Dynamics, Portals, and Adobe

We have a somewhat unique Dynamics environment here in Ottawa, so, sometimes, I am wondering if what’s happening here is a reflection of the overall trend or if it’s all about Microsoft trying to adapt to the specifics of the local market.

You see, most of the Dynamics implementations here are still on 2015 version of Dynamics, and they are still on-prem. This is a government city, so most of those implementations are for the government departments, and, for a number of reasons, they are not able to utilize Dynamics in the cloud yet.

What it means, for example, is that, right now, there is a clear upgrade path for Dynamics.. but there is, essentially, no upgrade path for the portals. Imagine a government department implementing an ADX 7 portal. A few years from now, they’ll go to Dynamics 2016/365/V9.. whatever the version is going to be. However, what are they going to use as a portal solution?

The interesting part is that there is, actually, a portal solution that’s being promoted by Microsoft locally. To me what’s being offered here looks like this:

ADX7 is not an option for new implementations – that’s why it’s pretty much greyed out.

One-Time source code release and community edition versions might be an option BUT they will have to be supported somehow.. and there is no support from Microsoft. Which will certainly make it an issue. So those two options are greyed out as well (may be a little less greyed out).

Then, there are customer portals online. Those are fully supported by Microsoft, but only for the online version of Dynamics. Technically, right now that’s, mostly, not an option because of what I wrote above. It may be an option in the future.

And, then, there is Adobe Experience Manager that’s offering integration with Dynamics (and other sources), and that’s likely a much more powerful product than ADX at this point. So, the relative scale on that image probably reflects the capabilities of those two solutions as well.

Actually, this is not a product of my imagination – this whole post is simply a reflection on the presentation Microsoft hosted earlier today for the government employees/consultants/partners where we saw what Adobe Experience Manager is capable of. I have to say it looked pretty good, though, as usual, the devil should be in the details we have not, really, seen.

Either way, keeping in mind the partnership between Adobe and Microsoft (have a look here, for example), and keeping in mind the announced depreciation of the Dynamics marketing service, I am wondering if we all should get to know Adobe Experience Manager better..

What do you think?