Microsoft Dynamics 365

1.      How does Dynamics 365 benefit customers?

Dynamics 365 will bring together the best of our CRM and ERP cloud offerings into one cloud service with specific, purpose built, apps for each of your key business processes such as Finance, Sales, Customer Service, etc.

Dynamics 365 provides customers a modern and familiar experience with built in insights, intelligence and workflow.  They also use a common data model and consistent application platform to ensure consistency, interoperability and extensibility. Dynamics 365 enables businesses to:

·         Start with what they need by offering apps that fit roles, industries, businesses, so our customers can start with what they need to grow at their own pace and run their entire business in the cloud.   

·         Enable greater productivity where they need it by connecting structured workflow of business applications and processes with the unstructured work of collaboration and productivity, so employees are empowered with productivity tools surfaced in the context of their business processes.

·         Get built-in intelligence with business applications that infuses big data, advanced analytics and IoT into processes out-of-the-box to proactively guide employees and customers to optimal outcomes.  With Dynamics 365, data and insights are transformed into action for intelligence where it’s needed.

·         Be ready for growth through nimble, adaptable applications that allow them to compose, modify and extend processes in real-time. Business users are empowered to change and adapt with a technological enabling platform.  Organizations can reimagine their business model with a consistent, flexible, extensible platform.

2.      Why did you choose the name Dynamics 365 and what does it represent? 

Dynamics 365 is our next generation of business apps in the cloud. These apps bring together the full power of Microsoft across productivity, advanced analytics, Power BI and IoT with the strength of Azure and a new application platform and common data model. As such, the new name reflects the significance of the offering and the coming together of two worlds: structured business processes and unstructured personal productivity, so our business customers can achieve more.  

3.      Is this just a marketing/repackaging exercise or are you offering a new product?

Dynamics 365 is a net new proposition that combines new products, new product capabilities, new packaging and new pricing.  We are taking a new approach to how we develop our products and bring them to market.

4.      Do all these Dynamics 365 apps really work together seamlessly?

All of Microsoft’s intelligent business apps will align to our new common data model, and an extensibility model that combines existing customization tools with PowerApps and Flow. We have made solid progress towards apps working seamlessly together, and it’s an effort we’ll continue as we redefine business processes to eliminate historical boundaries between CRM and ERP. Cortana Intelligence Suite, IoT and PowerBI all play key roles in how we help businesses be more outcome driven as well as give our customers and our Partner ecosystem the ability to leverage our new common data platform to integrate legacy and 3^rd party solutions with Dynamics 365.

5.      What is the "Common Data Model" and what role does it play with Dynamics 365?

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 that solutions can be easily deployed and used across Microsoft’s entire customer base.

6.      Are all these business apps built on the Azure platform?

We are focused on bringing the vision and value of Dynamics 365 to our customers. Microsoft Azure is the focal point from which we will drive innovation in Dynamics 365 and we will continue to adopt Azure capabilities as they are made available.  We will continue to leverage Office 365 and existing Apps outside of Azure to deliver on the vision.

7.      Will Dynamics 365 be available on-premises?

No.  Dynamics 365 is a cloud service, so it will not be available as is, on premise or in private clouds. 

We will continue to innovate and support Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, NAV, GP and SL solutions.  We will also offer customers connectors if they want to use a hybrid of on-premises and cloud solutions and a migration path when they are ready to move to the cloud.

8.      What happens to the Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, SL and CRM brand/ products?

This is the evolution of our business apps. New versions of Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM will come together later this year to create the Enterprise edition of Dynamics 365.  The Business edition of Dynamics 365 for Financials is based on Project Madeira, which is in public preview in North America. In the months following general availability of Dynamics 365, we plan to rapidly expand the number of countries where Dynamics 365 for Financials is available. Dynamics NAV, GP, SL continue to be enhanced, supported and licensed to new customers for on-premises and private cloud deployments.

9.      Does xRM provide the consistent app platform and a common data model?

The technology referred to as xRM is the current application platform technology that support our customer engagement (and CRM) workloads. With the new Microsoft Common Data Model, we’ve taken extensive learnings from xRM as well as other application platform technologies from our Dynamics applications such as Dynamics AX and Dynamics NAV. Based on these learnings we have developed a new data framework that is natively built on the Azure platform services and provides a rich set of standard business entities for our customers and partners.

10. Is xRM going away?

No, the xRM technology is not going away. We will continue to invest in this technology to support core extensibility scenarios required for our customer engagement solution.

11. What does Dynamics 365 offer for Small and Midsize Businesses?

At launch, Dynamics 365 will include Dynamics 365 Financials for Business, a comprehensive accounting and business management solution for SMBs. That offering is currently in preview in the US and Canada today under the name “Microsoft Project Madeira”. In the months following general availability of Dynamics 365, we plan to rapidly expand the number of countries where Dynamics 365 for Financials is available. Furthermore, as announced during the US User Group Summit in October, 2016, Microsoft plans to release additional applications such as Sales and Services for the Business Edition during the Spring 2017.

12. What level of SLA will apply to Dynamics 365 particularly to Dynamics 365 Business Application for Operations? What is Microsoft’s guaranteed uptime and does Microsoft Azure services credit policy apply?

The service level agreements (SLAs) for the current Dynamics online product can be found in the Volume Licensing site. We expect the SLAs for Dynamics 365 products to be consistent with these agreements, but are subject to adjustment with the alignment of the services.

13. How do customers and partners access Dynamics 365 data for usage in PowerApps and Microsoft Flow?

PowerApps and Flow can connect to a wide variety of cloud data sources to create composite business apps and workflows. Access your Dynamics 365 data for usage in PowerApps and Flow through a common set of connectors. Connectors for Dynamics 365 for Customer Services, Field Services, Sales, Project Services, and Operations are available today.   

14. What is the CRM/AX Product Roadmap for Common Data Model?

We are not migrating any of the current workloads to the Common Data Model (CDM). CDM is a key capability of PowerApps that will enable customers and partners to build more powerful applications more quickly. In the future, we will replicate data from Dynamics 365 directly in CDM to make it easier to build Apps. We foresee that 3^rd party ISVs can build a similar data replication to represent their key data in CDM as well.