’ve started a lot of draft blog articles around the topic yet I haven’t written that much about Dynamics 365 – because I haven’t really known what to say about it. After visiting Redmond last week for the annual MVP Summit and talking to all the awesome Dynamics C… sorry, Business Solutions MVPs, I’ve decided that it’s time to just start putting my thoughts out there. I believe this is the best way to gain more clarity on the topic, rather than trying to come up with the ultimate, complete definition on what Dynamics 365 is and how it will impact different parties.

In Loving Memory of CRM

First, let’s get this thing out of the way: CRM is dead. Yes, believe it or not, but from a Microsoft product marketing perspective this is absolute the truth. There isn’t a single SKU available now after November 1st that would carry the three letter acronym we’ve come to know from the Microsoft business software offering during the past 13 years. I wrote an article on this change in branding and why I think it makes sense, so go and have a look at it if you’re interested in the details: “Why is Microsoft dropping ‘CRM’ from its Dynamics branding?”

Second, Dynamics CRM as a technology is totally alive and kicking. It’s bigger than it’s ever been and about to get even more massive with the road ahead that is Dynamics 365. XRM remains the backbone on top of which most of the new Apps in Dynamics 365 will be built. In fact, it’s the non-XRM products in the portfolio that are being axed, with Dynamics Marketing being replaced by a new XRM based Marketing app for Dynamics 365 Business Edition, and Parature being discontinued as the features mostly already exist in the XRM service. So, the real reason why Dynamics CRM isn’t called “CRM” anymore is because it’s grown so far beyond what the humble beginnings of the product were back in 2003.

Third(ly), all of this means we’ve ended up deep in the enterprise territory. The number of different applications included in the Dynamics “customer engagement” portfolio (which appears to be the unofficial new term for the CRM platform) is now so big that no single individual in the world can claim to be fluent in all those areas. As a result, fully deploying these applications into real life business processes is a task that will require significant investments from the customer organization – even if they are configurable cloud apps rather than custom software. The current offering + the new features are now sold under the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Plan for a good reason and the pricing of the whole package has been increased to reflect the potential value that can be derived from it. The SMB story around Dynamics 365 remains unclear as of now and we’ll need to wait a while before the dust settles. To get an understanding of what’s going on there, I recommend you to subscribe to the writings of one Dynamics 365 Fighter Pilot to keep up with the latest news.

A Bigger Picture

The whole story of Dynamics 365 isn’t just about taking two products, formerly known as Dynamics CRM and Dynamics AX, then offering them as a single subscription service. Yes, that ease of acquiring a full business application platform from Microsoft cloud is already a major step forward and a big competitive advantage. However, CRM + ERP <> 365. Don’t settle for that explanation if a Microsoft partner gives it to you, because there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.

The timing of Dynamics 365 commercial launch coincided with the general availability of two new Microsoft products, PowerApps and Flow. These two cloud services are so intertwined that I don’t actually think they are separate entities, but rather components of a single “thing”. What that thing is exactly is not so easy for even Microsoft to articulate, but I’m expecting the story to evolve quite rapidly on this front. Just recently, the Common Data Model that I covered in a past blog post during its first preview was renamed to Common Data Service, to better reflect the true nature of this piece of the cloud business apps puzzle that Microsoft is putting together.

Since both PowerApps and Flow have been advertised not only as parts of the Dynamics story but also the broader productivity offering of Office, they’ve received far more attention in the blogs than a more recent entrant to the scene: Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights. Also known as “Azure Customer Insights”, or “Cortana Intelligence Customer Insights”, it is something that sits outside of the CRM platform, but when viewed from the perspective of business strategy, is definitely very much about CRM. You see, the purpose of Customer Insights is to deliver on the mythical “customer 360” promise that countless customer relationship management initiatives throughout the past two decades have aimed for – and often missed. It is the analytical CRM, where the traditional systems that some of us have spent their whole professional lives developing and deploying are firmly in the operational CRM territory.

Rise of the Machines

This leads us to the bigger vision that Microsoft has around more intelligent computing. While the existing business applications both in the Office and Dynamics product lines are being developed at a more rapid pace than ever before, they alone don’t reflect what the future of business software will be like. The term “transactional platform” has been used by Microsoft in reference to what XRM as we know it represents. This platform is not going away, rather it is becoming increasingly integrated into the direct interactions with customers via different channels, rather than the oldskool salesforce automation scenarios where a sales rep recorded information manually into the CRM system about these interactions. Alongside this platform, a new pillar is being built: the analytical platform.

