Microsoft Dynamics 365 Takes Advantage of the Cloud

What New Licensing Changes Mean for Your Organization

Josh Sutelman

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the next iteration of intelligent business applications via the cloud. Dynamics 365 fuses CRM and ERP (Dynamics AX) capabilities by delivering new purpose-built applications to manage business functions. Dynamics 365 has two main editions: Enterprise and Business. The Enterprise edition is aimed at organizations with 250+ users and includes the capabilities of financials, field service, sales, operations, marketing, and customer service. The Business edition is for organizations with 10–250 users and includes Dynamics 365 for Financials (currently known as Project Madeira) at launch sometime in early 2017.

The plans in Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition will be under the user subscription license (SL) model, meaning licenses must be purchased for users to access the service. But while some of the individual applications can be purchased as user subscriptions or service subscriptions, the subscription licenses include rights to the main instance included in the subscription and to additional Dynamics 365 (production or non-production) associated with the same Azure AD tenant.

Dynamics 365 also greatly simplifies the licensing by classifying the user as either a “full user” or “light user.” A full user is someone whose work requires a greater range of app functionality – for example sales people or even customer service representatives. These users in the past were pro or power users. The licensing model for full users is either by the Dynamics 365 Plan (1 or 2) or an application subscription.

Light users are often the large group in an organization – users who might consume data reports from different business systems or might complete small or simple tasks like time entry or updating HR records. These light users are licensed with the Dynamics 365 Team Members subscription.

The existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online plan was retired November 1, 2016. However, if you are a current subscriber, this change won’t affect you right away. The global administrator will receive email updates and see posts in the message center (part of the Office 365 admin center) with information on when you need to take action. Drop us a line to learn more about this.

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