If you work in an IT department, you’ve probably heard of Dynamics 365 – Microsoft’s set of modular, cloud-based applications, designed to integrate with your existing business systems & data, business logic, and processes.
These applications can help to digitally transform your customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) business functions. Dynamics 365 applications can help manage sales, marketing, customer service, finance, projects, field service, and more. All applications are web-based, and many have dedicated mobile and tablets apps.
Organisations will often turn to their in-house IT department to try to help support and manage these functions. Fortunately, with Microsoft’s infrastructure and administration tools, day-to-day maintenance of Dynamics 365 needn’t be an IT headache. This post and video outline the key benefits that can help IT departments customise and administer Dynamics 365.
Microsoft Power Platform Integration
Dynamics 365’s underlying platform is the Microsoft Power Platform – a suite of diverse intelligent services that run in Microsoft Azure and are the backbone of many of the Dynamics 365 applications. The platform provides a consistent way of shaping and connecting your data, thanks to the Common Data Model.
The Common Data Model defines entities, attributes, semantic metadata, and relationships to provide consistency in how data is defined and connected across applications. This model can also be extended to include industry-specific customisations where required.
Also, with the hundreds of available API connectors, you can swiftly integrate Dynamics 365 with your other business systems, introducing powerful and seamless automation.
Continuous Compliance
Staying compliant with regional and industry requirements needn’t be an IT headache, thanks to Microsoft’s continual updating of Dynamics 365 and its related services. Support for GDPR, global, governmental, regional and industry regulations is built into Microsoft’s compliance framework. Tools such as the Service Trust Portal and Compliance Manager make it easier to stay on top of your compliance commitments.
Microsoft 365 and Azure Integration
Many users are already familiar with the Microsoft 365 range of products. Tight, native integration between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 ensures that your users can continue to work within familiar apps such as Outlook and Teams and work with their new Dynamics 365 data, seamlessly.
And, as Dynamics 365 is built upon Microsoft Azure, its capabilities can be further extended by a raft of available Azure services.
High Service Availability
A further benefit of Dynamics 365 using the Microsoft Azure platform is high availability. Microsoft’s globe-spanning data centres ensure that you are always able to host your data where it suits your business, ensuring low latency. With your Dynamics 365 data securely stored in the cloud, your users will be able to access the information they need anywhere they have an internet connection. And where no internet connection is available, they can even work offline and synchronise their changes back to Dynamics 365 when convenient.
To provide maximum visibility, an admin-level overview into service performance is available, detailing any issues that may be affecting your Microsoft tenants, although with a 99.9+% uptime, you can be sure that downtime will be a rarity.
Security as Standard
IT administrators have straightforward control of which users can access Dynamics 365 services via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Within Dynamics 365 itself, security roles can be defined or customised to ensure that users see only the areas of the system relevant to their role and can only access the records that you want them to access
A Customised App Experience
Rather than your users having to adjust to an off-the-shelf CRM package, Dynamics 365 apps can be heavily customised to streamline day-to-day business processes. And if the included apps are missing some bespoke functionality that would greatly benefit your organisation, you (and even your users) can build new apps, leveraging business data in ways that suit everybody.
Ability to Learn
Microsoft have invested great effort in building their Dynamics 365 content library and training resources. This, accompanied by Microsoft’s push to encourage ‘citizen developers’ (individuals who can build apps, automation, and complex reports without any prior knowledge of knowing how to write code) aims to make your users more self-sufficient and less reliant on an IT department’s resources.
Summary
Implementing Dynamics 365 brings many benefits to an organisation, but it’s not the IT headache that some would expect, thanks to the robust platform and tools available. However, when an IT department needs a helping hand, having a professional support service on hand is always recommended. If you want to discuss Dynamics 365 and/or our Support services with one of our team, please feel free to get in touch.
