Expensive and inefficient
Updated October 25, 2024

Expensive and inefficient

Ron Ballard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

For 5 years I have worked with UK charities that were implementing and using Microsoft Dynamics 365. Their systems were used to manage: donors, partner organisations, other contacts, beneficiaries, donations, events, other fundraising activities, mailshots (paper and electronic), and to report on the effectiveness of their various activities. These organisations were sold Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management, which was renamed to Customer Experience.

Pros

  • Increases Microsoft's revenues

Cons

  • The starting price indicated here on TrustRadius is $44 per month. The organisations I was working with paid between GB£1.6 million and GB£3.7 million (US$2.1 million to US$4.9 million) just to get the system up and running. The lower figure is for an organisation with 200 employees and a database of 50GB (in its old system).
  • When the 50GB database was migrated to Microsoft Dataverse (the data management tool used in Dynamics 365) it increased in size to 500GB. This would have taken 150 days to migrate. The ongoing storage cost would have been over £100,000 per year in Dataverse, and that's on top of fees for licences, usage, support and implementation. As a result, the organisation migrated only a fraction of its data, and had to maintain another system to manage the rest of the data. The old database cost less than £1,000 a year for the full 50GB.
  • Implementation time and costs escalated throughout the project
  • Operating costs were much higher than expected, largely because of disk usage costs. The cost per GB per month was 20 times the cost of premium disk on an Azure server, and the space taken up by the data was 10 times the same data in the source systems.
  • Achieving accurate, consistent and credible reports was very difficult: for the implementation partner, independent consultants and internal staff (who had proven database reporting skills).
The user-interface is very clunky, truncating data fields while wasting space on the screen. There are too many menus.
Getting bulk data into the system used Excel. This caused much "mojibake" (look it up in Wikipedia) by the poor handling of different character sets (UTF-8 and Windows 1252).
Getting data out of the system was extremely long-winded and unreliable. It seemed that Microsoft never wanted us to copy data out of the system.
I have also used some bespoke systems, which were much better than any of these. Microsoft Dynamics 365 was selected by senior management, against advice from technical experts. The products I could find in the list were also expensive and inefficient; Microsoft Dynamics was at least as bad as these in my opinion.

Do you think Microsoft Dynamics 365 delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Microsoft Dynamics 365's feature set?

No

Did Microsoft Dynamics 365 live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 go as expected?

No

Would you buy Microsoft Dynamics 365 again?

No

As a consultant to such organisations I would advise, in the strongest possible terms, that they do not use Microsoft Dynamics 365. This product diverts huge sums of money collected for charitable purposes to the profits of Microsoft and its "Gold Partners". It also leads to endless frustration in trying to do the simplest tasks from my experience.

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