License

Business Central Free of Charge

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Directions EMEA has just been finished, and there was a lot of good news. One is access to the Business Central environment with the Microsoft 365 license. Now statement ‘free of charge” is partially correct.

What does it mean? You cannot get the Business Central environment free of charge as you must buy a minimum of one full user to get access (the whole article is about the cloud option). But when you have access to the environment, you can get free-of-charge access for all your users with Microsoft 365 license. This is huge news. As far as I know, there is no business solution (minimum, no global solution) to which you have free access. Of course, Microsoft will not cannibalize itself, and this access has some limitations, but this is a fantastic thing and can dramatically increase this solution’s use in the future.

You can find details in the following table about what you can use in Business Central with which license type. I hope it is helpful.

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Where is the limit in Business Central CRM capability and when integrating it with D365 Sales? (part 1)

Marko Totovic Business Central, CRM, Dynamics 365, ERP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We know that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (previously NAV) is primarily an ERP solution. But even so, this product has some customer relationship management capabilities. And name ‘Business Central’ probably comes because this solution can provide all business activities in one solution. But as this is primarily an ERP solution, the biggest strength comes in ERP, and in other areas, such as CRM or HRM, the level of functionalities is significantly lower. But let us make an overview of what is already in Business Central, but we can say it can be treated as CRM.

First, what we can find are a good customer and contact management. Still, as customers play an essential role in every ERP solution, we can emphasize more about contact management where we have some basic information about contacts and some segmentation.

You can also find some level of creating and tracking opportunities and sales quotes and interactions. You can also have some possibilities to make direct phone calls from BC or send an email. This is more or less what we have, but this is not a small number of functionalities.

Today I’ll not go into details about all these features. I just wanted to show some basic information about them and explain on a high level in which situation you should think about an additional and full CRM solution. As a full and independent CRM solution, I’ll focus on Dynamics 365 Sales Professional:

  • First, naturally, if you don’t have enough functionalities, you will take a specialized CRM solution, but let’s talk in detail on another occasion.
  • Second, the price can be an issue. If you have pure CRM users, they still need to pay $70 or even $100 for the license as they must pay a BC license even if they need only CRM capabilities. Sales Professional full license price is $65, and you can get full CRM. But with the new attach license for Dynamics 365 Sales Professional, BC clients can add a full CRM solution for an additional only $20.
  • Third, as I mentioned in the beginning, Business Central is still primarily an ERP solution, meaning its UI is built for ERP and not for CRM. Even if you have many CRM features, when we compare usage of these features, this is definitely not even close to being useable as in a regular CRM solution.
Dynamics 365 Sales Lead to Opportunity Business Proces Flow

Today I wanted just to make a high-level overview, but in future texts, I’ll try to be more accurate about when CRM in Business Central is enough for you and when you should think about integration with Dynamics 365 Sales.

Adding External Accountant to Your Business Central

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If you use Business Central online, I’m sure that you need to connect your external accountant or your reseller partner to your tenant without buying new license. This is something you have included in your license. Never mind how many user you bought or if you have Essential or Premium users, you can invite up to 3 external users (External Accountants). These 3 licenses have the same use rights as your standard license except access to the user setup and admin tasks. What these users can do in your system, depends on you. But just to remind you… I’m talking about external accountant, not about internal accountant. This is important to remember as this license is not for internal stuff.

But let’s focus how you can add them. First open Users page and run Invite External Accountant.

When you run this action, new welcome page will appear. You should read it and if you agree, click I Accept (otherwise you need to stop and you cannot add user 🙂 ).

Click Next and fill in minimum mandatory fields. These fields are your external accountant contact details: Email, First and Last name. You will see there is a welcome message your accountant will get as email. You can change it or type in your language.

When you finish with details, just click Next and wait a little while. How long? It depends on many things, but it is usually a few seconds up to minute until system invite your accountant. When system finish, you will get a message that person you added was successfully invited. Close the page and enjoy.

