This is the question I posed recently to Microsoft Execs. As a partner, I was informed about the new tiered pricing structure that is replacing the flat rate $44/user/month. The Microsoft team introduced three new licenses with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Online: Professional @ $65/user/mo, Basic @ $30/user/mo and Essential @ $15/user/mo. A quick glance at the advertised feature chart below led me to think that every user would end up needing the Professional license, in other words, just a price increase from $44 to $65.
When I saw Customer Service and Sales Automation only being available for Professional licenses, I thought, well that’s everybody. Microsoft assured me that this was not the case, but could not give me a good explanation at the time. So I decided to dig into it further on my own. It is interesting that part of Microsoft’s pitch for the new tiered structure is “simple-to-understand licensing”, yet they have trouble explaining it to a Partner.
One of the things Microsoft likes to do is simplify explanations. The need for this is obvious in public presentations to mostly uninformed consumers. The table above is a good example of this. We have similar “Feature” tables for Office 365 and SharePoint Online as well. Unfortunately, most of the time people make their license selections based on this summarized information. Another good example is the plan comparison charts for Office 365, at first glance the M Plan (Midsize) looks the same as the Enterprise E-3. What the high-level comparison chart forgets to mention is the lack of Access Services, Excel Services, Visio Services, Infopath support and many others. Having been caught by this summary view once myself in a client license recommendation, I decided to dig a little deeper. The summary above lists 10 “major” use rights, but after pouring though a lot of documentation I found there are actually 79, which I have detailed below.
Use Rights by Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online USL
The following table lists the use rights corresponding to the Client Access Licenses (CALs) that are available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and User Subscription Licenses (USLs) available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
[custom_table]
| Use Right | Professional | Basic | Essential |
|---|---|---|---|
| View Announcements | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Manage saved views | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Use relationships between records | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Create personal views | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ * |
| Advanced Find search | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ * |
| Search | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ * |
| Use a queue item | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Export data to Microsoft Excel | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Perform Mail Merge | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Start dialog | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Run as an On-demand process | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Run an automated workflow Read articles | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Notes | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Activity management | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Yammer collaboration** | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Post activity feeds | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Follow activity feeds | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Shared calendar | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Write custom entity records | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Read custom application data | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile Express | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM for iPad & Windows 8 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web application | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Manage user reports, user charts, and user dashboards | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Run reports | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Create, update, and customize Reports | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Create and update announcements | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Read Dynamics CRM application data | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| User dashboards | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| User charts | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| User Interface Integration for Microsoft Dynamics CRM | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Convert an activity to a case | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Case management | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Add or remove a customer relationship for a contact | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Associate an opportunity with a contact | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Qualify and convert a lead to a contact | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Contacts | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Lead scoring, routing, assignment | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Lead capture | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Add or remove a customer relationship for an account | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Associate an opportunity with an account | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Qualify and convert a lead to an account | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Accounts | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Import data in bulk | ✔ | X | X |
| Configure auditing | ✔ | X | X |
| Configure duplicate-detection rules | ✔ | X | X |
| Define relationships between entities | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure queues | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure dialogs | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure workflows | ✔ | X | X |
| System reports, system charts, and system dashboards | ✔ | X | X |
| Customize forms and views | ✔ | X | X |
| Create Microsoft Dynamics CRM forms, entities, and fields | ✔ | X | X |
| Administer CRM | ✔ | X | X |
| Article templates | ✔ | X | X |
| Create and publish articles | ✔ | X | X |
| Goal management | ✔ | X | X |
| Contract templates | ✔ | X | X |
| Contract management | ✔ | X | X |
| Territory management | ✔ | X | X |
| Sales literature | ✔ | X | X |
| Quote management | ✔ | X | X |
| Price lists | ✔ | X | X |
| Product tracking | ✔ | X | X |
| Order management | ✔ | X | X |
| Invoice management | ✔ | X | X |
| Competitor tracking | ✔ | X | X |
| Qualify and convert a lead to an opportunity | ✔ | X | X |
| Convert an activity to an opportunity | ✔ | X | X |
| Opportunity tracking | ✔ | X | X |
| Marketing lists | ✔ | X | X |
| Quick campaigns | ✔ | X | X |
| Marketing campaigns | ✔ | X | X |
| Facility/Equipment management | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure business units | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure teams | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure services, resources and workhours | ✔ | X | X |
| *Actions can be performed only against records corresponding to entities included in the use rights**Requires a Yammer Enterprise license (acquired separately) | |||
[/custom_table]
While the above table certainly adds quite a bit of information to the selection process, it creates as many new questions as it answers. For me the most important question is what exactly can an Essential or Basic user do? Where is says for example “Marketing Lists”, does this mean that only a Professional user can what? See them, create them, modify them, use them? I dunno, but I do know there is a difference that I will need to understand better.
