When it comes to transitioning to the next generation of marketing and customer engagement automation tools from Microsoft, there are a few topics of interest:
- The life cycle of Dynamics Marketing
- Migration and My Data questions
- Licensing questions in relation to the next generation of tools
How customer of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing best migrate to the next generation of marketing tools from Microsoft – “Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Business edition”
As an existing customer of Dynamic Marketing feel free to continue using the product throughout the ongoing subscription period. You may extend your subscription once from now to October 2017. For Direct purchase customer, the subscription period renews for one year, for Enterprise customers for 3 years. Microsoft is committed to provide full support for the product throughout your subscription.
We will continue to provide service allow adding more users and purchase of add-ons like email volumes throughout the subscription period. Microsoft will continue to support the product in that period fully, including the case of a hotfixes for observed issues. Yet we will eventually ramp down on the flow of monthly enhancements. We will instead fully focus our development on the new marketing app from Microsoft – “Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Business edition”. This new app will be available for Dynamics 365 customers in Spring release 2017. This will be an online release only in Spring 2017. Starting November 1, 2016, we have stopped selling Dynamics Marketing to new customers.
The spring release will focus on the topics of Customer engagement automation (campaigns), email and Web channels including content designer and templates, event management and event marketing, Integration and customer Intelligence including segmentation and analytics.
How will I in the future can move to the new generation of marketing tools from Microsoft: “Dynamics 365 for Marketing”?
If you are using the Dynamics CRM Connector for Dynamics Marketing today to connect Dynamics Marketing with your CRMOL instance today, you will find that the master data are already synchronized between the two systems. While you will find that you will need to reimplement campaigns and email messages with the new more powerful functionality in the new marketing app, you will also find that your audience and the lists you are syncing already today will continue to be in Dynamics 365 as well. We are looking at more tooling that help you with the transition.
Another option will be to continue using Dynamics Marketing running your existing customer engagement automation – some of which might have planned to run continuously for several months. By using the new app Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Business edition gradually more and more you will find the transition a smooth process.
What if I don’t want to transition to “Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Business edition”?
You may continue use the Dynamics Marketing until the end of your subscription (including the renewal you may be able to acquire, if you wish to do so.)
What happens to my data in Dynamics Marketing?
Upon the end of your subscription all customer data will be kept for maximum of 90 days. Before the subscription ends you may use the various functions for exporting data in Dynamics marketing to take a copy of records you like to take a hold of – if you need to do so.
Most objects provide an export to Excel function on the list representation. The OData endpoint together with Power Query and Excel is another good excellent tool to take a snapshot of relevant data in your Dynamics Marketing.
What about my product licenses, can I continue using them and when can I transition?
License plans will be available toward the Spring 2017 release.