You accountant will get an email message with text you entered in invitation as well as URL where he/she needs to log in. And yes, when you finish with adding accountant as user, do not forget to add user permission sets you want. And if you check license for this user, you will see: Dynamics 365 Business Central External Accountant.

OK, everything I described is related if everything is OK, but what if you have some trouble. I have two common issues you can often meet in a practice. Both of them will be met on the first step when you run invitation action.

First you can have an issue with licensing. Event if these 3 users are free of charge, they are not automatically added to tenant. CSP partner have to do it and if partner forget it, you will get an error message No External Accountant license available. Contact your administrator.

In this case only what you can o is to contact your CSP and to require adding these 3 licenses to your tenant. When these licenses are added, they will appear in your Admin Portal.

Now we have another case when you are not a global administrator or a user administrator in you AAD. In this case you can give yourself proper rights or you can ask administrator to do this task.

Dynamics 365 Sales Professional vs Sales Enterprise

Marko Totovic Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM , , , , , , , , , ,

In my previous post (video), you could learn how to create Dynamics 365 Sales Professional demo environment. If you are experienced with Dynamics CRM solutions you can recognize differences between this solution and enterprise version, but if you are newbie I would like to introduce you with all differences you can find there.

03-What-is-Dynamics-365-for-Sales-Professional

On the first place, we can split them to the two types of clients:

  • Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise – full sales capabilities
  • Dynamics 365 Sales Professional – core sales functions at a reduced rate for businesses with simpler sales force needs

But if you want more details and especially if you need to promise something to your client, you should have details. Let’s start with details. First list is list of all features Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise has, and Sales Professional has not:

  • Access via Portal or API
    • Non-employees only: Work Orders
    • Non-employees only: Opportunities
  • Entities (Create, Update, Delete)
    • Max 15 Custom Entities
    • Competitors
    • Embedded Intelligence
    • Forecasting
    • Product Families
    • Product Hierarchies
    • Product Relationships
    • Quick Campaigns
    • Sales Goals
    • Sales Hub
    • Sales Literature
    • Territories
  • Entities (Actions)
    • Business card scanning as add-on (10 users/month: pooled at tenant level)
    • Business Units (Define and Configure)
    • Knowledgebase (create, update, publish, configure, search)
    • Teams (Define and Configure)
  • General System Use (Actions)
    • Max 5 customized Business Processes Flows
    • Max 2 customized Forms and Views per entity
    • Max 15 custom Workflows
    • Max 5 custom reports, charts, and dashboards
    • Without custom system reports, charts, and dashboards
  • Additional Services and Software
    • Dynamics 365 Gamification (Player & Admin)
    • Microsoft Forms Pro
    • Microsoft PowerApps
    • Dynamics 365 Sales Insights
    • Max 10 ISV solutions

If your conclusion is that Sales Professional doesn’t have a lot of features it is not a true. Sales Professional has a pretty big number of very good features and it can cover probably the most of SMB company requests.

But let’s add some of advantages of Sales Professional. This list is maybe not so big, but quality of this list is more important than quantity:

  • Price: full price is 65$ and this is 30$ less then enterprise version
  • Attach license to Business Central; if you already have Business Central, you need to pay only 20$ for license. As you already have integration in Business Central with D365 Sales, it is a real benefit both a price and functionalities.
  • UI is better (mostly in configuration) as this is intended for SMB customers.

If you need core CRM functionalities and solution easy to implement, Sales Professional is the right solution for you, but if you need all CRM functionalities you should choose Sales Enterprise.

As I see Sales Professional as a great opportunity for small companies and especially for those who already use Business Central, I’ll be focused on this solutions with the following posts (probably mostly videos).

Dynamics 365 Business Central Licensing

atotovic Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics NAV , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As we already had insight in Dynamics 365 Business Central and this solution will be available in only three days, it is a moment to get more information about licensing. In this post I’ll show only the basic important topics regarding licensing.