“What’s so special about that? We’ve had data warehouses and BI tools integrated into our CRM systems for years and years already.” A fair question to ask, my dear fictional reader voice. Data analysis systems are of course nothing new in the realm of CRM, but they have often focused on reporting on the old world of business data coming from CRM and ERP databases. What’s different this time around is that both the sources of data and the quantity of the actual data, which are growing faster than the traditional BI solutions can cope with. You don’t need a new platform to build an even fancier opportunity pipeline chart from the data your sales reps are entering. You do, however need a whole different approach once you start automating your business processes based on the IoT device data that millions of sensors will be sending in a million times a day.

Although it may not seem like an everyday scenario just yet for most Dynamics customers out there, this is the future that Microsoft is very seriously preparing for. As one data point, the newly established Microsoft AI and Research Group has (or will shortly have) 5000+ computer scientists and engineers working on “democratizing AI”. What this means is that machine learning algorithms will be embedded into each and every service that Microsoft offers, to crunch the data inputs from various sources inside and outside your company, in an attempt to make the applications more intelligent. In Dynamics 365, Relationship Insights are the first taste of what added value Microsoft’s data cloud can provide when the algorithms get to work on the communication network data from both XRM as well as your Exchange Online.

This new form of intelligence will become both a built-in feature of the common business applications as well as a capability that the business application platform allows you to build on top of your customer data, business process data and, increasingly, sensor data. The first examples we’ll see might not be so glorious in practice yet (I’m totally expecting to see some less intelligent recommendations from Dynamics 365 Relationship Assistant), but the machines may well learn faster than many of us would predict. Also, even if your business wouldn’t be manufacturing any smart IoT devices to generate endless streams of data, there’s bound to be other valuable data sources out there that can be connected with your business processes. Microsoft didn’t spend $26B on LinkedIn just to get an excuse to spam you with email every day, so I bet we’re going to see some pretty compelling B2B insights being offered from this treasure trove of professional network data.

Welcome All Species

Back in the days of oldskool CRM things used to be simple: on one specific date a new package of bits would become available, people would find a server to install it on by following the deployment guide steps and… TA-DAA! Here was your business application! People would start entering letters and numbers into the system via their keyboards, to be later viewed by different people sitting in front of their own keyboards. Now we’ve got cloud software we can’t really touch, rolling out into our virtual subscription containers at an unspecified date, containing new functionality that we’ve barely seen for a few seconds in video stream broadcast online. New cloud apps keep popping up like mushrooms and they form a fungus-like network beneath the surface, communicating with one another in ways we can’t easily observe. They gradually find their way into new business processes and, thanks to the evolving AI capabilities, pretty soon start actively altering the behavior of us mere mortals who interact with these apps via any screen, keyboard not required.

The future isn’t scary, but it’s different. There isn’t anything specifically forcing you to work differently than you did a decade ago with your CRM software, thanks to the backward compatibility of core features and the underlying stack of MS technology. If you’re paying attention, though, you’ll see everything around you being gradually replaced with something else, expanded beyond the borders that used to be there just a moment ago. Close your eyes for too long in this environment and when you open the curtains you might be shocked to see that your cozy lil’ cabin has been surrounded by an urban metropolis that grew around you while you were sleeping. That hectic new lifestyle out there is going to take some getting used to.

It’s not a single thing like the Dynamics 365 commercial launch or the deprecation of CRM as a product name that’s responsible for the change. They are simply logical steps on the way towards a much broader set of tools for a universe of use cases that keeps expanding a lot like our physical one – at an increasing rate. Which means that unless you want to remain stuck on Planet CRM, there’s a lot of space exploration ahead for all of us.

November 16, 2016
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?

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

It 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.

Honestly, 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:
July 15, 2016
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!

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.

Killer UX – Delivering a Great CRM User Experience without Custom Code—Jukka Niiranen

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.

April 27, 2016
eXtremeCRM 2016 in Warsaw – See You There!

