Microsoft Updated Dynamics 365 License Pricing Update
Microsoft recently announced updated pricing for Dynamics 365 licensing which will take effect October 1st, 2024:
Here is an excerpt of the pricing, you can see:
As is probably expected, there is an increase in pricing across the board.
So the obvious next question is…
What Can We Do to Lower License Costs?
I get this question quite often and there are some common things I see that can easily be done to lower license costs. I am going to look specifically at Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations (D365FO).
The first thing to keep in mind is that security and licensing are connected, that is because D365FO is somewhat unique in the ERP space in the sense that licensing is based on what access a user is assigned not what access that user consumes.
Here are some of the most common themes I see at client sites that cause over licensing:
1) Remove unneeded roles assigned to users.
One of the first things I normally suggest during a license assessment is a user role review, where the roles that users are assigned are reviewed by a manager, supervisor, or business process owner.
This data can be generated by the User Role Assignments report found at System Administration -> Inquiries -> Security -> User Role Assignments:
2) Remove over provisioned role access causing a higher license level.
It is extremely common for organizations to have roles that have more access than they actually need. This is across both out of box roles from Microsoft and custom roles companies create. The scenarios that are easiest to remedy are those that only have a few accesses causing a higher license level.
You can manually find these by reviewing each role from the ‘View Permissions’ report and looking at the license requirements and determining if there is a path to reduce the access to lower the licenses. In an ideal world, you would find a role that is assigned to a large number of users which can be easily fixed.
One thing I will call out is that any time you make a role change, be sure that adequate user access testing is done prior to deployment as you do not want to break current user functionality.
There is also a more automated solution to this that I discuss below.
3) Removing access at above Read level for ‘Read only’ or ‘View only’ security layers.
This scenario also impacts out of the box roles and custom roles, duties, and privileges and is something I always check for all license assessments. This is extremely important now because of a recent license change Microsoft made where Read access to a menu item will always require a ‘Team Member’ license.
This process can also be done manually by reviewing the access for each ‘read only’ or ‘view only’ role by using the ‘View Permissions’ functionality within the Security Configuration form. An example of this happening can be seen in the out of box duty below where there is a ‘View’ duty but as we can see there is a menu item assigned at above a ‘Read’ level:
Are There Tools to Help?
Yes there are a few different ISV solutions to help with this type of reporting, both Fastpath (now Delinea) and XPLUS have licensing offerings.
If you are looking for additional help with this, Protiviti offers a license assessment option that has a PowerBI file that includes a multitude of tabs that will allow for quick and easy analysis of the licensing requirements and will address the issues I listed above.
For example, you can execute a role license review and use the slider at the top to only show roles that have less than that number of accesses causing an Operations level license. In this case, we are looking for all roles that have less than 10 accesses that require an Operations license. This is one way to easily determine which roles would be the easiest to remediate to lower license costs:
You can also then take a role and see which users are assigned that role to see if they are assigned other roles which might be impacting their licenses.
Conclusion
Licensing is extremely complex within D365FO, be sure to utilize the free resources I and others have produced on the topic (some of mine are listed below) if you are performing the review yourself or if you would like more help feel free to reach out to discuss more!