Dynamics 365 Business Applications
Find out more about what Dynamics 365 is, the business applications included within it, and what makes Microsoft's offering different!
What is Dynamics 365?
Dynamics 365 is the family name for a range of business applications developed by Microsoft, including Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management solutions.
From engaging your customers, optimising operations, empowering your employees or transforming your products and services, Dynamics 365 provides you with insight about your business to help digitally transform and achieve success. Fundamentally, it connects your data and applies intelligence, enabling you to understand your business across all its functional areas.
With Dynamics 365, you can not only integrate applications with existing systems, but also build and extend upon them with customisations from the Microsoft Power Platform. This means you will be able to derive insights that turn into action, enabling you to make better decisions and transform processes. You can reimagine engagement with your customers and generate greater value for them.
What business applications are included in Dynamics 365?
The Dynamics 365 suite of business applications includes the tools your people need to drive your business. This includes Finance, Supply Chain, Operations and Sales, boosted further by HR, Field Service, Customer Service and Marketing functionality.
Depending on the size and individual requirements of your business, different applications may be more suitable for your needs. As a software provider, we implement and support the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution called Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Whilst Microsoft may recommend alternative ERP solutions for businesses of a certain size, we believe Business Central can scale to suit. Read our blog on the scalability of the Dynamics 365 Business Central solution here.
The history of Dynamics 365
To understand where these applications came from, let’s talk a bit about the history of Dynamics 365 Business Central. If you'd like to read more about the history of ERP overall, head over to this page.
Dynamics 365 Business Central was previously known as Dynamics NAV – and before that Navision. The Navision product was developed by Navision, a Danish company that Microsoft acquired in 2002. It then became a new division at Microsoft, named Microsoft Business Solutions (of which Microsoft Dynamics forms a part).
Then we have Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. This was known as Dynamics AX and, before that, Axapta. The Axapta product was also developed by Navision. There’s also Dynamics 365 Sales, a product that Microsoft developed itself. The first release came in around 2003. Finally we have Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Field Service and Marketing. These were brought to market more recently.
The History of ERP
What makes Dynamics 365 different?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a world apart from its competitive products because of:
- The strength of its individual products. Each product leads in its field based on functionality offered, security features, and continuous Microsoft improvement and backing.
- How easy the products are to use. Being a Microsoft product, every screen has a familiar look and feel. Moving from Outlook to Teams, to Business Central, to Dynamics CRM - your team will find it much easier to adapt and learn the various systems.
- The available customisation options. Each product offers deep adaptability and rich functionality. They can be expanded as and when you deem it necessary to offer more capabilities. This means you get more for your money.
- Its global availability. All of the products within the Dynamics 365 family benefit from being available in any country, meaning there is no need for anything to be installed to a machine on-site.
Microsoft Azure
The Dynamics 365 world of business applications is built on Microsoft Azure. You can host any of the Dynamics 365 applications in Azure, where your data will be secure and the future of your business will be in safe hands.
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud-based computing service for building, testing, deploying and managing services. Microsoft continues to invest in Azure, ensuring it’s up-to-date and suitable for the digital-first world of today. Year on year, investments of over $1 billion have been made on security alone.
Only Amazon and Google come close in terms of size of infrastructure, but neither offer the same suite business applications at the same scale.
Azure Integration Services
Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365, previously known as Office 365, is the best-in-class offering for productivity tools. You'd be hard pressed to find a business on Earth that hasn't considered using Microsoft's productivity tools.
In relation to Dynamics 365, Microsoft consistently does a better job of joining up its own products. Therefore Word, Excel, Teams etc link to the Dynamics 365 suite seamlessly.
A great example of this is being able to open customer contact cards from Dynamics 365 Business Central within Microsoft Teams. You don't even need to change applications to get to the information you need.
Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform
Dynamics 365 can benefit hugely from the investment Microsoft are making in and around the Power Platform, a suite of technologies intended to help businesses to innovate their processes.
We're excited and the possibilities it can bring to your business. The Power Platform includes, but is not limited to:
These applications make one powerful business application platform, providing quick and easy app building and data insights. To find out more about the Power Platform and its technologies, visit our sister brand The Power People.
What is Dynamics 365 doing for our customers?
The Dynamics 365 family of products are built to assist businesses across the broad spectrum of activities they need to conduct daily.
We support and implement Dynamics 365 Business Central. We know just how great Dynamics 365 Business Central is but don’t take just our word for it.
As one of the best Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partners and resellers, we’ve helped a lot of businesses to make the most of the ERP solution, enabling them to improve processes and scale!
We thought it would be worth sharing a few of our success stories with you so you can get a better idea of what Dynamics 365 is and how it can help you:
Is Dynamics 365 what your business needs?
Dynamics 365 ensures that you are tailoring a solution for your business, adding on the functionality you need and not what you don't. In short, the Dynamics 365 suite offers businesses a vast array of options to pick and choose exactly what they need.
If you're still looking to understand what Dynamics 365 is and some of the business applications it has to offer, get in touch with us today. If you want to find out more about the platform and how it can be used to empower your business, check out our Dynamics 365 Business Central guide. It has everything you need to know!
The Ultimate Guide to Dynamics 365 Business Central
Embarking on a Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation is not easy! The 11th edition of our 'Ultimate Guide' has the answers to all your burning questions. Delve into the most recent insights on Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics NAV upgrading options, Microsoft's Power Platform, and more.
Grab your free copy and learn from our TNP experts, who have written each article with your needs in mind.
Download our guide