As you may have heard, the long running Microsoft Dynamics CRM & ERP conference Convergence is no more. Microsoft has revised their event catalog and is now instead encouraging people to attend either the brand new Envision conference for business level discussions or Ignite for the technology platform updates. However, since both these events are much more generic in nature than the Dynamics focused Convergence used to be, it does leave quite a gap in the market for the CRM application deep dive content. Also, there’s nothing in the MSFT event calendar that would directly cater to the Envision and Ignite crowd in Europe, so anyone from around here who doesn’t want to spend too much time on a plane (and mentally in between time zones for the relatively short period of the conference) may not be quite as excited about these changes as the marketing message coming from Redmond might want them to feel.

Luckily the Dynamics CRM ecosystem isn’t dependent on only the events that Microsoft arranges. CRMUG has been building up their presence also on this side of the Atlantic and is now launching their first European Congress this spring in Stuttgart. eXtremeCRM is a long running event that has been catering to both the US and Europe partner audience for many years already and they’ll also have an event nearby very soon, as eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw takes place on April 18-21. So, whether you’re working on the customer’s side of the table or consulting a variety of different organizations on how to best take advantage of Dynamics CRM, there’s bound to be the right event for you where you can meet professionals like yourself, exchange ideas with them and hear presentations from knowledgeable members of the #MSDynCRM community on what’s hot (and not) in the CRM space.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a CRM conference myself but this year I decided to make room in my customer projects calendar for attending one, since one doesn’t simply survive in this business with content you can find from online sources and social channels. So, I registered for the eXtremeCRM Warsaw event early on and then decided to also suggest a topic I could do a presentation on. The suggestion got approved, which means… well, the picture of yours truly right underneath Jujhar Singh says it all!

I’m honored to have the opportunity to join such a prestigious list of speakers in the eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw event. I wont of course be competing on the level of Jujhar (who BTW seems like exactly the right man for the Dynamics CRM GM position, based on our encounters at the MVP Summit) but will rather be focused on preaching what I know. Which is all about how to make the most of the XRM platform when you don’t know how (or just don’t want to) work with the API’s but rather need to leverage the built-in customization tools. My session is titled “Killer UX: Delivering a Great CRM User Experience without Custom Code” and what I’ll try to do is show how anyone who knows his or her way around the solution configuration UI can make a real difference in what Dynamics CRM as an application feels like for the end users to work with.

Now, I should of course be working feverishly on my presentation slides already, but here I am just reading and writing blog posts like I always do. If you’ve ever encountered a situation where instead of focusing on completing the important work that has a deadline approaching in the distant but all too inevitable future, you find yourself wondering around between Twitter and YouTube instead, then you know the feeling. Well, speaking of online videos, there just happens to be an excellent TED Talk from Tim Urban on the topic “Inside the mind of a master procrastinator”. You really should watch it because A) the Instant Gratification Monkey inside your brain will totally love the distraction, and B) it’ll help you better understand the dynamics of (not CRM but) procrastination.

“Hey, get off the wheel, you Monkey! We haven’t even finished this blog post yet! Grrr…”

In addition to myself, there are also eight other awesome CRM MVP’s who are coming to Warsaw. We’ll all be having our own sessions of course, but in addition to that, there will be a joint session where the audience can present questions to all the CRM MVP’s in the room on the latest CRM 2016 Spring Release in particular. Now, as we were thinking about what’s a good way to coordinate such a session, it occurred to me that “hey, why couldn’t we use CRM for this?” More specifically, wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to showcase the new Voice of the Customer functionality that’s very recently been made generally available for CRM Online customers?

As it turns out, Voice of the Customer (or “VoC” as we’ll all end up calling it) allows you to easily design surveys on any topic that you’re interested in collecting data on. If you haven’t yet explored this great new addition to the XRM family of add-ons that Microsoft has integrated into the core Dynamics CRM product offering, you could start by watching this introductory VoC video on YouTube. Or, you could see a VoC survey live in action by answering our eXtreme MVP Survey.

