Dynamics 365 Sales Professional Infographic

19/11/2022 Marko Totovic Business Central, CRM, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Power Platform, SaaS CRM, D365, D365 Sales Professional, Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 Sales, infographic, Licensing, Microsoft, price, Sales Professional, SMB, Upgrade

Recently I finished my session about using Dynamics 365 Sales professional with Business Central at Directions EMEA. But there were many questions about D365 Sales Professional capabilities… what is possible, where are limitations…

First, Sales Professional is a CRM solution for SMB companies targeting businesses with more straightforward sales needs with basic sales force automation and limited customizations. But it is still a powerful tool, and I wanted to show you what this app includes using an infographic model. You can see details here:

What more is essential to know? You cannot mix a Sales Professional license with Sales Enterprise (and other Sales licenses)… if you decide to use Sales Professional, you must use it for all Sales users. But if this is not enough for you (at some moment, your company has grown), you can upgrade this license to Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise.

If you like this infographic, I’ll add a similar one for Sales Enterprise.

Reminder about D365 Sales Professional

31/10/202228/10/2022 Marko Totovic CRM, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SaaS D365 Sales Professional, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 Sales, limits, trial

As I started to write about Dynamics 365 Business Central with Sales Professional series, you will probably need a few directions on how to test it and about limitations (when to accept them or to go to the Sales Enterprise). As I already wrote about it two years ago, I just wanted to remind you as this is something you will need if you want to track what I’m writing or more about my session in Directions EMEA.

There are two posts you should read if you are interesting for this topic:

Limitations and Dynamics 365 Sales Professional vs Enterprise

How to install demo environment with Dynamics 365 Sales professional

See you in the following blog posts or in Hamburg.

Dynamics 365 SMB Ecosystem Map – October 2022

27/10/202227/10/2022 Marko Totovic Business Central, CRM, Dynamics 365, ERP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Power Platform, SaaS Customer Service Professional, D365 Sales Professional, Dynamics 365, dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft, Sales Professional, SMB

You already know Microsoft publishes new releases two times per year (wave 1 in April and wave 2 in October). You can find all news in Microsoft’s release plans. There is also an amazing ecosystem map by Vadim Korepin about all solutions in Dynamics 365 family.

But as I’m most connected with SMB solutions inside Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, I wanted to share more details on what is available for SMB users and companies from Microsoft Dynamics 365 family. Three business applications (Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sales Professional, Customer Service Professional) covered ERP and CRM parts but with plenty of features. I’m sure no other vendor currently can offer more for SMB customers worldwide.

You can look at and download the Ecosystem map for Dynamics 365 SMB solutions I created (resolution is 3840×2160):

I hope this SMB ecosystem map will be helpful for you, and we will have more features and maybe even more solutions here in the future.

Business Central API’s and Available Methods

07/07/202007/07/2020 atotovic Business Central, Dynamics 365, LogicApps, Power Platform, SaaS actions, API, Azure, Business Central, Connectors, CREATE, custom, D365, D365BC, delete, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, dynamics 365 Business Central, entities, Flow, GET, limits, LogicApps, methods, parameters, Power Automate, Power Platform, PowerApp, update

If you use API’s in Business Central, probably you found some limitations in methods, depending on API to API. Sometimes you can do more, sometime less. For example, with Accounts you can use only GET method (I still don’t understand why?), and so on…

You can find details about all of them here, but I prefer to have everything on one place as it will be easier to decide if I would use standard API or eventually I need to create the custom one. Because of that, I’ve made this matrix with all standard API’s and methods you can use with them:

Except these limitations, it would be nice to know that you have some other limits as well and they are important if you want to use API’s in some solutions. Even if those limits are high, they are still limits. For example, you can have maximum 600 requests per minute in production environment and 300 in sandbox. Complete list of limits is here.

And what is also important? If you are using those API’s through Power Platform (or Logic Apps) connectors, you should understand their actions and parameters. All details can be found here, but there is a table for better understanding:

It is important to mention that all that information are subject of change.

