What Dynamics 365 means to you

Dynamics 365 will affect you differently depending whether you are a CRM Online user, a CRM on-premise user or partner hosted CRM user

CRM is dead – long live CRM

On 1st November 2016, Microsoft will launch Dynamics 365 in the United States.  From an ERP and CRM software perspective, Dynamics 365 is mostly a change to branding and bundling.  So how will the focus change from CRM, and particularly CRM Online, to Dynamics 365 affect you?

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From launch, American and Canadian organisations will be able to acquire Microsoft Dynamics 365 Financials. For Australian users, we will have to wait until early next year, when the Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales Business Edition is released. The formal launch of Dynamics 365 occurred at the CRM User Group summit in Florida earlier this month. The illustrations in this article are some of the slides from the launch.

Dynamics 365 is an app based approach to business software. Initially it will comprise the cloud version of Dynamics 365 for Financials – previously Project Maderia - small-business financials offering and Microsoft's Dynamics AX ERP suite, then Dynamics CRM Online. Dynamics 365 will be integrated with Office 365, Power BI, with Cortana Intelligence, the Office Graph and, some time after Microsoft's acquisition receives approval from regulators later this year, LinkedIn.

This will provide businesses of all sizes (from an American perspective) with a scalable, modular suite of unified applications to manage right across your business. To drive impact, businesses need to be able to modify and innovate on a range of products, not just in silos.

To read the rest of this article where I look at:

• What is in Dynamics 365 at launch
• The roadmap for Dynamics 365
• What Microsoft Dynamics 365 will give you that is new?
• Questions that still need to be asked of Dynamics 365 including how Dynamics 365 will handle large volumes of data, what is the opportunity with Dynamics 365 for smaller organisations, the plans for current on-premise users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and pricing for all users who want different configurations of Dynamics 365.