While many Office 365 apps and services represent sophisticated products, Dynamics 365 encompasses a range of Microsoft cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM), human resources, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) products which can work alone or together to fulfill many lines-of-business needs.
Sales
Sales is Dynamics’s salesforce automation app. It helps you automate the full sales process including accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, and activities such as appointments, emails, and phone calls.
Customer Service
Customer Service empowers customer support representatives to manage cases and track resolution of issues. It can be used for both internal or external customers.
Field Service
Field Service manages field operations for organizations that perform services such as deliveries, installation, maintenance, and inspections. It tracks resources and people through a dispatcher interface. Mobile apps support multiple devices.
Talent
Talent offers apps for attracting talent (hiring and recruiting) as well as onboarding new employees.
Finance and Operations
Finance and Operations offers financial capabilities including general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable as well as operations management services like supply chain automation, procurement, asset management, and logistics.
Retail
Retail helps companies manage store operations and merchandising, such as sales, promotions, sourcing, and replenishment.
Project Service Automation
Project Service aids project management, resource optimization, forecasting project profitability, and increasing productivity with a simplified interface that is easier to learn than most project management tools. It includes visual interfaces for scheduling resources, matching people to project roles, and viewing the progress of projects.
Marketing
Marketing provides marketing automation and event management capabilities such as automated emails, nurture marketing campaigns, and event registration. It is the replacement for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, which was discontinued in May 2018.
Business Central
Business Central includes financials, supply-chain management, sales, customer service, project management, manufacturing, and warehouse management capabilities. It’s geared toward small- and medium-sized businesses.
Portal
Dynamics 365 includes a portal interface, which simplifies access especially for occasional users such as customers, vendors, and employees who need self-service capabilities. Dynamics Portal stores its data and configuration metadata in Dynamics 365 and respects the security controls of Dynamics 365.
Configurations in Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 is extensible through solutions, a set of customizations which may be installed in your instance of Dynamics 365 to add new entities, fields, queries, reports, and other elements. You can install multiple applications in one instance so the solutions can be built for your unique requirements. Microsoft publishes free solutions which are visible in Dynamics 365.
Third-party apps allow you to extend Dynamics 365 further, with utilities, pre-built integrations, and additional functions all the way to implementations for specific industries and scenarios. Microsoft AppSource is the online marketplace for Dynamics 365 apps from Microsoft as well as third parties.
Office 365 Integrations
- Dynamics 365 allows you to store documents in SharePoint.
- Outlook emails may be tracked automatically as activity records and associated with business leads, contacts, accounts, and sales opportunities.
- Data may be output from Dynamics 365 using Office templates.
- Dynamics 365 can send reports and queries to static and dynamic Excel files as well as to other formats such as PDF.
- Word merges may be used in Dynamics 365 to generate customized email messages.
- An Outlook app integrates Dynamics 365 with Office 365.
Security
Content in Dynamics 365 is integrated with Office 365 security, which is used as the authentication provider. Dynamics 365 offers a rich security model that has field- and record-level security, and governs access based on an organization hierarchy. This means that record access can be controlled by organization unit (e.g., allowing only sales representatives to see accounts or opportunities that belong to them yet allowing managers to run reports for all customers).
Training
- Dynamics on Microsoft Virtual Academy, Microsoft
Feedback
Microsoft Resources
- Dynamics 365 Documentation
- Dynamics 365 Roadmap
- Dynamics 365 on YouTube
- Dynamics 365 on Twitter
- AppSource
Similar applications
- SalesForce (CRM)
- SugarCRM (CRM)
- Oracle (CRM and ERP)
- SAP (CRM and ERP)
- Accumatica (ERP)
- Netsuite (ERP)
- Zendesk (Customer service)
- Workday HCM (human resources)
- HubSpot (CRM and marketing)
Author
- James Townsend, Dynamics 365 thought leader
