While most of you are unaware of some of the usage requirements that may have altered in Microsoft Dynamics 365, we, as an MS Dynamics 365 services professionals bring useful tips that will surely help you save on licensing costs in D365. Microsoft dynamics 365 implementation company has introduced critical changes to its cloud licensing model lately. Due to this, some users could be migrated to a license at a lower cost without losing the main functionality they had selected.
Using the wrong license brings unnecessary monthly expenses and so, we are sharing the best ideas to help you optimize your D365 licensing and save on costs.
Free License Check
There are online websites offering free license check facility to help you find the best D365 customer engagement licenses for each user.
Such sites review each instance of D365 and deliver a detailed report that includes a suitable type of license. The report is an estimate based on the previous usage of the customer, it still offers better ideas to evaluate the present licensing model.
2. Review Plan Licenses
When Dynamics 365 was released, a Plan license was promoted as the best cost-effective option to use all capabilities throughout its customer engagement apps. Since October 2019, Microsoft has withdrawn the plan and due to this users will be licensed on each app basis.
3. Team member licensing
The team member license is the basic starting lowest price point to access D365. Microsoft has designed this to meet the minimum usage needs of the users.
With Team Member License, users will be able to read any data stored in D365, create views, dashboards, and carry out basic functions such as create/edit/delete permissions for activities and contacts, and up to as many as 15 custom entities.
4. Evaluating the latest licensing model for saving storage costs
The latest structure of D365 has default storage that is split into three elements throughout the database, file, and log capacity. This is done to show how Dynamics data is stored inside the CDS. Administrators are able to deploy extra D365 production or non-production instances at zero additional cost. Earlier each dynamics subscription was limited to a single production environment along with one sandbox with additional costs for using extra instances.
The issue with Dynamics 365 storage space
Most of the times users have the issue with D365 storage space as their database size keeps increasing quicker. The massive database size affects the performance as well and along with that, the user starts seeking low storage cost options.
When the user does not have enough storage, he has only two options – either he needs to pay for extra storage, or he needs to free up space for the new database.
How to reduce the storage required in D365?
When you analyze the dynamics 365 to ensure the optimal performance of the system, you must check if there is enough space for growth. When you consume 80% of dynamics 365 total storage capacity, the system should send you a notification about the same so that you will be ready to take some action.
Here are some useful tips to help you in reducing the used up storage space in D365-
- Delete old useless records like cases and opportunities.
- Discard unwanted attachments from emails and notes using advanced find and bulk deletion options.
- Clear audit logs
- Remove suspended workflows that you won’t use again
- Remove bulk import examples
- Remove bulk duplicate detection jobs
- Perform bulk deletion job instances
After taking these measures, if you still lacking the space, you must check the attachments and documents. As per the several survey reports, attachments and documents consume over 70% of storage space in D365.
Using Document Management Systems
Being a cloud CRM system, Dynamics 365 was initially made to handle customer relations and not for storing documents. For that reason, the best solution to avoid extra costs with document storage is shifting them to different systems. These systems offer cheaper storage along with additional features.
Most popular DMS such as SharePoint and storage solutions like Azure Blob have a lower price/GB as compared to Dynamics 365 storage. Sharepoint not only offers cheaper storage but also providing immense collaborating opportunities to the organizations.