The survey is mainly targeted at those who are planning to attend the eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw event, but there’s nothing stopping you from taking it if you can’t make it there. The survey starts with some questions about the event and closes with a “feedback form” that you can use for submitting your questions to the CRM MVPs in advance, to be answered in the live event (time permitting). It also contains a few questions about how you feel about the upcoming CRM 2016 Spring Release, so I’m planning to also experiment with some of the analytics capabilities that these XRM style surveys offer us. I might even write a blog article about how the VoC experiment worked (unless the ‘Monkey gets its way again), so it’s all conducted in the name of science! (No marketing spam will come from this survey, it’s my personal CRM Online trial org that will disintegrate within a couple of months.)

March 28, 2016
Everything as a Service – Not Just Your CRM

Spring is in the air, at least if the Dynamics CRM 2016 Spring Wave announcement is anything to go by. It’s pretty amazing that only 2 days after we were given the 2016 update for our CRM Online environment there’s already the next batch of updates to pay attention to. Now here I was thinking about spending some time experimenting with the new v8.0 functionality like the Interactive Service Hub or Knowledge Articles and OH, LOOK, A NEW RELEASE WAS ANNOUNCED! (Welcome to my goldfish bowl…)

Another thing that further contributes to the growing inability to concentrate on just a single CRM version at a time is that, well, there aren’t really any proper versions anymore. Sure, there are still official announcements regarding the major (Fall) and minor (Spring) releases, but it’s not like there would be a single point in time when the product bits become available for you to download. To a certain extent they still do, for the type of software that’s shipped as bits on MSDN, but if you’ve been working with Dynamics CRM for a while you might have found yourself thinking “all the fun stuff’s in the cloud”. I certainly have, and I don’t even see anything wrong with this, because pulling off this type of continuously updated application delivery is in practice only really feasible for customers when it’s consumed purely as a service.

By the time the CRM 2016 version became generally available, as in new CRM Online trial orgs were provisioned with v8.0, there was a slight feeling of “meh” when you discovered that most of the coolest new features touted in the Release Preview Guide were actually not yet there. No Mobile Offline, no Voice of the Customer surveys, no Relevance Search, no External Party Access… Many of the features being developed didn’t appear to have made the release train of v8.0 and were instead moved to what seemed like a Plan B, meaning rolling them out in limited Previews rather than the big fanfare of the GA. This would have been quite controversial back in the days of “one release every three years”, but these days it’s not really such a big source of concern at the end of the day, because there is no “gold master” disc to signify an RTM product anymore.

Recently Microsoft released an official Roadmap site for Dynamics CRM, which may be a small step for content management but a giant leap for the release policy around the CRM product. Following on the footsteps of many other MSFT product teams, like Office 365, this further moves Dynamics CRM into the service delivery model as the traditional product versioning gets pushed behind the scenes and the application functionality is brought to the forefront. Yes, the sysadmin will still need to be aware of the specific release that his or her CRM Online instance is running on, but from a business perspective this is becoming less and less relevant. New things will arrive in a continuous stream and the decisions for how to deploy a particular application functionality and what actions are needed for ensuring user adoption is an ongoing task for the persons in charge of making their workforce more productive and building customer facing processes that meet or exceed their ever going demands.

I guess it’s fair to say the world of CRM software reflects the bigger picture of how we the individuals are also operating when it comes to acquiring the things we desire: as a service. Instead of making big upfront investments in gaining the full possession of physical goods or property, our consumption patterns are increasingly leaning towards making a few clicks in an electronic environment and gaining access to the missing piece that will fulfill the needs we’ve identified. Our magic wands with wireless connectivity can be used to conjure up pretty much anything that you can imagine via a “buy now” button somewhere, almost at the exact moment you’ve thought of it. The end product may still be a physical package that gets delivered to your door, but the experience that the customer receives from your company is increasingly being evaluated against not how well the physical gizmo has been crafted but rather how well the various interactions around the customer lifecycle stages of information acquisition, financial transaction and ownership/service consumption are in line with the expectations that the customer had when he or she embarked on this journey. (more…)

March 6, 2016
First Glance At Dynamics CRM 2016
Another year, another major Dynamics CRM release! What a time to be alive, eh? CRM 2016 has now been published for new Online trial instances globally and will be coming available as on-premises download within the next couple of weeks. If you haven’t yet explored what’s new with Dynamics CRM 2016 then I recommend starting from the following three links that I personally always refer to when discussing the latest version:
Rather than just making it a “go and RTFM” type of post, here are a few notable features in the latest release that I personally think you should pay attention to.

