What's in a name - CRM, Dynamics 365, CDS

Now that I've restarted posting on this blog, I'm struggling to name the technologies consistently. It used to just be CRM (or Microsoft CRM, or Dynamics CRM, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM), but now it's Dynamics 365, or Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement. And from the platform perspective, it's Common Data Services (CDS).
To an extent, we're necessarily at the whim of Microsoft branding, which can change, but I feel we're close to an overall set of terms that can be consistently applied. As I see it, there are 3 distinct things that can be named:

The overall suite of technologies
This has been Dynamics, Dynamics 365, or Microsoft Business Applications. Of these, Dynamics 365 is definitely the leader, though there has been recent use of Microsoft Business Applications, so we may find this to become more popular. To me, the main difference is that Microsoft Business Applications can include technologies such as PowerApps and Flow, which started out under the Office 365 brand


The applications that Microsoft deliver
We started with the separate Dynamics products (CRM, AX, GP, NAV etc). Several (but not all) were then included within Dynamics 365, along with some new application (e.g. Talent). From the original CRM application and implementations, we can refer to each Application, which are Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, Field Service and Project Service Automation. Here the roadmap is a useful reference. These applications can be usefully referred to individually, but we need to be able to refer to them collectively, and distinguish them from the other Dynamics 365 applications (Finance and Operations, Retail, Talent, Business Central) that are not based on the CRM technology. Rather than using the term 'CRM', Microsoft are pushing the term 'Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement'. I do mostly understand the Microsoft approach, but it is a lot longer than 'CRM', so I'm going to struggle to move off CRM. For more on this, see Jukka's post

The platform - i.e. what underpins the applications
'Platform' itself can mean different things to different people, which we won't resolve here, but I'm taking about the technologies that started in CRM, and not just the Azure platform. Here we started with CRM, then the term xRM was introduced, but now (as of March 2018), I think that we should now be referring to CDS (Common Data Services). Now that Common Data Services for Applications and CRM are the same platform is a huge step. And from now on , I think the platform that started out as CRM is better termed CDS. There are a few details to sort out still; there are 'Common Data Services for Applications' and 'Common Data Services for Analytics', and I reckon only the former truly relates to the original CRM platform, but I'm not certain on that yet

Overall, I thing the picture will soon be reasonably clear, with a few caveats. For the foreseeable future, I expect I'll still preface most presentations by saying that I'll use the terms 'CRM' and 'Dynamics 365' interchangeably, unless there is a reason to differentiate between them, in which case I'll try and explain the difference. Similarly, I'll probably be using 'CRM' and 'xRM' and 'CDS' interchangeably for a while

Common Data Services Architecture in CDS 2.0

I struggled to think of a good title for this post, and I hope to change it to something more inspirational, as this is a very significant topic.
Microsoft have made several recent announcements in March 2018, but for me the most significant is the PowerApps Spring Update. This may seem strange for me, a CRM MVP, to say, given how much there was on CRM in the Business Applications Spring ’18 Release Notes, but I think it makes sense once you realise that the PowerApps Update describes the new and future Common Data Services (CDS) architecture, and that in this architecture, much of CDS is the CRM platform (aka xRM).
Rather than CDS being a separate layer or component that then communicates with the CRM platform, CDS and CRM are a shared platform.
Strictly, it's not quite as simple as the last sentence makes out, especially as CDS now splits into Common Data Service for Applications and Common Data Service for Analytics (I'm hoping we'll soon get good acronyms to distinguish these), but for now it's worth emphasising that, if using Common Data Service for Applications, you are directly using the same platform components that CRM uses. This has several major implications (all of which are good to my mind):

1. CDS for Apps can fully use the CRM platform features, such as workflow, business process flows, calculated fields. This immediately makes CDS a hugely powerful platform, but also means there are no decisions to take on which platform to use, or differences to take into account, because they are the same platform
2. There are no extra integration steps. Commissioning a CDS environment will give you a CRM organisation, and equally, commissioning a CRM organisation will give you a CDS environment. This is not a duplication of data or platforms, because again, they are the same platform

There's a lot to play with, and explore, but for now this seems a major step forward for the platform, and I feel I'll be writing a lot more about CDS (though I'm still not sure when I'll stop referring to CRM when describing the platform).

The one area that still needs to be confirmed, and which could have a major impact on adoption, is licensing, but I hope we'll get clarity on this soon.