Changes to Dynamics 365 Licences

Dynamics 365 Licensing From October 1st Microsoft have introduced some major changes to their licensing.

Here are the key changes:

Team Member License Changes

Team Member restrictions will now be enforced, rather than being Honour based due to the new Common Data Service that the platform now sits on top of.
Team Member Licenses can no longer Create, Update or Delete Account records.
Removing create, update and delete right from Knowledge records
Create, update or delete records for a maximum of 15 custom entities (this was previously unlimited). PowerApps P2 License is now also required if you need to access more than this for heavily customised Dynamics 365 Instances

Microsoft Portal Licensing

Access to the first included Microsoft Portal for the tenant requires the purchase of a minimum of 10 Full User licenses. This was originally 1, then upped to 5, now 10.

Dynamics 365 Storage Costs

Dynamic 365 comes with 10 GB of storage included, and this will not change. However the storage costs for an additional GB of storage is changing. Previously the storage was £3.80/GB/Month for the Dynamics 365 - Additional Database Storage. This has now been rebranded and increased considerably. This is now treated as App Database Storage and costs £30.20 Microsoft have put on hold any price increase, but you can't buy any new storage during this Month, unless you already have a subscription in place for Additional Storage in which case you can increase it. Whilst the CDS for Apps Database Capacity has increased, there are still ways of minimising how much data is stored in Dynamics 365. One option is to move your Email and Note Attachments into Azure which is a fraction of the cost. The other is to review what level of Auditing is captured in Dynamic 365 and how long you retain system job history in the system. All of these can reduce the storage being used considerably and is something easy to put in place.

When will this affect you?

These immediately apply to customers setting up new Dynamics 365 Team Member subscriptions after 1st October 2018.

Existing customers will not be affected straight away and will be able to renew Team Member licensing without these changes until 1st July 2020. After this date any renewals will change to the new Agreements.

So if you already get your Licenses on CSP through Three Grey Monkeys, or another CSP you will not notice any changes until after July 2020.

What Should You Do Next?

Their are a few things to consider here to understand how you will be effected.

Number of Team Member Licences you currently use and access provided.
Are users accessing functionality they shouldn’t be?
How has your solution has been architected and how it is being used?
When does your licensing agreement renew?

The new team member licence for some customer will work for their current environment with no changes. Others may need to upgrade to a more expensive Customer Service or Sales licence, or a PowerApps P2 licence.

The Licensing can be quite tricky to get right, so if you need any assistance in working out what Licenses are right for you and your organisation please get in touch.