The Partners’ new role as Online Licensing Consultants
The “safe” path for Partners is simply to recommend to their clients that they should just get Professional Licenses for everybody; it’s even the “Recommended” choice on the Microsoft Summary. Partners will also make more money… sounds like a win-win. A win for Microsoft and a win for the Partner… but its a lose for the client. For every Professional Licensed user, who could have functioned properly with an Essential License, a client is throwing away $50/month. How would this work out for say a call center client with 100 operators? $60K per year that client did not need to pay. Moving from a flat $44/month to this tiered structure means a Partner actually has to understand your business and what your users actually do rather than just how many of them there are. So add another item to the list of skills a Cloud Partner has to have today, because things just got a lot more complicated.
I will say that even at the $65 Professional license, Dynamics CRM Online is still a significantly better value than Salesforce.com and I am working on a future post to substantiate that claim.This is the question I posed recently to Microsoft Execs. As a partner, I was informed about the new tiered pricing structure that is replacing the flat rate $44/user/month. The Microsoft team introduced three new licenses with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Online: Professional @ $65/user/mo, Basic @ $30/user/mo and Essential @ $15/user/mo. A quick glance at the advertised feature chart below led me to think that every user would end up needing the Professional license, in other words, just a price increase from $44 to $65.
When I saw Customer Service and Sales Automation only being available for Professional licenses, I thought, well that’s everybody. Microsoft assured me that this was not the case, but could not give me a good explanation at the time. So I decided to dig into it further on my own. It is interesting that part of Microsoft’s pitch for the new tiered structure is “simple-to-understand licensing”, yet they have trouble explaining it to a Partner.
One of the things Microsoft likes to do is simplify explanations. The need for this is obvious in public presentations to mostly uninformed consumers. The table above is a good example of this. We have similar “Feature” tables for Office 365 and SharePoint Online as well. Unfortunately, most of the time people make their license selections based on this summarized information. Another good example is the plan comparison charts for Office 365, at first glance the M Plan (Midsize) looks the same as the Enterprise E-3. What the high-level comparison chart forgets to mention is the lack of Access Services, Excel Services, Visio Services, Infopath support and many others. Having been caught by this summary view once myself in a client license recommendation, I decided to dig a little deeper. The summary above lists 10 “major” use rights, but after pouring though a lot of documentation I found there are actually 79, which I have detailed below.
Use Rights by Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online USL
The following table lists the use rights corresponding to the Client Access Licenses (CALs) that are available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and User Subscription Licenses (USLs) available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
[custom_table]
| Use Right | Professional | Basic | Essential |
|---|---|---|---|
| View Announcements | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Manage saved views | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Use relationships between records | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Create personal views | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ * |
| Advanced Find search | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ * |
| Search | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ * |
| Use a queue item | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Export data to Microsoft Excel | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Perform Mail Merge | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Start dialog | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Run as an On-demand process | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Run an automated workflow Read articles | ✔ | ✔ * | ✔ * |
| Notes | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Activity management | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Yammer collaboration** | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Post activity feeds | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Follow activity feeds | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Shared calendar | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Write custom entity records | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Read custom application data | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile Express | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM for iPad & Windows 8 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web application | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Manage user reports, user charts, and user dashboards | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Run reports | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Create, update, and customize Reports | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Create and update announcements | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Read Dynamics CRM application data | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| User dashboards | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| User charts | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| User Interface Integration for Microsoft Dynamics CRM | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Convert an activity to a case | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Case management | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Add or remove a customer relationship for a contact | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Associate an opportunity with a contact | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Qualify and convert a lead to a contact | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Contacts | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Lead scoring, routing, assignment | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Lead capture | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Add or remove a customer relationship for an account | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Associate an opportunity with an account | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Qualify and convert a lead to an account | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Accounts | ✔ | ✔ | X |
| Import data in bulk | ✔ | X | X |
| Configure auditing | ✔ | X | X |
| Configure duplicate-detection rules | ✔ | X | X |
| Define relationships between entities | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure queues | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure dialogs | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure workflows | ✔ | X | X |
| System reports, system charts, and system dashboards | ✔ | X | X |
| Customize forms and views | ✔ | X | X |
| Create Microsoft Dynamics CRM forms, entities, and fields | ✔ | X | X |
| Administer CRM | ✔ | X | X |
| Article templates | ✔ | X | X |
| Create and publish articles | ✔ | X | X |
| Goal management | ✔ | X | X |
| Contract templates | ✔ | X | X |
| Contract management | ✔ | X | X |
| Territory management | ✔ | X | X |
| Sales literature | ✔ | X | X |
| Quote management | ✔ | X | X |
| Price lists | ✔ | X | X |
| Product tracking | ✔ | X | X |
| Order management | ✔ | X | X |
| Invoice management | ✔ | X | X |
| Competitor tracking | ✔ | X | X |
| Qualify and convert a lead to an opportunity | ✔ | X | X |
| Convert an activity to an opportunity | ✔ | X | X |
| Opportunity tracking | ✔ | X | X |
| Marketing lists | ✔ | X | X |
| Quick campaigns | ✔ | X | X |
| Marketing campaigns | ✔ | X | X |
| Facility/Equipment management | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure business units | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure teams | ✔ | X | X |
| Define and configure services, resources and workhours | ✔ | X | X |
| *Actions can be performed only against records corresponding to entities included in the use rights**Requires a Yammer Enterprise license (acquired separately) | |||
[/custom_table]
While the above table certainly adds quite a bit of information to the selection process, it creates as many new questions as it answers. For me the most important question is what exactly can an Essential or Basic user do? Where is says for example “Marketing Lists”, does this mean that only a Professional user can what? See them, create them, modify them, use them? I dunno, but I do know there is a difference that I will need to understand better.
