What's coming in Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Marketing app next year

While Microsoft already is selling its new Dynamics 365 suite for enterprises, three of the pieces -- Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service -- of the Dynamics 365 Business suite targeted at small and mid-size businesses aren't coming until next year.

On the marketing front, Microsoft is advising larger business customers who want marketing capabilities to go with Adobe's Marketing Cloud. But on the SMB side, Microsoft is building a new, different marketing app. Microsoft officials have declined to provide anything beyond the pricing ($40 per user per month) and Spring 2017 timing for the coming Dynamics 365 Marketing App.

But one of the company's Gold-level CRM partners, Crowe Horwath, has shared some specifics based on "preview information."

Microsoft is no longer selling the company's existing Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) offering, though it is continuing to support existing customers running that app, as officials acknowledged earlier this year. (Microsoft Dynamics Marketing was based on Microsoft's 2012 Marketing Pilot marketing-automation acquisition.)

According to Ryan Plourde, author of the Crowe Horwath blog post, "the new Marketing app will be much easier to configure and extend than the current Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) solution. But the transition for existing MDM users will be a re-implementation. There will be some basic migration tools available but limited to master data such as customers, contacts and lists."

Here's a comparative feature list provided by Plourde as to what Microsoft plans to provide, functionality-wise, with the coming new app and how it compares to what was offered with MDM:

According to this feature chart, which Plourde acknowledges may still be subject to change, the new Dynamics 365 Marketing app will include only limited marketing resource management capabilities. But it will include more robust features for most multi-channel campaigns, event management, sales collaboration, customer intelligence and profiling and customization.

I asked Microsoft officials for comment on the information above and was told "Microsoft will not be offering comment at this time."

Microsoft's Dynamics 365 is the makeover and combination of its Dynamics CRM and ERP lines. The Dynamics 365 cloud service is a combination of CRM Online, Dynamics AX, and a new financials offering that was codenamed "Project Madeira."