With much fanfare in 2013, Microsoft launched Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) to complement its successful Dynamics CRM offering.  On the heels of its 2012 acquisition of Marketing Pilot, Microsoft set out to develop an end-to-end marketing application that would expand Microsoft’s business application footprint, and allow competition with the likes of Salesforce.com, IBM, and Oracle, each advancing their own marketing footprint through acquisition.

Despite an intriguing story of broad marketing functionality, and vast development resources of Microsoft, MDM did not realize the potential so many expected.  This article is not intended to explore the woes or the why’s, but it is safe to say, MDM did not achieve the goals set out in 2013.

Accordingly, in November 2016, Microsoft announced that MDM would no longer be sold and that current customers would need to transition away from the MDM product (after optionally renewing their license) no later than 2020.  For those who chose not to renew, transition would occur much sooner. Further no formal upgrade path would be supported.

So now what?

MDM users generally fall into two camps:  a) “Camp MA” – those who licensed MDM predominantly for its Marketing Automation (MA) features such as email marketing, landing page forms, lead scoring and so on, and b) “Camp MRM” – those who licensed MDM predominantly for its Marketing Resource Management (MRM) features such as job and task management, creative content annotation, review and approval, and financial management.

While neither camp will benefit from a “push button” upgrade path, Camp MA is likely to endure less pain and rework than Camp MRM.  Because the MDM marketing automation features share much of the same data as CRM (contacts, leads, campaigns), Camp MA users will be able to maintain their data already stored in CRM.  It is true that historical email and landing page form templates, email and web response data, and lead scoring models may be in jeopardy, but this will have a much smaller impact than the data and configuration loss anticipated for Camp MRM users.

Many Camp MRM users who invested heavily in task and job tracking, intake form, campaign brief, and asset review templates, and/or budget, expense and reporting configuration are likely facing a complete redo.  To make matters worse, Microsoft has not committed to providing comparable (replacement) functionality in these areas. This is different than with marketing automation where users and partners alike await the arrival of Dynamics 365 Marketing, Business Edition (Microsoft’s Marketing Automation replacement for MDM).

So now what?

(see Part 2)

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