Article

Why Microsoft's Dynamics 365 SMB Strategy Must Offer More Than Simplicity

by James Crowter
Managing Director, Clever Dynamics

Microsoft have revealed more details of their Dynamics 365 licencing to partners this week. A huge 173 page presentation gave us all a lot to think about as we try to understand the future and how it will affect our prospects and customers.  

One obvious conclusion from it all is that the ‘Enterprise' plans are a lot more well developed than the SMB focused ‘Business' ones at this point. My other conclusion is that the Business edition will need to evolve considerably to be a success.

With Enterprise, at least on the slides you know that the applications listed such as Field Service and Project Service are there and available. Even Operations in the form of Dynamics AX 7 has come a long way down the road by reaching general availability this year. Yes, I know the integration story still has a way to go and that PowerApps and certainly the Common Data Model are not there as Microsoft would like them yet. But at least a company in the market today could look at what is there, understand what it will be, and start to plan around it.

In the SMB space though the plan is much more confusing. There are slides showing sales and marketing apps which are coming next spring and apparently are based on a ‘simplified' version of Dynamics CRM. There is something described as ‘Financials' which is the released version of Project Madeira, itself a simplified version of Dynamics NAV. And that's it apparently, apart from the surround applications such as Power BI, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, etc.

And Microsoft's description of Business is that it is aimed at companies with between 10 and 250 employees, so we are not talking micro businesses here. These are businesses that are looking to upgrade ...

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About James Crowter

I'm passionate about how businesses can improve their efficiency by getting process optimal more of the time. For the last twenty five years I've worked to help organisations of all sizes and types implement the ERP & CRM software that typically they decide they need when things are going wrong. I've seen that work unbelievably well and enabled those organisations to rapidly grow but I've also had some hard projects over that time where it's felt more like warfare at times.

Since 1996 (and version 1.01) I've been working with a small Danish product called Navision that's now become Microsoft's Dynamics NAV and I've also been using and consulting around Microsoft CRM since 2005. As managing Director of one of the longest established first Navision and now Microsoft Dynamics partners I've been involved in the complete history including numerous product councils and system design reviews. It's my privilege to know many of the key Microsoft executives and product designers and have insight into both where the products are now and their future direction.

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