Understanding Dynamics 365: Enterprise edition
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Enterprise offering is primarily aimed towards larger businesses; however, the solution can still be utilised in the SMB / SME market. The Enterprise SKUs are a great place to start if your customers are looking at streamlining specific areas of their business; mainly in Sales, Customer Engagement, Customer Service or Field Service. It means your customers can mix and match between the different applications depending on their individual needs, saving on costs and boosting efficiency.
Enterprise differs quite significantly to Business Central, more closely matching the features seen in the wider Dynamics portfolio, including CRM and ERP. As noted above, Enterprise is streamlined to cater for specific job roles and business processes, making it easy to provision for users that tend to carry out similar tasks on a day-to-day basis.
So, for example, a Sales Manager and their team may need full read/write use of the Sales module to access price lists and quotes, but only need a team members license for Customer Service and Customer Engagement. On the other hand, a CMO may need full read/write access to the Marketing and Customer Engagement applications, but need a team members license for Sales, Finance and Operations and, perhaps, Retail. Financial Administrators may need read access to all applications, but only write access to Finance and Operations. With these examples, it’s easy to see how customers can benefit from a variety of applications in Dynamics in a cost-effective and productive way.
What is Microsoft PowerApps?
Your customers may want to be able to manipulate and visualise their business-critical data in ways which require a custom application to be built. Microsoft PowerApps is a way to build an application using defined templates without the need to enter a single line of code. For example, say your customer wanted to access their data on a smart device while travelling, so they could write notes and assign them to contact records or if they want to get data from multiple applications, such as Excel, OneDrive, SharePoint and Dynamics 365, an app can be built to do just that.
Building an app for your customer doesn’t have to be complex. It’s a much more powerful and flexible piece of software in comparison to the limited functionality of the Dynamics mobile app, for instance. Let’s take Confluent – a market leader in complex business process automation and workforce mobilisation – as an example. Confluent designed the Go Onboarding application in PowerApps to streamline HR processes and employee onboarding. It allows employees to discover their own ‘Onboarding Adventure’ and includes specific locations similar to an augmented reality (AR) mobile game. It promises to be a fun and exciting way to onboard future employees. It’s just one of the ways PowerApps can be utilised to its full potential, though you can easily choose simple and more accessible options for your customers when integrating applications.
Is Enterprise right for my customer?
If your customer has been using Dynamics CRM Online or Dynamics CRM 2016, the Enterprise options can be flexible to their needs. You’ll need to determine what they are hoping to achieve in Dynamics 365 to assess what the most cost-effective option is for them. The CRMOL qualified offers, in particular, can deliver considerable discounts when transitioning. For more information on Dynamics 365, check out the rest of our Understanding Dynamics series on the Giacom blog, or contact our Sales team on 0333 332 0888.