Start From The Top

For folks upgrading their on-premises CRM environments, this is definitely a sizable release, as the features from CRM Online 2015 Update 1 (v7.1) are only now becoming available to them. Working mostly with CRM Online environments these days, it does really feel painful whenever I have to go back to the pre-7.1 Nav Bar, so the new navigation experience should definitely cheer up your users who are now spared from the game of sideways scrolling accuracy Olympics. I’ve yet to find a single thing that the new navigation would be worse for than the old one released in CRM 2013. Don’t forget to configure a custom theme & logo for your CRM while visiting the customizations menu! Oh, and remember to leverage this Theme Generator, since MS apparently had to cut the development budget when it came to “nice to have” things like color pickers instead of hex codes.

Moving from 7.1 to 8.0 may not deliver any immediately visible changes to you, as Microsoft has largely decided not to introduce anything dramatic in the look & feel of the familiar web client. One thing you may notice, though, is a yellow notification bar telling you something about an “interactive service hub” and asking you to “experience it now”. Hmm, sounds interesting, so maybe I’ll click on it and… Whoa, what’s happening?! Why am I seeing the same customization download screen as on the tablet client? And where did half of my menu items from the Nav Bar go all of a sudden?

So you thought there’s not much new in the CRM 2016 UI, huh? There definitely is a lot of new investments to be found here, ranging from brand new “interactive experience dashboards” to updated form layouts with embedded cards, revised components like Timeline (ex Social Pane) and new concepts like the Reference Panel (“Related”). It’s all built on top of the MoCA framework, and it gives you a taste of how the Dynamics CRM application of the future will behave: less like a web page and more like an app.

Why do I say “the future” if it’s in fact already available in CRM 2016, for both Online and on-prem customers? Well, if you’re an existing Dynamics CRM user, the chances are that you’re not going to deploy this into production use quite yet. For starters, it only supports a limited set of the core CRM entities like account, contact, activity and case. Sales opportunities, leads, marketing lists or campaigns aren’t within the scope of this release. While you can show custom entities in the Interactive Service Hub, you’ll not be able to perform many of the more advanced customization tasks that the traditional Dynamics CRM web client supports, like embedding web resources or Iframes to forms.

There’s a lot to like about the new user experience that this “interactive” web client presents us with. The new dashboards especially appear to address many of the requests that CRM users typically have, like the ability to apply global filters to all the charts. The method of presenting related records and streams of activities is definitely more in line with the way modern mobile apps work, even if the experience itself feels a bit too mobile for a full size monitor in terms of information density. Still, in its current state it remains more of an experimental release that’s not meant for wider adoption yet. Much like the infamous Polaris release prior to CRM 2013, this Interactive Service Hub will be best used for learning about and preparing for the direction of future Dynamics CRM web clients.

Explaining this grand scheme of things to the customers will be tricky, as it was with Polaris. For example, in order to leverage the new Knowledge Articles you have to access them via The Hub, presumably because Microsoft hasn’t wanted to build a rich text editor UI for the old web client anymore but has rather focused their investments on MoCA. Within the right feature scope you can probably do cool stuff with this client already, it’s going to required setting the right expectation level right from the start. Oh well, I guess that’s what us consultants are there for…

CRM Via The Apps

On the mobile apps there is now the ability include new types of visual controls for the mobile forms that can make CRM data both a lot more pleasing to the eye as well as easier to work with on a touch screen device. While many of these new controls would surely be great additions to have on normal web client forms as well, Microsoft has decided not to enable them for browser users of CRM in this release. Remember what I said about the MoCA framework being the focus area for MS?

Task Based Experiences (“TBX”) a.k.a. Task Flows is another new feature that is not just “mobile first” but “mobile only”. The idea behind these experiences is to be independent from the underlying entity relationship model and rather guide the user through a set of screens that present a subset of only the relevant fields from each related record that need to be touched in the process. What’s a bit cumbersome in this release is that TBX isn’t actually launched for a specific record but rather from the bottom left corner of the mobile app start screen. It’s almost like the old (and mostly abandoned) Dialogs feature from CRM 2011 but with a more modern approach, including the ability to add nice looking photo icons for the launch menu. (more…)
December 3, 2015