The Dynamics side of 365 includes CRM, ERP, Customer Service, and other applications you might need to manage your business.

For example, an Enterprise E5 license holder has access to everything, while a person who has an Office Online license only has access to some apps in a browser. Your specific product mix is determined by your license type. Not everyone who is on O365 has access to all of these products and services. O365 includes the core Office applications: Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but adds in some other robust tools like Access and OneNote as well as services like OneDrive, Exchange, and SharePoint. Since everyone uses email I’ll discuss the Office side of 365 first.

Now let’s get down to the details of M365. Azure services and O365 can work together to do things like including the content of an automated chat in your CRM, but that is the topic for a different blog. Too many to list in this post but you can find a comprehensive list here. Azure services include Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence and much more. We should distinguish M365 from the suite of Azure services that Microsoft offers. These tools range from marketing and CRM to finance and business intelligence. M365 is a suite of online software applications that businesses use to manage their enterprise.

If you’re talking to a Microsoft salesperson, they might use the term “M365” to reference their high-end enterprise licensing but for most of us out here in the trenches, we use M365 to refer to the combination of D365 and O365. Both Office and Dynamics are part of the 365 platform so they boast a common data model which means that they can communicate freely with each other as needed. Office 365 is usually referred to as “O365”. Dynamics 365 is usually referred to as “D365”. Complex, because they do so much and cover so much territory within your enterprise that it takes a lot of effort to wrap your head around what is available to you. Simple, because 365 is really just a suite of business applications that you can take advantage of very easily. The answers are at once simple and complex. People who are just beginning to investigate business software ask these questions frequently. What is Dynamics 365? How does it relate to Office or M365? Which one is the CRM tool? Which one is ERP? Does O365 give me an email?

Microsoft office suite vs 365