Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Edition Differences
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ReportI’ve had discussions recently with both customers and partners regarding the differences in the three editions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 so I thought I’d quickly cover these today.
Note: For this discussion, I am purposefully not covering CRM Online since the end-customer has no control of that environment.
Editions
We have three editions available to us:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Workgroup.
This edition is limited to five, or fewer, users. It can be installed on Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 Premium Edition, any of the supported Windows Server 2003 editions, or Windows Server 2008. This version is limited to a single organization and a single computer that is running Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server.
Pretty self explanatory: 5 users, one CRM Organization.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Professional.
This edition has no user limit and is limited to a single organization. However, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Professional can be installed on more than one computer in the same deployment.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise.
There is no user limit for this edition. Additional features include support for multiple organizations, multiple server instances, and role-based service installation. Role-based services let you increase performance by installing component services on different computers.
Why is this important?
Most companies run into issues because they purchase the Professional Edition knowing that they will always have a single organization or tenant. Most people know that the Enterprise edition allows you to specify multiple organizations, but what is not really clear, if you don’t know the terminology, is something called role-based services.
CRM 4.0 is divided into a series of server roles that perform various tasks related to the operation of the system as a whole. Unless instructed otherwise, when you install CRM all roles are placed on a single server, which is usually not a problem. But, there may come a time when you need to move one of the roles to a separate server to help ease the processing burden.
And in many cases, this has nothing to do with the number of users but is totally related to what those users are doing. Some operations, such as the application of complex business logic, batch updates, etc., may require a tremendous amount of processing power for a short period of time. Since all of the server roles are on a single server, that one server must perform all of the processing directly.
If the server roles are split, say by moving the Asynchronous Processing service to another server, the load is shared between multiple physical machines so that one set of processes doesn’t affect others.
So, keep that in mind when you start planning your own CRM installation.
Licensing
A Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 deployment operates by using a single license key. Unlike earlier versions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 no longer requires additional license keys to be added when changes are made, such as adding a client access license (CAL). The single license key contains the Microsoft Dynamics CRM version, server license, and the CALs.
You can view and upgrade a license in Deployment Manager.
You can view and modify client access license types for each user in the Users area of the Settings area in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web client.
Note: There is no difference in the licensing for the CRM Clients, no matter which edition of Dynamics CRM 4.0 you have installed.
References
This was originally posted here.
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