Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 3 – Dynamics 365 Licensing

This post is for day 3 of the Licensing Advent Calendar. In this post, I will elaborate on the Dynamics 365 licenses available and provide background on the conditions mentioned in the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide.

Dynamics 365 Licensing

On Day 1, I already briefly mentioned the different licensing SKUs available for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. There are more applications available in the Dynamics 365 suite of products. I think it is good to have an understanding of all license SKUs, as e.g., Dynamics 365 Sales or Field Service are used together with Finance and Operations in a lot of implementations.

The overview with license SKUs is not complete. The purpose is to get an idea of how the licensing is defined for the Dynamics 365 products to unify the experience of one suite of products, despite the technologies for the Customer Engagement apps and the Finance and Operations apps being different. Project Operations is a product with its core in the Customer Engagement apps, and the accounting and integration scenarios in Finance and Operations.

Next to user licenses, there are various device licenses, and some licenses are on the tenant level. E.g., Customer Insights, the customer data tool to get insights for Sales and Marketing, is licensed on a tenant level. This is not licensing the users, but the number of customer insights per month.

Examples of devices are: POS systems, Warehouse Mobile Devices, and Shop Floor Execution for manufacturing execution. For the activities on these devices, users can switch devices, or there is one hardware station being used by different shifts on a day.

For both the CE and F&O apps, there are multiple SKUs for different products, also with different access levels. When a user wants to open, e.g., Sales or Field Service, the products are different solutions that can be deployed, and they have their own tile via the environment URL. Here, per product, the user license is already checked when accessing the application.

If a user wants to use either, e.g., Finance or Human Resources, the F&O application contains all metadata of all apps. They are mixed across the main menu. Using security roles, the user will be restricted to the application areas of their responsibility.

Light users can perform simple tasks in the application using a Team Members license. This license grants the users access across all Dynamics 365 CE and F&O apps. The user can, e.g., enter timesheets, report expenses, or approve vendor invoices.

In Finance and Operations, there are also two additional user license types. Operations – activity is intended for users performing operations activities, such as receiving goods or maintaining purchase orders. HR Self Service is intended for users to access their own HR records and provide updates on, e.g., contact details. This last-mentioned license can be considered as a limited Team Members license.

Base and attach licenses

In case a user needs to have access to multiple applications as a full user, there is an option to save on licensing costs by assigning one base license and another attached license for the other product. In case a user needs to have access to both Finance and Human Resources, the base license will be Finance and have Human Resources as an attach. It is also possible to have an F&O app as a base and a CE app as an attach. All possible options are listed in the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide (see below).

In this table, you can read that having an SCM base license, you can use, e,g, Sales professional as attach. Vice versa, this is not possible. The most expensive license should be used as base, then other licenses will qualify for an attach.

In case the license value is the same, you can choose which license you want to use as base and which one as attach. E.g. you can have Finance as base and SCM as attach, but also SCM as base and Finance as attach.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

As mentioned above, there are different applications in the Dynamics 365 family. What product gives access to what features, and what additional user licenses can access what part of the application is listed in the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide. It also lists all conditions and additional capacity add-ons. The guide is updated monthly. You can always download the most recent guide using this link: Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide.

It is recommended to read and understand the licensing guide. In addition, changes are announced in the licensing guide. I’m reading the Licensing Guide every month to understand important changes. E.g., the update for December is about Dataverse and Operations capacity increases and consolidation.

For the F&O products, the licensing guide mentions per product out-of-the-box security roles with application features that can be accessed by the full base user, the Operations – Activity user, and the Team Members. This is key knowledge to understand what type of persona needs what license when using the product.

The team at Microsoft that is responsible for the implementation of the license enforcement takes the Licensing Guide as the single source of truth. Since the announcement of the license enforcement, a lot of updates have been applied in the guide for clarification and to take away conflicting statements. During the implementation of the new license calculation logic (a post for another day in the Advent Calendar), there were quite a few mismatches between the outcome of the User License reporting and the details in this guide. During calls with Microsoft, it was ensured that in case of discrepancies, the details were validated, and this resulted in various updates in the licensing metadata, which changed the outcome of the reports. Unfortunately, around November 11, a wrong update messed up the outcomes, which got fixed last week. The reporting should be stable now. In case there are still mismatches, you can report this to Microsoft. The implementation of the correct reporting was a bumpy ride for all parties involved: the client, the partner, but also Microsoft.

There is more…

During the Advent period, each day in December, I will share some thoughts and tips related to the Dynamics 365 user license enforcement. If you have questions about this topic, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn, the comments section below, or the contact form on this blog. I will then either update one of the planned blogs for the coming 24 days or answer questions in a new post.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Enforcement Advent Calendar

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!