As we already know, there are three licensing types Premium, Essential and Team Members. Premium and Essential will provide full access to solution, but not to the same level of features. Essential has most of the future, but not Manufacturing and Service Management (this is included in Premium package). And very important thing is that we cannot use a mix of these two user types. You must choose what level of features you need and all full users must use the same license type.

D365BC licenses.PNG

As a Team Member, you can do the following:

  • Read anything within Dynamics 365 Business Central
  • Update existing data and entries in Dynamics 365 Business Central – existing data are records like customer, vendor or item records which are already created. Entries means entries on which it is specifically allowed from an accounting perspective to update specific information. (e.g. due date on customer ledger entries)
  • Approve or reject tasks in all workflows assigned to a user
  • Create, edit, delete a quote
  • Create, edit, delete personal information
  • Enter a time sheet for Jobs
  • Use PowerApps for Dynamics 365

And more, it is important to know that the minimum number of full users is 1 and w don’t have a maximum number of users (you can register number of users you need). But keep in mind, we are talking about named users, not concurrent.

And Dynamics 365 Business Central Essential, Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium and Dynamics 365 Business Central Team Members also includes the PowerApps for Dynamics 365 Applications license.

Dynamics 365 Business Central users are not provided with any standalone or general-purpose Power BI license or use rights, but this subscription includes an option to embed Power BI content as a product feature but require users to subscribe to Power BI separately to configure access to this content.

And with a question what we have more included, this is important table:

D365BC environment

Customers who wish to expand beyond the default subscription capacity included in Dynamics 365 Business Central will need to have a separate Azure subscription.

But on the end as very important: please do not use this article as license manual. If you need more details for licensing of real or potential customers, please use an official Dynamics 365 Business central Licensing Guide.

Counting Named Subscription Users in NAV – 2nd part

atotovic Microsoft Dynamics NAV , , , , , , , , ,

In my previous post, I tried to explain how to handle with named users in NAV. But I’ve got a few feedbacks with some additional questions I didn’t cover in this text.

The main question was what if I want to stop to use some account temporary, for example because sick leave or vacation or something similar? In this case, we can disable this user.

DisableNamedUsers

When you try to login the next time, you can see system will not count disabled users. Then you can decries number of users for some period. When your user come back, you need to increase number of users in your license and just enable this user.

Second very important topic is that you must to know when you buy for example 3 subscription users, you will get 5 (you will get 2 users for free, but with limited usage). This is because 1 user is for intended for partner work and 2nd users is for external accountant, but remember an EXTERNAL accountant. You need to create them on beginning to avoid misuse of license rights and use it for internal processes.

And on the end, if you already have the maximum number of full users and want to create new limited user, because you have licensed more limited users, anyway you will get message that this is not possible because the new user don’t meet the terms of the current license.

##1

This is only because of that, Full User is default user. You just need to change License Type option to Limited and it will be OK.

Counting Named Subscription Users in Dynamics NAV

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Waiting Dynamics NAV as full SaaS solution (Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’), a lot of partners are deploying NAV on Azure with subscription licenses. Subscription license has much better price in comparison with perpetual model, even from only BREP.

But we have a small difference here. In perpetual licensing model, users are concurrent, but n subscription model, users are named. Because of that I’ve got a lot questions how system count these users and prevent bigger number of users from licensed.

Generally, this is very easy. NAV counts number of created users and compare it with your subscription license. That moment, when you try to create new user, more than you have licensed, system will stop you.

##1

As you can see on the previous picture, I’ve got a message that creating this new user will not meet the terms of the current license. OK, it works. That means if you want to change user, you need to delete old one and than create new one.

But in subscription model, you can change number of users monthly. What if you had in one moment, because of business needs, more licensed users and now you scaled down number of users? In this case, when you try to log in, system will show the following message:

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That means with current license and number of users, you are not legal. But if you press OK, system will allow you to log in. But every time when you try run NAV, you will get this violation message that shows you are not legal.

