We now know the full Ecosystem is both compelling and comprehensive. The image below was presented by Marko Perisic in the second Microsoft Keynote here at Directions EMEA. But where can I start to describe the customer benefits?
The foundations of the ecosystem
Let’s start with the foundations, the common data service that underpins the ecosystem. What does this mean to you? It means that data is available across the entire ecosystem accessible in a common form whether you are using office applications or business applications. It means the integration gets better to the point of being seamless and it means that you can undertake most of your work in the application in which you spend most of your time.
Office 365 is enhanced with the “Business Centre” facilitating rapid response to customer enquiries; a typical flow might be email enquiry, immediate response with a quotation, customer confirmation, flip quotation to invoice and customer pays. The Lead-to-Cash workflow is elegant and fast.
Tenerife functionality
Dynamics 365 “Tenerife” (Tenerife is the code name for D365) provides marketing, sales, finance, operations and talent functionality. All of this functionality is ideal for small companies because of the easy and intuitive adoption and is also suited to large companies through extended capabilities.
Business intelligence, extensibility and the smart application of AI mean opportunities to become more efficient are everywhere. The example we were shown was a live demo of a free format, unstructured email stating a requirement for a certain number of items translated in real-time into a structured quotation at the start of the Lead-to-Cash workflow. It was truly impressive to see BI applied to a real-life example, one that we could all immediately imagine taking place. This is an ecosystem designed to support a company from startup all the way through to enterprise. As well as the obvious laptop access, tablet and mobile versions were presented to show that you can access the tools on any device – again this is applicable to how our customers want to work.
It’s exciting to be in Madrid to learn more and can’t wait for the D365 “Tenerife” to become generally available.
Read my day one update here if you missed it yesterday.
