What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform?
Introduction
You may have come across this site whilst looking for a business applications partner for your organisation to work with, or you may have got here accidentally having Googled Sartix trying to find the unaffiliated stop motion film guys, but hopefully it hasn’t escaped your notice that this Sartix specialises in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. Anyway, in this post we’ll have a look at what Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform are,and how they can help drive efficiencies, automations and ultimately growth in your business.
Power Platform
Bespoke business application built using Power Apps
Whether your business requirements may be met with a bespoke Power App implementation, or a Dynamics 365 application, everything sits on top of the Power Platform. The Power Platform is cloud-based and is hosted within your organisation’s Microsoft 365 environment (you simply purchase licenses from within the same portal as your IT team uses to set up new users). The Microsoft Power Platform encompasses a set of versatile tools designed to build bespoke applications, automate workflows, analyse data and the creation of AI chatbots. These tools include:
Power Apps (used for building business applications, including mobile applications)
Power Automate (for automating tasks, such as moving data between disparate systems and sending automated alerts to customers)
Power BI (analyse your business data to identify trends and make decisions to drive growth)
Copilot Studio (used to create AI-enabled Chat Bots for both internal and external users)
Underneath all of these sits Microsoft Dataverse and the Common Data Model (CDM). Microsoft Dataverse is a data storage and management platform which hosts the data that your business applications will use. You can create one or more applications as part of your implementation and they can all sit on top of the same data platform meaning there is no need for complex data integration between applications.
Licensing for Power Apps can be as little as £4.10 user/month (as of October 2024) and comes with pre-built tables for Account and Contact management and customer activity tracking (giving you the ability to log phone calls, emails and tasks against a customer or account). Adding any functionality beyond this would require some, or all of, customisation, configuration and development. Increasingly the Power Platform is becoming more and more powerful which is greatly reducing the amount of custom code that needs to be written for a implementations, speeding up both delivery time and cost.
Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Confusingly, but worth clarifying, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications are Power Apps built by Microsoft themselves. All of the features found within Customer Engagement applications are built using tools and techniques available to us all when building bespoke Power Apps. As such, in theory, it would be possible to recreate a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement application for only £4.10 a user a month. Licensing agreement restrictions aside, this would generally be bad idea due to the time it would take a team of very skilled developers to create, resulting in any saved license costs being wiped out to pay the development costs. In addition you’d also have to wait significantly longer before the system could be implemented, losing out on any quick gains from using the system.
Dynamics 365 can be split into two application categories:
Customer Engagement applications including
Sales
Customer Service
Field Service
Customer Insights and Journeys (Marketing)
Project Operations
ERP applications (Enterprise Resource Planning)
Finance and Operations
Supply Chain Management
Commerce
Human Resources
Business Central
Note: At Sartix we only specialise in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications. The ERP applications, whilst containing the Dynamics 365 name, are not built on the same underlying Dataverse platform as the Customer Engagement applications. As such if you are looking for an ERP implementation it is essential that you engage a specialist ERP partner. Likewise an ERP consultancy would not necessarily be best placed to delivery a Customer Engagement project.
Licensing for Customer Engagement applications starts at £53.40 user/month (as of October 2024).
Do I need Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Power Apps?
Whilst we’re huge fans of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications, they can be an overkill if implemented on some projects. As a general rule during engagements we would always first see whether the functionality required to meet business needs may be met using only Power Apps. The main reason for this is cost. Power Apps licenses can be as little as £6 a user a month compared to between £53.40 - £160.30 a user a month for a Microsoft Dynamics 365 application. However if business requirements are complex enough, and those complexities may be met with a Dynamics 365 application, it may be that the additional license cost of Dynamics 365 is more cost effective than the development costs of building the same functionality within Power Apps. A good example of this is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales which out of the box allows businesses to manage customer enquires from initial enquiry through to quote and order, allows for the loading and tracking of sales targets, management of different customer price lists, suggested next activities for sales teams and the creation of marketing lists. Building all of this from scratch would be a costly and time consuming process. Organisations with Dynamics 365 licenses also benefit more from the biannual updates to the platform from Microsoft which routinely add additional features and enhancements. Of note is that as Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a Power App, it is also fully extensible so that any organisation specific functionality may be added to work alongside the functionality of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 application.
Conclusion
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications come with extensive pre-built features. If your business will make use of the majority of these features the license cost may be justified. However if you are a smaller business, or would only use limited set of features from a Dynamics 365 applications, then building from the Power Platform may be more cost effective. It is also possible to have a combination of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Apps licenses within a single organisation. For example the sales team may all have a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales license to make use of Lead, Opportunity, Quote and Order functionality whereas the operations team, who could use a bespoke application built using Power Apps to track equipment maintenance, require only a Power Apps license.
Whilst it is impossible to draw a conclusion as to which implementation would be most suited to your business, hopefully this post clarifies the differences between the various offerings.
