Welcome to the “Introducing” series!

Today we will introduce to the second of three Clouds which Microsoft provides. In the last part of this series, we introduced Microsoft 365. When most people we talk with hear the words Microsoft and Cloud, they assume what we are referencing is Azure and in most cases that is correct. It is important to note however that Microsoft has three different Clouds. In this blog post, we will provide some details on the “Dynamics 365” or D365 cloud solution.

D365 Cloud Solution

In the first blog post of this series, we discussed the various applications which are used as part of our daily jobs such as email and word processing. As mentioned previously, these are commonly referred to as commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) apps as they are not custom to an organization or a specific vertical industry such as healthcare or finance. Many industries utilize specific types of COTS software to provide functionality such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). These types of COTS packages are what we will be discussing in today’s blog post.

From a high-level, Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based business application platform that combines components of customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). As a cloud-based solution, they also integrate artificial intelligence for applications to provide a variety of insights around sales and customer. Dynamics also integrates with the Microsoft Power Platform to provide additional capabilities. For a quick introduction video on D365 cloud solution check this out.

• D365 cloud solution is the subscription services version of Microsoft Dynamics. As a quick summary from the previous blog post subscription services update throughout the subscription and continually evolve to provide more features on a quicker cadence.
• Dynamics 365 is designed to assist in seven major areas:

• Sales, Marketing, Service, Finance, Operations, Commerce, Human Resources (HR)
• An off-the-shelf product in this space makes a lot of sense as these seven areas are extremely common in most organizations.

• One of the interesting aspects of Dynamics 365 is that it is a platform that you can use to build out your custom applications. As an example, Catapult Systems has a Grants Management solution built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• To keep up with what’s going on with Dynamics 365, check out their blog.
• Pricing/available plans for D365 cloud solution:

• Information on licensing for Dynamics 365 is available here and a licensing guide is available here.

Thank you to Chad S and Beth F for their help on this blog post!

Series Navigation:

• Go back to the previous article in the series: Introducing the first of three Microsoft Clouds: M365
• Continue to the next in this series: Introducing the third of three Microsoft cloud: Azure