Business Central OnPrem vs Azure vs SaaS

06/07/202007/07/2020 atotovic Azure, Business Central, Dynamics 365, SaaS Azure, chart, customer, D365, D365BC, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, IaaS, Infrastructure, Licensing, NAV, OnPrem, SaaS, Technology

A few last months constantly I see misunderstanding what Business Central SaaS offering is. To be honest I thought it is all well known, but often it is not a case. Because of that, I’ve readjusted standard IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS chart and made it applicable to Business Central. I think this chart speaks for itself, but if someone needs additional info, you can send a question and I’ll add details.

Just to be clear, on the top level where we have Company Data, I think on using BC as a system through UI or API’s. That means you are master of your data. You need to be sure how you enter and post your documents. But if we talk about configuration of system, mostly it will be done by your partner, but again this is your decision (as customer) to find trusted partner to work with.

As this chart cannot offer completely picture, I’ve added one more. First one was all about technology, but the next one is about licensing and what is included in system.

*) One thing maybe not 100% clear from this chart is infrastructure subscription if you are using BC on Azure (IaaS model). If you want to use Business Central deployed on Azure infrastructure (no SaaS), you can use a few different models. First you (as customer) can have your own infrastructure (1 VM, 2 VM’2, or VM + Azure SQL). The second, you (as customer) can use partner infrastructure and in this case you can dedicated hardware or services to you (as if you use your own) or you can use shared resources (more cost effective). In this case, middle tier can be used for more clients, as well as Azure SQL database can be added to Azure Elastic Database Pool and to get better performances and better cost. You can find ideas how to make it here (and this is important especially if BC SaaS is not available in your country). And one more thing… if you are using model BC on Azure, cost for OS and SQL Server is included in HW Subscription.

I hope it is now far clearer, but again if you need any additional detail, just send a question.

How to create trial environment for D365 Sales Professional

05/05/202005/05/2020 Marko Totovic Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Power Platform, SaaS CRM, D365, D365 Sales, D365 Sales Professional, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, SaaS, Sales Professional, Small Business, SMB

Here I am after a while. I’ve just started new video series about great new product Dynamics 365 Sales Professional. I’ll create probably dozens of different videos about functionalities and configuration, but in this first one I’ll start with how to create a trial environment.

If you didn’t already hear for this solution, just to know this is the great Microsoft CRM solution especially for small and midsize organizations and it is available as full SaaS solution.

Now, I hope you will enjoy in this first video, and I’ll notify you as soon as I publish the new one:

NAV 2017 Official Release Date and News from Directions

27/09/201627/09/2016 atotovic Conference, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, SaaS App, AX, Business, Cortana, CRM, CRM Online, Development, Directions, Directions NA, Dynamics 365, edition, Environment, GP, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, NAV, NAV2017, NAVUG, Project Madeira, SL

I’ve finished with a first two days on Directions NA. Both of these days I had sessions and I couldn’t prepare this article earlier. I wanted to say a lot, but I couldn’t.

First, NAV 2017 still didn’t official released, but finally we know when to expect. Not on Directions NA and not on Directions EMEA, but few days after that. Official release of Dynamics NAV 2017 will be at October 24^th. And, Microsoft also promised that we will get official release of Dynamics 365 for Financials (ex. Project “Madeira”) shortly after. OK, we will wait these dates, but generally we already know what we will get with these releases.

Some of these functionalities were presented by Marko Perisic and his team on Keynote, and some of them on other sessions. I’ll noticed some of the in this article, but I’ll write more about them in the future. Now, I want to speak more about future of Dynamics because I think this is something the most important in this moment. As you can see on the following picture, we have something very interested and Paul White said “This is an AND strategy”.

Based on this strategy Dynamics AX and CRM will continue to live only as part of Dynamics 365 solution. Something is not clear enough because we expect CRM as part of both Enterprise and Business edition of Dynamics 365, but AX will be part only of Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition and on other side, Project “Madeira” will be on the same position in Dynamics 365 Business edition. But NAV (GP and SL as well) will continue to exist as independent solution, in this moment available on-premises and as subscription. On the first sight this is the perfect for all NAV fans, but I need more time to be sure.

In any case, we will get new opportunities and we have to learn how to make the most of them.

