Top articles of 2020: Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM)

In the CRM space, Microsoft's year has been defined by the steady release of new and updated products. Some were re-released to align differently with the broader business applications portfolio ( Dynamics 365 Customer Voice (previously "Forms Pro" and Project Operations), while updates to Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales offered more typical product enhancements and expanded feature sets. The year also saw Microsoft re-commit to offering its own industry-focused solutions like those in nonprofit and healthcare.  

The articles presented below represent Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement-focused news and articles that covered 2020's most notable product changesd the topics that our audience was most interested to read about. 

Microsoft has finally deprecated the Dynamics 365 for Outlook COM add-in (Mar 30) 

This older model of Outlook integration for Dynamics 365/CRM had been a target for replacement for years, but Microsoft delayed the final move several times over at least three years. The company made a definitive announcement of its demise in March 2020, with the COM add-in's end date of October 1. The long slow demise of this tool reflects its importance for some organizations. And this article's consistently high traffic stats (even past October) provide one more example of the broad impact of this change on customers. 

Microsoft to introduce two new Dynamics 365 apps: Project Operations, Finance Insights (Feb 19) 

Project Operations officially replaced Project Service Automation this year. The change appears to have come from the product team's desire to rationalize project-related applications to bring all the strengths together, from project finances to project management tools to project resources, into one offering. The result is a new offering that Microsoft promises will be richer in capabilities than its predecessors. So far, however, it also seems to be a more confusing product for existing customers to understand and prepare for. Microsoft explained that there will be transition licensing that should prevent most customers from seeing their costs explode as a result of the change. But as a supposedly unified offering, Project Operations now faces a more formidable challenge: bringing together disparate capabilities (some updates are not planned until mid-2021 at the earliest), filling in some notable gaps, and rationalizing the whole thing atop Dataverse.  

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