Licensing in Dynamics 365 for Talent

atotovic Dynamics 365, HRM , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In a last period, I’ve got a lot of questions about how to make a proper licensing for Dynamics 365 for Talent. As it is a new solution, it is understandable. As I’ve already wrote a few articles about this product, I think I can help with some answers.

The first and very important, all users in this solution are named users. And if we speak about HR core part, we have two different user types and you can buy them on two separate ways. We have Full Users with total access to all HR core application and we have Team Members with very limited access (mostly, but not only for read tasks).

As I mentioned Full Users (Talent Users) can be bought on the following ways:

  • as a regular Talent User (you must take minimum 5 users) for 40 USD
  • buying Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, i.e. you will get full Talent Users buying Unified Operation (for 190 USD) or full Dynamics 365 Plan (for 210 USD); in both cases you will get much much more than just Talent, but Talent will be part of your completely system.

TalentLicense.PNG

If we are speaking about Team Members, you can buy them for 8 USD, but again you will not get only access to Talent with them, but also to all other Apps in Dynamics 365 package. As I mentioned, Team Member are not limited only with read rights, because you can use them for example as employee for Employee Self Service.

OK, but this is not the end. Recently, Microsoft announce two additional AI Apps for Talent (Attract and Onboard) and that means if you want to use them, you first must be a regular Talent User. Then, you can subscribe them. Price is 8 USD for each of them separately or if you want both, price will be 12 USD in total.

And again, this is not the end. Actually, it doesn’t mean it must be the end. Why? Because if you want to customize something. As you already know (I hope), this App is full SaaS and you cannot just open a code and change it. If you want to change something on forms and similar, you can do it using PowerApps. In this case person who will make these customizations must have PowerApps Plan 2 (40 USD) license, but other users who will use these forms, have to have minimum PowerApps Plan 1 (7 USD) license. That means, not all users, only these who will use these new features. And just to know, if you are buying some Dynamics Plan, you will get PowerApps for free.

PowerAppsLicense.PNG

And again, it is similar situation if you want to use PowerBI for additional reports or Flow for additional workflows.

I hope I covered all models of licensing here. But just keep in mind, it is possible to be some changed, because it is a new App in Dynamics 365 family and with new releases, it is possible to be some changes. And I didn’t mentioned, but just to be sure: all pries are on monthly basis.

Limited Users in NAV 2016

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I suppose the most of you have already used Limited Users. It is pretty good possibility to save some money for users who have not a lot different processes to work in NAV. But limitation was a big; you could insert in only 3 tables by your need and in 80 additional by default. It was enough for some basics processes (creating contacts, HR, warehouse and similar).

But from NAV 2016, we have a pretty greater possibilities. That means we can use for inserting even 151 default tables; you can find completely list here. Some of the most important default tables for insert are:

  • Customers and Vendors
  • Customer and Vendor Invoice Discounts
  • Sales and Purchase Headers and Lines
  • Deferrals
  • Sales/Puchase Price and Line Discount
  • Assembly Order Headers and Lines
  • Incoming Documents
  • Workflow tables
  • …

You can see that with these tables in combination with three additional by your needs, we can use Limited Users for a lot different processes. It can decrease project cost and improve quality.

LimitedUsers.jpg

New Dynamics ‘Give Me 5’ Promotion

atotovic General, Microsoft Dynamics NAV , , , , , , , ,

Few days ago, Microsoft has published new “Give Me 5” FY16Q1 customer promotion. New customers that buy license between now and end of September can get Starter Pack + 2 Full Users for 6000USD. But I have to underline that this is available for US market only.

Unfortunately, we have not explanation why this promotion is only for US market. Only we know, this promotion is valid for Microsoft Dynamics NAV and GP and for new customers on US market.

I hope, we will get the same promotion in the rest of the world soon. The same promotions help us every time in competition with the local solutions and in undecided potential customers. I hope it will be good for Microsoft and for partners altogether.