Industries have seen customer relationship management (CRM) become one of the most essential tools for business growth. Businesses have an interest in tracking their regular customers from the very beginning, offering them a better experience and attracting new customers. This interest led to the birth of the traditional CRM system.
Add to that the need to track vendors and partners, determine where the best relationships are in place, and find out what the most efficient way to collaborate with these other businesses is, and you can see how CRM becomes a rather complex endeavor.
Over time, it turned out that having such platforms hosted in house, while absolutely providing increased value, encountered new challenges when faced with a mobile workforce. The cloud was there to support this sorely needed expansion.
The next logical evolution happened somewhat in parallel with the move to the cloud. Organizations are recognizing that a simple system, on its own, cannot provide the value needed for the business to gain an edge over its competitors. As such, the tools evolved again, integrating with other essential tools in the organization, as well as with various social channels.
The last few years have seen a merger of the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms with the classic customer relationship management platform. This results in better end-to-end processes across the entire organization, and better visibility into where the biggest issues are within an organization. The end results provide better customer experience and a faster and better service, while adapting to the customers' growing online presence.
Dynamics 365, now joining under its umbrella with both CRM and ERP functionality, is Microsoft's response to a growing trend. It is a set of robust business applications, with a long history and presence in the market, all brought together to maximize an organization's performance and homogenize its data.
This book focuses on the functionality, which was formerly part of the CRM platform. While at times we might touch on some of the newer offerings, we'll be spending most of our time focusing on the revamped modules for Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service, and Marketing. We'll also be looking at the new paradigm and features offered through the Power Platform. As the new kid on the block, the Power Platform quickly gained popularity by not being entirely dependent on the typical CRM functionality, but rather by allowing us to build brand new functionality for the organization in a much simpler and rapid manner.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- What is Dynamics 365 really?
- Global data center locations for Dynamics CRM Online
- What do you need to customize Dynamics CRM?
- Opening a free 30-day trial of Dynamics 365 for Sales
- Configuring a domain name for your environment
- Integrating with Office 365 E3 trial services
In this chapter, we will first look at what environment we need to complete the examples presented in this book. We will create a new environment based on a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online 30-day trial. This approach will give us the means to experiment with a trial environment for free.
Let's get started!
Understanding what Dynamics 365 really is
Dynamics 365 is an umbrella marketing term describing several platforms and functional products. The various applications under this branding include the following:
- Sales
- Customer Service
- Field Service
- Human Resources
- Finance and Operations
- Retail
- Project Service Automation
- Marketing
- Artificial Intelligence
- Mixed Reality
- Business Central
A detailed look at these applications will show that, at their core, these are the next evolution of the Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, and Dynamics NAV platforms. Some have organically evolved into what they are now, while others have received a major update with the move under the Dynamics 365 umbrella.
As mentioned before, the focus of this book is centered around the former Dynamics CRM platform, and how the separate modules evolved from it, becoming the following:
- Dynamics 365 for Sales
- Dynamics 365 for Customer Service
- Dynamics 365 for Field Service
- Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation
- Dynamics 365 for Marketing
Whereas before, you were buying a package that included most of these, now you have the flexibility to select only the modules you need when choosing the cloud SaaS offering. This allows your organization to start with, let's say, Sales, and later expand into Customer Service.
Note that if you still choose to purchase the on-premise deployment option, which continues to be available, you will continue to get the same model that we've all seen in Dynamics CRM, with modules for Sales, Service, and Marketing. But the real value is in the cloud offering, where additional services and functionality are abundant.
Along with the standard platform functionality provided, we have a wide range of customization options, allowing us to extend and further customize solutions to satisfy a large range of other business scenarios. In addition, we can integrate this platform with other applications and create a seamless solution spanning across multiple platforms.
While it is by no means the only available platform on the market today, Microsoft's Dynamics 365 is one of the fastest-growing platforms and is gaining large acceptance at all levels (from small to mid-size to enterprise-level organizations). This is because of a multitude of reasons, some of which include the following:
- The variety of deployment options
- The scalability
- The extensibility
- The ease of integration with other systems
- The ease of use
Deployment options include the SaaS (cloud) offering, which provides the most advanced functionality, the classical on-premise deployment, and (not as common anymore) a third-party hosted solution, which is just another model of an on-premise deployment.
For the purpose of this book, we're looking at the SaaS model and we're leveraging a 30-day trial. Once you have a trial in place, you can turn this into a paid subscription when you're ready to move to production.
A recent development gives us the ability to host a virtual Dynamics 365 (CRM) environment in Azure. This offloads the cost of maintaining the local infrastructure in a fashion similar to a third-party hosted solution, but takes advantage of the scalability and performance of a large cloud solution maintained and fully supported by Microsoft.
The white paper released by Microsoft (which you can read at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49193) describes the deployment model using Azure Virtual Machines.
In the next sections, we will look at some of the benefits that Dynamics 365 provides.
Scalability
Dynamics 365 can scale over a wide range of deployment options—from a single box deployment (used mostly for development) to a cloud offering that can span over a large number of servers and host a large number of environments. The same base solution can handle all the scenarios in between with ease.
Let's now see some of the extensibility features.
Extensibility
Dynamics ...