And what about Project “Madeira” and licensing. We have some pictures earlier where we found recommended priced about 40 USD for each App. That is a true, for example if you want only Project “Madeira”, you need to pay 40 USD, but if you want some other app, for example PowerApps, you need to pay the same amount for this app per user per month. But if you want to have access to all apps (currently 4 of them), you need to pay only 50 USD for all of them as Plan model (and yes, this price will decrease with the number of concurrent users). And you can use Team Members for only 5 USD as some kind of limited users. And what is good more? If some of exiting NAV clients with Perpetual licensing model want to transit to new subscription model, he will get pretty big discount for every month.

And I said that I don’t want to write about all features, but I need to notice few of them. I already wrote about Cortana Intelligence in Inventory Forecast, but now we saw Cortana Intelligence in Cash Flow Forecast; it is a perfect and you can use this in NAV 2017 and Project “Madeira” and the best is that it is very easy for using and configuring.

End something more – new development environments. First you can use Visual Studio Code in the future as new code oriented environment (soon more about it). Marko presented live work with new tool.

And on the end, new development tool for incredibly easy work. You just need to click on Edit button in your Web Client and you will get perfect logical environment where you can change pages, add fields to table and page… And on the end just click Stop and choose how you want to use this development… You can see all changes as preview in Web Client, Tablet Client and Phone Client. And all changes will be finished in Web Client and Windows Client, as well (of course, this is just short description – soon more about it).

End again about dates, the new development environment preview will be available for Christmas.

How to Configure Bricks – Madeira and NAV2017

25/08/2016 atotovic Microsoft Dynamics NAV, SaaS Brick, Madeira, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, NAV, NAV Madeira, NAV2016, NAV2017, NAVUG

I’ve got a few questions how to configure Bricks I already wrote on NAV 2017. Generally, Bricks are not something new. We already had a Bricks on NAV 2016, but we used them only in Phone Client. I already wrote how to configure Bricks on Phone Client here.

I don’t expect something special in NAV 2017 about Bricks. To open the Field Groups window, on Table Designer just choose View, and then choose Field Groups. In a table, we can see two Field Groups: DropDown and Brick. If Brick Field Group doesn’t exists, DropDown is interpreted as Brick.

What is new here? News is that we can use Bricks in other clients. I still cannot speak more about it (it is still by NDA), but everything I mention is the same as on NAV 2016. And yes, if you want picture on item, you need add picture as part of Brick Field Group. About Project “Madeira” you cannot use Development Environment for customization and you can change it only using Extensions.

I hope, this is good enough. More about it when we get official release of NAV 2017.

Bricks in Project Madeira and NAV2017

15/08/2016 atotovic Microsoft Dynamics NAV, SaaS Brick, Dynamics, Madeira, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, NAV, NAV Madeira, NAV2017, NAVUG, Project Madeira, Tiles

Very often, using of standard lists in NAV were not so comfortable because of specific data sets. Now, we will get some new feature that all list pages can be showed as “bricks”. If you remember, we used bricks in NAV 2016 for Phone Client. But now, we can use this for all lists: Customers, Vendors, Bank Accounts, Chart of Accounts, Currencies, Items, all Journals… You just need to choose brick view:

You can configure what you want to see on bricks and optimize space and readability for data that appears in these pages using a Brick Field Group. You can change importance of these data and their layout changing orders of them.

But if you choose Items, you can see more. Not only list and bricks, you can choose tiles as well. Difference is that you can put item picture on both bricks and tiles. Again, you can configure what you want to see by yourself:

NAV 2017 Roadmap

04/08/201617/08/2016 atotovic Microsoft Dynamics NAV, O365, Power BI, SaaS agenda, Directions, Directions NA, NAV, NAV Madeira, NAV2017, roadmap, WPC

In just two month, Microsoft will publish new Microsoft Dynamics NAV version. In the encounter of this event, month ago Microsoft published the last NAV roadmap on WPC in Toronto. Now, we can see what will be generally the main features in NAV 2017.

We still cannot notice a lot of things (these thing are not so clear), but if we try to use Project “Madeira”, we can find a lot of some new features and that means, we can expect the most of them in NAV as well.

In the same time, Directions NA has already published agenda for this conference and now we can see the main topics, because NAV 2017 will be published in this period. See you there.