Perhaps one of the best pieces of news arising from the detail behind the Dynamics 365 for Enterprise (D365E) announcement was the introduction of a number of freebies that are included as part of any subscription. Previously, under CRM Online licensing, you would have to purchase a number of Professional licenses before getting any free items. Now, regardless of the number of user licenses in your subscription, new and existing customers get all of the following at no additional charge:
- 10GB of total database storage across all of your instances (Production/Sandbox)
- Free Sandbox instance
- Free Portal
- Add-on services, such as Microsoft Flow and Project Online.
Given that the monthly cost for most of the above previously amounted to a significant figure in the hundreds of £’s, it is good to now see that arguably essential subscription elements (for example, Sandbox instances, to ensure a separate development/testing environment for customisations) are included at no additional charge. The question of whether or not this is value for money, however, is something that will likely depend on the size of your D365E deployment and the number/type of user licenses involved.
With this in mind, there is doubtless a high amount of impetus to encourage organisations who are currently on Dynamics CRM 2016 Update 1 or earlier and/or are still on the “old” Office 365 SKUs for CRM Online to start migrating across to one of the new plans - either Enterprise Plan 1, Dynamics 365 for Sales/Field Service etc. or Team Members. Organisations who are still on CRM Online plans can choose to either upgrade now or when their plan retires, in addition being able to take advantage of transition upgrade pricing. In some cases, this can amount to an average reduction in monthly prices of up to 20%. Therefore, if you are currently paying for excess storage at £7.50 per GB per month, additional sandbox instances at £113.10 per month and a Portal instance at a whopping £377 per month, then there may be a good business case for not waiting until renewal and to upgrade straight away to the new D365E SKU’s.
This was certainly the case with an organisation I was working with previously. The deployment was rather small in nature, approximately 60-70 users in total. The majority of licenses were allocated towards Basic and Essential license types. As such, the organisation was unable to benefit from the previous offer of a free sandbox instance with 25 CRM Professional licenses and additional, free database storage with more Professional users; meaning that they had to buy 2 additional sandbox instances and a large amount of additional storage to cover their requirements as part of the solution. The organisation was, therefore, an excellent candidate to transition across their CRM Online Professional to Plan 1 Enterprise license types.
With the above TechnNet article open and during an appropriate out of hours timeslot, I was then tasked with carrying out the license migration. I was relieved that the process went largely to plan, with no major hiccups. I was able to confirm successfully that the free sandbox instance appeared within the Dynamics 365 Administration centre after purchasing the new plans and did not vanish when cancelling the CRM Online Professional subscription. However, the same could not be said for the free storage. In the past, myself and colleagues have observed that purchasing additional storage can take some time to appear on the Dynamics 365 Administration Centre - sometimes up to an hour or more. After noting no change in the storage count after waiting this long, it definitely looked as if something had gone wrong as part of the upgrade. 😕
After temporarily adding on some additional storage to cover the amount that we expected to gain as part of the transition and waiting until the next weekday, I opened a support ticket with Microsoft to clarify the situation regarding the additional 5GB of free storage we were expecting to receive and to determine whether something had in fact gone wrong. In good time, I was duly informed the following by a Microsoft support representative:
We informed you that “to get 5gb free storage for their organisation, update of CRM organisation to 8.2 is recommended and you will receive this free storage whenever your organization will be updated”.
At this juncture, it should be noted that one crucial piece of information has been left out as part of the above 🙂 All of the organisations CRM instances were at version 8.1. According to the above then, one (or all) of the organisations Dynamics CRM 2016 Update 1 instances need to be upgraded to D365E to take advantage of the free storage offer.
Since the above incident, we have scheduled in all of the organisations instances to be upgraded to 8.2 i.e. to D365E. I will report back after this upgrade has been completed to confirm the presence (or lack thereof) of the additional 5GB storage. Why the scepticism? I find it rather strange that you have to upgrade all of your instances to the latest version to take advantage of the new storage offer. I was always under the impression that the storage “layer” of your CRM/D365E instances are separate from the instances themselves. This being the case, I had therefore assumed that the SKU change would have been the flag to tell Administration Centre to add on an additional 5GB storage. This would appear to be how the additional Sandbox instance worked because, as demonstrated above, the free instance updated into Administration Centre without issue. The world of CRM/D365E can always throw up interesting and bizarre behaviours, so I won’t rule anything out at this stage. Stay tuned…
UPDATE (28/03/2017): Well, I can confirm that the support engineer is correct and at least one of your instances as part of your subscription needs to be running 8.2 for the free additional storage to appear on the portal. So if you have a spare instance and are itching to get your hands on additional database space, then I would recommend that you reset one of your spare sandbox instances to the latest version via the Administration Centre.