The Partners’ new role as Online Licensing Consultants
The “safe” path for Partners is simply to recommend to their clients that they should just get Professional Licenses for everybody; it’s even the “Recommended” choice on the Microsoft Summary. Partners will also make more money… sounds like a win-win. A win for Microsoft and a win for the Partner… but its a lose for the client. For every Professional Licensed user, who could have functioned properly with an Essential License, a client is throwing away $50/month. How would this work out for say a call center client with 100 operators? $60K per year that client did not need to pay. Moving from a flat $44/month to this tiered structure means a Partner actually has to understand your business and what your users actually do rather than just how many of them there are. So add another item to the list of skills a Cloud Partner has to have today, because things just got a lot more complicated.
I will say that even at the $65 Professional license, Dynamics CRM Online is still a significantly better value than Salesforce.com and I am working on a future post to substantiate that claim.
I’m working on a CRM project for a client setting up some customisations and reworking their processes, and when I got to setting up some new custom security roles, the subject came up as to the number of licences they had, and it turns out they have quite a few more active users tan purchased licenses.
How can this be?? Does CRM 2013 on-premise not check the number of licenced CALs against the number of end users?
Also many of their licences were of the Essential type, but they had access to areas they theoretically should not be able to access (access levels explained here: www.forceworks.com/cost-dynamics-crm-2013-go ), such as creating Opportunities, creating Leads, converting Leads to Opportunities, etc. I had to try this myself with an Essential user, and I can confirm this is so.
I’m quite confused by MS’s licencing model for CRM.
Does someone know what is going on?
Speaking of customers, …, Convergence EMEA 2013 and now this problem. It’s a shame that something so important, is a mystery. The partner does not deserve it, the client either.
The information referred.
Greetings.
I’m not sure where you got your list from, Steve. Did Microsoft provide it?
Many of the privileges don’t make any sense. Here are few examples:
User interface integration: suppose I add a JavaScript function to hide a field on a custom entity. Uses with a Essential CAL aren’t allowed to use this function, but there is no easy way for me to restrict the function to users with Premium or Basic CALs.
Read Dynamics CRM application data: if Essential CAL users can’t even read data, how can they use CRM at all?
Lead scoring: CRM 2013 doesn’t have a lead scoring feature.
I understand that the intent is to enable cost-effective pricing for using CRM as a platform, especially for internal portals such as HR, help desk and project management (time recording) scenarios.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way for a customer or partner to be certain that a given security role meets the use rights of the Basic or Essential CALs, and the licenses are not enforced programatically by CRM (meaning that the customer/partner has to figure out how to do that). So license compliance is going to become even harder and more important.
I’m glad the options are there though. They help demonstrate much better value that salesforce.com. But it’ll take a while before the rules become clear. I hope that Microsoft issues a model security role for the Essential and Basic licenses — that would be a great help.
Yes, this is from Microsoft. As you know, sometimes getting the “detailed” answers we need can be a challenge. I am working on a post of scenarios to show how I think this will work in the wild.
Regarding your question on the marketing list user rights, the “Read Dynamics CRM application data” right available to the Basic user means that they will be able to see the data in the system. In fact, a Basic user can view any data in the system, be it a default or custom entity. According to my understanding, however, Basic users cannot add or remove marketing list members, as these rights are limited to only the Professional license.
Steve:
I went through the same drill you have and then went to eXtremeCRM where I asked the question to Connor Marsden, head of CRM in US. His answer boiled down to this: an average salesperson “could” use the $30 level but they can’t use Opportunities. In your table above, it says they can “Qualify and convert a lead to a contact”. They can also “Qualify and convert a lead to an account” but can NOT “Qualify and convert a lead to an Opportunity”. There are other entries that suggest they can work with Opps but the reality is they can’t Write data.
So, the big new Business Process Flow in 2013 will cost most businesses $35 per user, just to write Opps. Doesn’t make sense to me but I guess that’s why my business isn’t as large as Microsoft’s… This sure makes it seem like Microsoft is using the same bait and switch tactics that Salesforce has perfected over the years — “oh, you want your data backed up? That’ll move you to the $130 per user level!”
One more factoid I verified: if an existing customer has less than five licenses, when it’s time to renew their subscription they will be required to pay $65 per user for a minimum of five users.
Hope that helps,
Lon