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Your Guide to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Licensing and Entitlements

by Charles Ma 6 minute read

During this Fall’s Dynamic Communities User Group Summit, the annual gathering of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform users, our team was approached many times with questions regarding software entitlements for their investment of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform (PowerApps, Power BI and Flow).

This is an important topic for any customer who is investing so much of their time and money into a solution. Unfortunately, that information is difficult to gather, and you’ll have to dig through long licensing documents to find it.

For that reason, we have put together this guide which has everything related to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform entitlements in place.

What’s new as of October 2019

There have been many changes to the way that Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform have traditionally been sold. In this section we summarize the main changes and more detail is provided later in the post.

  1. No more plan licenses. The “Customer Engagement Plan” is a thing of the past—now you simply license the D365 first party apps that you need – Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, etc. And you can mix and match. If some of your users use opportunities and another set of users use cases, you can license sales for the sales users and customer service for the users who manage support cases.
  2. Administrators and makers do not need a Dynamics 365 license. If you are a maker, you don’t need to be licensed for Dynamics 365 apps. You can have PowerApps per user license and be a maker of Dynamics 365 apps, as long as somebody in your environment is licensed for a Dynamics 365 app.
  3. Many other types of users do not need Dynamics 365 licenses. You need to have a Dynamics 365 license if you use Dynamics 365 first party apps (sales hub, customer service hub, field service, etc). For the rest of us, you can license a less expensive PowerApps license and still use the core platform or custom model driven apps, even in the same environment used by Dynamics 365 licensed users. This applies to many of Hitachi Solutions’ customers that leverage our Engage for Insurance, Credit Unions, or financial services products. If you have users who are not leveraging first party apps or restricted entities (like cases), these users can use less expensive PowerApps per user or per app licenses.
  4. PowerApps and Flow are included in your licensing for Dynamics 365, maybe. If your PowerApps or Flow leverages the Common Data Service and is used in context with Dynamics 365 apps and solutions, Flow and PowerApps is included in your license. Microsoft refers to this as “seeded apps and flows.” If you are building apps and process that leverage other connectors and do not involve the Common Data service, you need to license PowerApps and Flow individually.
  5. Microsoft announced new API request limits for Dynamics 365, PowerApps, and Flow. For enterprise users, the limit is 20,000 per day. To provide for customers with high volume integrations, Application Users and Non-Interactive Users (special non licensed service accounts provided in enterprise deployments) are granted 100,000 api requests per day pooled at the tenant level. If you occasionally exceed your limits, your processes will not be stopped and you will not see any additional invoices, but if you will consistently exceed your limits, you need to purchase additional API request allocations.
  6. New capabilities: Microsoft has introduced a number of new capabilities for Omnichannel Engagement Hub, Power Virtual Agent, Sales AI, and more. Each of these requires an additional license and are priced based on volume of transactions. For example, Power Virtual Agent is $1,000 per month for up to 2,000 chat sessions per month, and additional 2,000 sessions can be purchased for $450/month.
  7. Dynamics 365 Portals is now PowerApps Portals. Portals no longer requires any Dynamics 365 licenses, and it now provides 100,000 external unauthenticated page views per day. Authenticated logins start at $2 per login and go down based on volume. See Colin Vermander’s blog for more details.

In the next section we get into more details about licensing options.

Dynamics 365

Let’s start with Dynamics 365. The Dynamics 365 suite of solutions provides a vast set of powerful applications to empower your business to succeed. But in order to derive the most value out of Dynamics 365, you’ll have to understand what you’re getting for your investment.

There are several types of entitlements you receive along with the purchase of the applications. Most of these are provided per tenant, unless otherwise noted:

Dual Use Rights – This allows customers the option to deploy the server software either in Microsoft’s cloud or in a private on-premises or partner-hosted cloud.

Downgrade Rights – Customers may use downgrade rights to deploy an earlier version of a server, however, downgrade rights are limited to Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Server for Dynamics 365 for Operations on-premises Server, and Dynamics CRM 2016 for Dynamics 365 (On-Premises) Server. Licenses for all supporting servers (e.g., Windows Server and CAL(s)) must be obtained separately.

Default Capacities – This refers to the storage capacities (Database, File, Log) and production/non-production instances you’re entitle to. With storage capacities, there are two sub-types.

  • Shared – This is shared amongst the entire tenant and all its users. The Shared storage is given with the first subscription license purchased but does not increase with each additional license.
  • Accrued – Added capacity with each additional base license purchased.

Additional Applications – Supplemental applications that are includes with the purchase of the primary application. These may include Microsoft Forms, PowerApps, Flow, etc.

* At any given time, only one of the instances may be in production but alternatively both instances may be in non-production (UAT, pre-production).

Power Platform

Next, let’s review Power Platform. The Power Platform consists of three separate solutions designed to help improve productivity within your organization: PowerApps, Flow, and Power BI.

PowerApps

PowerApps can be purchased as per app or per user plans. These plans entitle you to different capabilities:

Flow

Microsoft Flow can be purchased as per user or per business process plans. These plans entitle you to different capabilities as shown below:

Power BI

Power BI can be purchased in Pro or Premium tiers. A comparison of what the two tiers entitle you to is below:

Final Thoughts

The licensing and entitlement landscape of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform can be difficult to navigate. With each individual entitlement there are nuances built within it and while this guide curates most of the detail, it is by no means complete. If you would like to have a conversation about how we can help you navigate the licensing landscape, please feel free to contact Hitachi Solutions today.

References

All information in this article is a comprehensive summary collected from the following sources: