Dynamics 365

Last updated: October 6, 2023

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Overview

The journey to deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 is long, complicated, and expensive. Generally speaking, the budget required for a deployment would range from $10,000 to $1,000,000+ with timelines for development and deployment taking from 6 months to several years.

Step 1) Understand UW’s offering

Currently, Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 are not generally available to the University, so there is a significant amount of missing documentation and procedures, which may lead to some rough edges during deployment and for ongoing operations.

The costs are broken into many parts:

  • Internal staffing costs for the department implementing and using the solution
  • Microsoft Partner or other consulting costs
  • The cost of the licensing via our Microsoft Enterprise Contract, plus ~25% overhead for management of the contracts, ordering processing, customer per user licensing assignments self-service tool, and annual automatic renewal. It includes no provisioning of services, technical support, or planning support. All licenses are an annual cost and will be automatically renewed and billed to the department unless UW-IT is informed prior to the annual cutoff date of April 1st.
  • All planning, provisioning of services, and support is billed monthly at a standard hourly rate of $134.67 in 15-minute increments.
  • Microsoft Premier Support costs if needed for compliance or higher levels of required support are contracted directly between the department and Microsoft.

Step 2) Review Dynamics 365 licensing guide and engage appropriate Microsoft Partner & pre-sales

Dynamics 365 is a very complicated set of products and licensing – click to download the Dynamics 365 licensing guide. UW-IT is not able to provide guidance on which products to purchase. A good Microsoft Partner should be able to help you determine the right products you will need to license.

Although it may theoretically be possible to deploy a Dynamics 365 solution independently, no one at UW has yet to succeed at that. Therefore, we highly recommend engaging and purchasing services from the appropriate Microsoft Partner for the type of solution needed.

Step 3) Evaluate order with UW service team as hourly recharge support

Not all Dynamics 365 products can be offered at the UW due to complications of the UW environment and many quotas in Dynamics are shared across the entire organization. Due to the complication of the product range, we cannot provide good guardrails currently, so we require that the planned purchase be evaluated prior to purchase under our standard hourly rates.
We require organizations to purchase all the Power Platform Common Data Service (AKA Dataverse) Database, File, and Log quotas needed for their use. The standard tenant quotas are entirely reserved by UW-IT for the support of the services and providing other standard offerings to campus that use these quotas. Protection of other users and services is the primary reason for requiring this review.

Step 4) Licensing cost calculation

After the order has been evaluated, it can be submitted for quoting as needed through our campus contract. (The cost of this service is included in the purchasing overhead.)

Step 5) Execute contract with partner

The department deploying and managing the solution is responsible for negotiating contracts with the Microsoft Partner, consultant, and Microsoft Premier Support. It is very important that a UW Privacy and Data Security agreement be part of that contract. The department should contact the UW Office of Information Secuirty which has an IT Vendor Risk Management service for help with that process.

Step 6) Execute licensing order

At least 30 days prior to needing to begin work on development, send a email to help@uw.edu with required budget information for purchasing and asking for the final product list and quantities to be ordered.

Step 7) Environment provisioning

Provisioning of the Power Platform environments and Dynamics instances needed is done through a help@uw.edu support request. All work and meetings associated with initial provisioning is charged at our standard hourly rate.

Step 8) Development

Development is done by the sponsoring department and its contractors. It is not unusual for this phase to take a year or more if it is a custom solution or set of requirements, though some Microsoft Partners offer prebuilt solutions they can deploy very rapidly.

Step 9) Deployment

Deployment is done by the department and its contractors, and involves applying licenses to users, applying appropriate roles, and training. This stage also may involve end users making requests to enable integration with their UW Exchange mailboxes. Exchange mailbox integration is also billed at our standard hourly rate for each request.

Step 10) Operations

Operations is done by the department and its contractors. It is important to understand that the department has sole responsibility for managing the security, records retention, operations, and support for users. This includes keeping up on changes Microsoft is making to the products in use. UW-IT does not currently provide any proactive or end user support.

Please let us know if you need any further assistance prior to contacting Microsoft to begin the process or when meeting with the selected partner. If more help is currently needed, please open a Productivity Platforms recharge service request.

Organization Dynamics Support Groups (ODSG)

An Organization Dynamics Support Group (ODSG) is required before purchasing and implementing Dynamics 365.  The ODSG will be responsible for supporting the Dynamics 365 instance.

Dynamics 365 features available for request

  • Creation of new Sandbox and Production Dynamics CRM instances
    • Verify license(s) have been acquired
    • Verify name(s) are available
    • Add initial system admin account(s)
    • Set access limitation group (optional)
  • Adding licenses to users
  • Recover from backup
    • Verify an instance system admin is requesting the change and subsequent potential deletion of data
  • Exchange integration requests
    • Verify that at least one instance system admin approves
    • Verify that the owner of the target mailbox approves
    • Enable the integration

Dynamics 365 services explicitly not offered

  • Trial licenses and trial instances
  • Log analysis and investigation of user activity
  • Partner of Record designation
  • Management and reconfiguration of roles on an instance

Purchasing Dynamics 365

To initiate a Dynamics 365 license purchase, email help@uw.edu.