Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Licencing the way you want to buy?

While Microsoft may not be known as an organisation that sells its software in a simple way (otherwise why would you have consultants who make a great living explaining it to you!), with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft have tried to simplify the process by breaking down the Microsoft Dynamics 365 licences into one of three groups; Team Members, Apps or Plans.  Simple!

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licences

Starting at the most basic, Team Members are for the vast bulk of your users, starting at $10/£6.20 per user/month.  Want to put in a time sheet, submit expenses, update your HR record – Team Members are for you.  The great thing about Team Members is that it gives you read access to every Dynamics 365 App your organisation has rolled out, the ability to read and interact with PowerBI dashboards (a favourite of mine!), mobile access to Microsoft PowerApps and even the ability to use Microsoft Flow templates to automate anything you (or someone else) can dream up.

Apps (All apps are $95/£59.20 per user/month apart from Operations which is $190/£118.40 per user/month) are for your users that need full access to one business workload.  Think of this as a “full user” in the old world.  So, your HR, finance, sales teams etc. would probably need these, but as you will find out when you start digging into the different users within your organisation, a lot of people that you would have thought would need an App licence will actually be able to use a Team Member licence – this is one of the key changes which has caught a number of people out – it’s not a like for like change between the “old” Microsoft Dynamics products and the new.  App licences also give its users all the access that a Team Member has – so if, for instance, you are in finance and you need everything in the Operations App you buy an Operations App user but you can also submit expenses, apply for annual leave etc. without having to buy another licence.

The third type of licence are the Plans.  A plan gives you full access to either all of the apps (Plan 2), or all of the apps apart from Operations (Plan 1) that you have rolled out within your organisation.  Why would you buy a plan?  It’s actually pretty simple – if you need access to more than one App, then you buy a plan!  At an additional $20/£12.50 per user/month you get a lot more functionality, which for some of your users will make this a really compelling option.

Step Pricing – The more you buy the cheaper it gets!

Now, if you were thinking, he is right – this is pretty simple, but there must be more to it!  You are right.  Sort of.  With Team Members and Plan 1, Microsoft have what they call step pricing.  This means that the more you buy, the cheaper the individual users become.  These are broken down into two groups:

Plans: You combine your Plan 1 and Plan 2 users to get a number of users – this is the number of users you would use to calculate the new price of your Plan 1 users (Plan 2 isn’t discounted on tier pricing)

• Team Members don’t count towards anything else – really easy, the more you buy the cheaper it gets
• App users aren’t discounted at all.  Basically, this means that after buying more than 100 “Plan” users, you are then better off financially moving all heavy users onto plans (which will save you $5 per user/month)

Obviously what I have written above is only the start of the conversation around Microsoft Dynamics 365 licences, but hopefully, you have found it useful.  I will leave you with the following tips, but if we can be of help in going through the Microsoft Dynamics 365 licences options in more detail please just ask.

Tips:

• Try and put as many of your users as possible into “Team Members” – it’s a lot more functional than you may think
• Plan 1 and Team Members have tiered pricing so the more you buy the cheaper they become
• If you can, please join us on Tuesday the 18^th of October for our Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Getting Rid of your Business Silos webinar at 13.00 BST