What are the odds for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Apps?
5/1 on Manchester City winning the league.
22/1 on Caledonia Gladiators winning the playoffs.
And odds on for Seattle Kraken to win the NHL playoffs.
But what are the odds of the first-party Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps being around in 3 years?
As I see things, the more and more we are shifting over to the Power Platform the less likely we are to need the Dynamics 365 branding. Currently there are four or five applications (depending on your outlook) within Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement but everything now seems to be shifting over to being under the umbrella of Power Platform and Dataverse. Which begs the question – how long will we have Dynamics 365 first-party applications?
If we take a look first at Sales, the sales app is becoming more and more integrated with the Marketing suite. They share a lot of common processes and usually, your marketing team and your sales team will work closely together. So, are we going to see a PowerSales soon? Should it combine Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 for Marketing into a single first-party Power Platform model-driven app?
Simple things like lead nurturing which starts off in the marketing team, then feed into the sales team for qualification and then the marketing team will look at current sales data to see what products are best to market to. Does this mean we are about to combine the two into one app?
Now the next three apps I would personally see merged, are almost integrated at this point, maybe not 100% integrated, but very deeply dependent on each other. Field Service is my favourite thing in the world, however, as it stands right now the Customer Service app in Dynamics 365 is almost at parity with the Field Service functionality.
The only additional areas around PO’s, RTV’s RMA’s and Internet of Things (IOT is creeping in) everything else, including the ability to add new tables to the Schedule Board are already in Customer Service. Then we add in Omni channel which, by definition, is a Customer Service role which uses Resources, characteristics, and a few similar tables. With that being said are we about to see PowerService?
I will say that I am not against this, and believe it or not, I think that first-party Power Apps are the future of the platform. Mark Smith said a few years ago that Dynamics 365 is dead, in some ways I do agree with that from a Customer Engagement perspective but I do think the brand of Dynamics 365 will live on through F&O and Business Central. Business Central is the ideal candidate to move to a model-driven Power App. For this to happen there would need to be a full rework under the hood and from a UX perspective alas this is the one that makes the most sense to me.
If there is a shift over to the Power Platform and branding and technology, then I think that would be a move for the good and will hopefully make licencing a little less ambiguous.