Dynamics 365 – 1 November 2016 | ask Synergy Software Systems

Microsoft is offering a first look at its new Azure-hosted Dynamics 365 service and plans to start rolling out a number of its components as of November .
This is the product that goes head-to-head with Salesforce, as well as Oracle and SAP.

Dynamics 365 is cloud software that has combined what’s known as CRM or customer relationship management software – used by salespeople to track prospects and customers (a market Salesforce leads) – with ERP or enterprise resource management software. ERP is financial, manufacturing, and supply chain management software, a market where SAP is the biggest player, followed by Oracle.

This new product is one of the main reasons that Microsoft bought LinkedIn for more than $26 billion. Dynamics 365 includes new applications that sift through data stored in Microsoft documents, the CRM/ERP system, and social media like LinkedIn to provide sales leads and business insights for marketing campaigns.

Microsoft had previously said that it plans to start a price war with the main CRM players, particularly Salesforce. Microsoft’s new subscription plans for Dynamics 365 will bundle together many popular options, rather than making a company pay for each one per user, separately

November 1, the first seven discrete Dynamics 365 applications would be on the company’s price list. Those apps will be rolling out in 135 markets and 40 languages starting on that date. Microsoft will make a preview of a new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights app that is built on top of the Cortana Intelligence Suite, available at the beginning of November, as well, officials said.

There will be two different editions of Dynamics 365: Business and Enterprise. (Unlike Office 365 andWindows 10 Microsoft will not be using the E1, E3, E5 designations with Dynamics 365, to distinguish between different offerings.)

The Business edition of Dynamics 365, aimed at companies with between 10 and 250 employees, will include Financials, Sales, and Marketing modules.

The Enterprise edition, targeted at companies with 250-plus employees, will consist of Operations, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service, and Project Service Automation modules.

” …….when you add up the functionality, Microsoft is putting a lot of firepower in the hands of individual users that is based on a relatively well-known user experience: that has to be a net positive against any competitor, but particularly Salesforce, which struggles to fulfill the needs of the full enterprise, or Oracle, which is mired in older products or user experiences, or SAP, which is still transitioning from a very heavy-weight on-premise offering to a less heavyweight set of cloud offerings” Josh Greenbaum, Principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting,

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Dynamics 365 includes built-in intelligence capabilities to help improve manufacturing and supply chain execution, make field service operations more efficient, sell more effectively and ultimately deliver exceptional customer experiences. Sentiment and intent analysis, preemptive service, relationship insights, lead and opportunity scoring, product recommendations and up-sell/cross-sell, etc, are some of the built-in intelligence capabilities included.

Microsoft has highlighted that customers can extend these built-in intelligence capabilities with independent apps that provide targeted and domain-specific intelligence. For example, Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights is a new analytics app from Microsoft that connects and analyzes data from Microsoft – and other widely used CRM, ERP, web, social and IoT sources – and applies intelligence to it to give you a 360-degree customer view with automatic suggestions to improve engagement.

Built to take full advantage of the capabilities in Power BI, Office 365, Microsoft Azure and Cortana Intelligence, with Dynamics 365 you can start small and scale on demand to deal with your biggest business challenges.

The company has also launched Relationship Insights. The service is also capably of analyzing things like sentiments, using a variety of complex data analysis and machine learning techniques. This analysis is way more important than it looks at first glance — as any well entrenched businessman can tell you — and can give you stats like the probability of closing the deal, the next best steps to take and so on.

Microsoft’s Azure and Office 365 cloud services have recently achieved Tier 3 of the Singapore cloud security standard . This improves on a Tier 1 certification awarded in late 2014 for Azure and Office 365, and makes Microsoft the first global cloud service provider to have obtained the MTCS certification across its infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.

MTCS SS is a cloud security standard developed by the Information Technology Standards Committee (ITSC) in Singapore and published in November 2013. The objective was to help businesses understand the different cloud service providers’ (CSPs) offerings better, and as a means to drive cloud adoption by certifying the security that they offer. Tier 3 was designed for regulated organizations with specific requirements and more stringent security requirements. Industry specific regulations may be applied in addition to the baseline controls in order to supplement and address security risks and threats in high impact information systems.
Aside from MTCS, Microsoft also recently received the United States Defence Information System Agency (DISA) Level 2, Japan Financial Industry Information Systems (FISC), and New Zealand Government Chief Information Officer (GCIO).

Microsoft’s cloud portfolio is now the most trusted with 22 certifications, self-attestations and guidance framework adoptions from around the world, more than any other hyper-scale cloud platform provider.