Dynamics 365 – Bending it to Your Will

In Microsoft’s continuing quest to make Business Solutions easier, “Configuration over Code” is where they are making the most investment. “Coding” requires skills that most customers, and frankly most partners, do not have, which leads to additional costs for the customer. How is Microsoft doing on lowering this barrier?

Stage Setting

In the recent past, in order to get a Dynamics Business Solution to truly “fit” a customer’s unique requirements, configuration would only get you part of the way. By configuration, I mean adjusting the settings and options within the application that would be available to a System Administrator, a role that a Partner, as well as the Customer, may have. You could do a lot with configuration, but in the end it was glorified tweaking. At some point, many specific requirements, would require an effort beyond configuration. This additional effort was probably required in “most” deployments, and almost always required additional expenditures with a partner/developer. I have yet to find the customer who was happy to invest these additional funds, and Microsoft has been eyeing this tension as well. With Dynamics 365, Microsoft has made great progress towards, if not codeless, at least code less, and I expect that trend to continue.

Coder vs Developer

Code is code, it is written by a coder, it can be good or bad, and still function. Introducing externally written code into Dynamics has been a very common way to extend its capabilities for a very long time. The problem with code is that it is not Customer “accessible”; not that they can’t get to it, but they can’t understand it if they do. For many years, I think even Microsoft was resigned to the fact that code would simply be required with a complex application like Dynamics. The best they could hope for was that decent coders would be involved. I consider a “Developer” to be a different animal. While they may also know a bit about coding, their real strength is extending the application with the tools provided, more like a “Super Configurator”. Things like adding custom entities, building complex workflows. etc. But even these super-configuration tasks were beyond most customer’s capabilities, leading to additional costs.

More Code means Less Code

The R&D Team behind Dynamics 365 at Microsoft, has been very busy writing lots of new code, the goal of which is to reduce the need for additional code after product delivery. The first attack at minimizing external code is giving Super Configurators more tools. You might look at the new ability to create a slider control as fairly simple to add in the new configuration. This would have required external code before, and no doubt Microsoft wrote a whole bunch of code to eliminate the need for this external slider code.

Microsoft can See Now

One of the huge benefits to Microsoft of this shift to the cloud is that they can now see what is happening in the Customer environments. Telemetry is a big thing and getting bigger. I don’t know they they can do this today, but if not already, they soon will be able to see, and catalog, what solutions and web resources are being added, and for what purpose. This would allow them to identify common feature gaps, that maybe should be added to the core. We saw this recently with the new Editable Grids capability, much to the chagrin of a few ISVs.

AppSource is the new preferred method for adding first and third-party capabilities to Dynamics 365. AppSource apps typically contain a lot of externally written code. There is a lot of telemetry behind AppSource.  AppSource will be a huge repository of “Feature Gap” fillers, that could eventually find their way into the core, and not just through acquisition. I am not suggesting that Microsoft is a Witch and AppSource is an Apple, but Customers will always trump Partners, as well they should. Prior to the Cloud and AppSource, Microsoft had zero visibility into their customers’ deployments. The Wild West is being tamed.

Giving the Customer Options

This is the holy grail Microsoft is striving for; if Microsoft can reduce the cost for the customer to reach success, you can bet your ass they are going to do it. Cloud may have lit the fuse on lowering customer costs, but competitive forces are keeping that fuse burning and extending it. Let’s take a look at some of the options that a typical customer has today, I’ll use an SMB Construction Company as an example.

The typical SMB Construction company will make use of plenty of out-of-the-box features. Leads, Opportunities, Contacts and Accounts for example. This is fine for Lead to Opportunity management, but that customer would like to do more, for example they may also want to track their projects in Dynamics 365. To do this, they have several options depending on their needs:

1. Add a First-Party Solution. Microsoft offers Project Services. Currently it is only available in the Enterprise Edition, and in most cases will probably require a Plan to get to it, so we are looking at a pretty hefty cost for SMB. In addition, Project Services is a pretty big hammer for an SMB’s Project needs.
2. Add a Third-Party Solution. A customer can jump into AppSource and search for their additional Project Management needs with an App. Or, as AppSource is still digesting third-party apps, they may need to do a web search and find a solution that has not made its way into AppSource yet. In either case this would be introducing code into their environments along with configurable elements. In addition, they are introducing some level of risk. These third-party solutions are not supported by Microsoft, but rather by the third-party who offers it. Microsoft is attempting to ease this risk with ratings and reviews for those items in AppSource, but there is no source stability checking. There is no way for Microsoft to check to see if the third-party is financially sound, or if they will continue to develop and update their App, or support it very well. Once installed, it could become “Mission Critical” for the customer, so yes, there is some unknown level of risk introduced. These are all managed solutions and if the third-party were to fold up on you, it would be a mad scramble to replace the functionality. I am not saying AppSource is bad, but I do suggest you dig deeper than the App’s AppSource marketing page before you bet your business on it.
3. Hire a Super Configurator. This is where we see focusing our services today, and I think is the path that most partners will also be looking at. In this scenario, an unmanaged customizations solution is created and the configuration takes place within that, at least this would be the “Best Practices” approach in my opinion. Adding entities, relationships, forms, fields, views, workflows, etc., you can solve almost any business requirement here today without code, provided you have a “Configure First” mentality. The upside is that the customer owns the work, none of it is locked and if the partner goes belly-up, another one can step right in. This is significantly less risky than a third-party solution for the customer. So why would anyone buy a third-party solution? Cost. While Super Configuration may not require coding skills, it still requires a great deal of knowledge and time to “configure” what an off-the-shelf App provides. So the least expensive path is always going to be an App, as long as it meets your needs, and you minimize the risk by checking out who is behind it.
4. Citizen Developer. This is a new term I am hearing more lately. It is directly related to Microsoft’s efforts to make their Business Solutions simpler to configure. Microsoft will be ramping up its messaging to this target. While the water has not gotten shallow enough yet for the majority of “Citizens”, it is moving that way, and that tide will not be abating. The challenge will be around education. The typical Citizen Developer is someone at the customer who is “Tech Savvy”, and feels comfortable enough with basic configuration to try on the “Super Configurator” hat. Even without the need for code, the water gets deep pretty quickly today, and without proper training the Citizen Developer usually makes a mess of things. That is the risk of making something that is truly complex, “look” easy. I expect to see the clean-up business continue its growth trajectory. I cannot recall a circumstance, where the customer spent less to have us fix something, than they would have, to have us do it right in the first place, but that is increasingly going to be Microsoft’s fault as they continue to try and convince customers that this stuff is easier than it is.

Configuration is King

We are working with a large government agency that I cannot name. They came to us after pursing their traditional route to solving a software issue with a custom coded approach. The traditional approach was coming in at 7 figures and that went right up, and right back down, the flagpole without approval. Still having a dire need, they investigated alternatives and that led them to us. Instead of writing code from scratch, I suggested that we leverage the existing millions of lines of code that Microsoft has already written behind Dynamics 365. The project, instead of coding, became a “super configuration” project, and the cost fell to the low 6 figures. This entire agency has now adopted the approach of using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software, with configuration only. I wish I could name them because your jaw would drop.

To my coder friends out there: Coding has entered the Grace Period.

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