Dynamics 365 On-Premise supports App Designer and Site Map Editor

I attended the excellent CRM Saturday in Dublin on Saturday past, with some very informative talks on a wide variety of CRM related topics, both technical and non-technical.

One of the most interesting talks was by Mohamed Mostafa, which involved a discussion around things to consider when considering whether to recommend an on-premise CRM or a cloud based deployment.

As well as discussing technical considerations, supportability, data jurisdiction issues and data protection issues such as GDPR, the diverging feature set between online and on-premise came up. Since Microsoft’s move to the cloud, more and more features are going online only, leaving on-premise customers slightly envious of some of the cloud only features.

I recently blogged about the benefits of Dynamics 365 apps, and Mohamed rightly pointed out that the official Microsoft feature list indicates that Apps, specifically the ‘App designer and sitemap designers’ are available to online customers.

They lie!

A few weeks ago I read this documentation and scratched my head. Why were apps not included in an on-premise installation? As apps were solution aware, I wondered whether this could cause conflicts with moving solutions from online to on-premise. So I fired up an on-premise Dynamics 365 install to have a poke around to discover that apps worked perfectly on an on-premise installation – both the app designer, site map editor and the apps themselves once published.

The only difference between on-premise and cloud is that you won’t get the side bar on the left hand side showing each app, as this appears to be integrated to Office 365, but each app you create can still be accessed via the GUID appended to the URL and applied to standard security roles. So on-premise apps are still 100% usable.

This is great news all round for those who still wish to, or need to stay on-premise.

If you are on Dynamics 2016 on-premise, technically it is a minor upgrade from v8.1 to v8.2, so it’s time to upgrade now and use apps to simplify your user experiences.