Even with the best will in the world, objects that we own or operate will sometimes break down completely. In these occasions, after typically spending an inordinate amount of time attempting to resolve things ourselves, we refer to others who have the expertise and ability to provide a fix. Often, this will come at a price and, depending on the nature of the issue and how it’s ultimately resolved, you will walk away happy as Larry or anything but.

Dynamics 365 for Enterprise (D365E) applies very much to the scenario illustrated above. As an application system developed and, in most cases, hosted by Microsoft, you will occasionally come across issues that cause the application to be inoperable or prevent you from carrying out a specific task. In these instances, we generally need to raise our hands and get someone from Microsoft involved to help out. The routes available to do this can vary, meaning you have to consider carefully which option is best for your business.

In this week’s post, we will take a closer look at the different support offerings that are available to D365E customers, what you get as part of each one and the pros/cons of each offering. If you are currently in the process of evaluating which support option is best for you, then this post will (hopefully!) leave you much better equipped to determine the best option for your /organisation.business

Standard Support

All subscriptions on Office 365 include access to Standard Support, generally amounting to the ability to open support requests on the portal and getting assistance to resolve issues with a particular application/service. D365E is no exception to this rule, and organisations can be comforted in knowing that they are covered from a support perspective the second after they purchase their subscription. However, unless you already have dedicated expertise within your business on how to operate the application, do not expect this service to be an effective hand-holder through your early days with the application. The priority level for Standard Support requests is low and will generally be routed to Microsoft affiliates as opposed to dedicated support professionals within Microsoft itself. Nevertheless, Standard Support does provide you with the ability to get your critical issues with D365E resolved.

Pros

• Included in your subscription.
• Guaranteed resolution for all break/fix issues.

Cons

• Responses are only guaranteed within 24 hours of first raising the case.
• Support provision can generally be lacklustre and cumbersome to deal with.

Enhanced Support

For smaller businesses, often the cost of obtaining more streamlined support provision for internal applications can be prohibitively expensive. Enhanced Support attempts to try and overcome this by providing a very cost effective means of putting in place a 2-hour SLA response time for any support requests raised involving D365E. This is definitely a huge improvement over what is offered as part of Standard Support. If your business has made a firm commitment not to align yourself with a Partner, then I would strongly recommend looking at Enhanced Support to keep you afloat while using D365E.

Pros

• 2 hour response time guaranteed for all service requests.
• Grants access to CustomerSource, an online repository of training resources to help you brush up on your D365E expertise.

Cons

• As a paid offering, each user in your organisation will require the appropriate add-on subscription to ensure compliance. The additional cost (amounting to a few extra £’s per month) will, therefore, need to be factored into your monthly budget.
• Provides in-hour support only, with no guarantee of a response/action outside of normal business hours.

Professional Direct Support

Professional Direct Support is best geared towards medium to large size organisations or those that require the peace of mind of having speedy responses to any problems. The 1 hour SLA represents the pinnacle response time that Microsoft customers can receive and the offering is also enhanced further via access to a dedicated person within Microsoft who will look after you and ensure your requests are being dealt with effectively. Unlike Enhanced Support, you also have explicit access to 2nd line support professionals within Microsoft, with a commitment towards priority escalation to engineers when a serious problem is identified. Professional Direct Support is the best support offering to go for if you place significant value within your D365E investment and want to align your support provision very closely with Microsoft.

Pros

• 24x7, 1 hour guaranteed response for all of your issues
• Access to a Service Delivery Manager within Microsoft, as a point of contact for all support requests and to provide ongoing review of your support experience.

Cons

• Costs an additional £6.80 per month on top of your existing D365E subscriptions
• Cannot be relied upon to provide in-application support (e.g. entity customisations, plugin development etc.)

Working with a Partner

Partners are perhaps a natural choice for medium to large size organisations who cannot afford to have the dedicated expertise in-house to manage their D365E deployment, but are looking for a cost-effective way of having this knowledge at their disposal. Dynamics 365 partners are plentiful, and many of them can prove to be a lot less daunting to deal with day-to-day compared with Microsoft directly. They will likely have lots of combined expertise across different areas of the product and will be able to tailor a support offering that suits your requirements more neatly than Microsoft can. The key thing to remember when choosing your partner is to ensure that they have an Advanced Support for Partners (ASfP) or Premier Support for Partners (PSfP) agreement in place with Microsoft. Why is this important? By being enrolled within one of these offerings, the partner has the ability to log support requests relating to your subscription with enhanced routing/SLA’s in place, meaning your request will be dealt with faster - in some cases, a 1-hour response is guaranteed for critical issues. The partner will also, arguably, be in a much better position to support you more generally, as both of these schemes afford ample opportunity for the partner to keep up to speed with everything that is happening with D365E.

Pros

• Excellent resource to have in place for in-application issues (i.e. problems that don’t require escalation to Microsoft).
• Low month-on-month investment, anywhere from £200-£700 or more per month, depending on the size or your organisation.

Cons

• For any issues that require customisation/developer expertise to resolve, expect some punishingly expensive day rates for the work; in some cases, I have seen prices going up to £950 a day for a junior consultant(!!)
• Does not benefit from any of the above offerings to help you as a business maximise your investment in D365E. You will be reliant solely on your partner of choice to provide this as part of the service (if in fact, they do at all).

Conclusions or Wot I Think

The myriad of support options presented as part of this post are very much designed to cater for organisations of different sizes, agendas and visions of how they see their D365E system at a strategic level. The list is by no means exhaustive too, as enterprise organisations can look at Premier Support as well. As this kind of support offering would generally involve provision for multiple Microsoft/Microsoft Online Services products, I have deliberately left it out this list, due to it very much being “overkill” for supporting a single application. What you are left with as part of this list is arguably 3 viable support options that can be recommended depending on which boat you are sitting in:

• If you are a small business with sufficient technical expertise in-house, then the Enhanced/Professional Direct Support options are best.
• If you are a larger organisation looking to very closely align yourself with Microsoft and are confident in your in-house technical ability, then Professional Direct Support is the one for you.
• If you are a business of any size and very much don’t want to worry about managing and supporting your D365E system, then the Partner route is a very sensible approach.

The implication with all of the above is that the Standard Support option is not one that I would recommend you have in place. Whilst you can be assured that your critical issues will ultimately get looked into and resolved, you may find yourself waiting days and weeks for a resolution and not necessarily be afforded the most technically accomplished support professionals to assist you in resolving your case.