Microsoft Dynamics 365

• 1. Introduction

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  Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a set of enterprise accounting and sales software products. Its flagship application, Dynamics GP, is dated back to 1981. That single year hides a stranger origin story than most Microsoft products carry. Dynamics 365 was not built from scratch inside Microsoft's own offices. It was assembled, piece by piece, out of independent companies that Microsoft bought over the years. Those companies ranged from small firms in Denmark to a family business in the American Midwest with an unusual founding motive. Some of the code still running inside Dynamics 365 today was written for different machines, under different names, decades before Microsoft owned any of it. This is the story of how those separate companies, cultures, and codebases ended up sharing one Microsoft label. What still sets them apart, underneath that single brand, is what the rest of this documentary traces.

• 2. A Product Built From Products

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  Four legacy names sit underneath today's Dynamics 365 label. Dynamics GP was once called Great Plains Software. Dynamics NAV was once called Navision, and has since been forked again into Dynamics 365 Business Central. Dynamics SL was once called Solomon. Dynamics AX was once called Axapta, and has been forked into Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. Each product was built for a different kind of customer. Some serve small and medium-sized businesses. Others handle large organizations that operate across multiple languages, currencies, and legal entities at once.

  More than 15 applications now sit inside the Dynamics 365 catalog, spanning sales, customer service, field service, human resources, finance, supply chain management, commerce, and marketing. Microsoft's recent development has pushed these tools toward software as a service, hosted centrally instead of installed on a company's own servers. Two of the entries, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Mixed Reality, put guidance directly into a technician's field of view. They work through a headset rather than an office screen. A separate artificial intelligence layer applies specifically to sales, customer service, and market insight.

  Two of the four legacy names, Navision and Axapta, both trace back to the same small country. The other two, Great Plains and Solomon, grew up an ocean away, inside the United States.

• 3. Danish Roots

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  PC&C A/S, short for Personal Computing and Consulting, opened in Denmark in 1984. The company's first product, released in 1985 and called PCPlus, was a single-user accounting package with basic functionality. Two years later, in 1987, the company released the first version of Navision. It was a client-server accounting application that let multiple people work in the system at once. The product sold mainly inside Denmark until 1990. Starting with Navision version 3, the company began distributing the software into other European countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom.

  Navision's growing success led the company to rename itself Navision Software A/S in 1995. That same year, it released the first version of the product built for Microsoft Windows 95. In 2000, Navision Software A/S merged with a fellow Danish firm, Damgaard A/S, founded in 1983, to form NavisionDamgaard A/S. The combined company changed its name again in 2001, becoming Navision A/S.

  On the 11th of July 2002, Microsoft bought Navision A/S. This added to an earlier purchase of Great Plains Software. Navision became a new Microsoft division named Microsoft Business Solutions, which also took charge of Microsoft CRM. In September 2005, Microsoft rebranded the product as Microsoft Dynamics NAV. In December 2008, it released Dynamics NAV 2009, pairing the original classic client with a new three-tier interface called the RoleTailored Client. By the first quarter of 2014, NAV had reached 102,000 current customers.

  In 2016, Microsoft folded NAV into a new all-online product family called Dynamics 365. The successor to NAV was given the codename Madeira. At the Directions conference in September 2017, Microsoft swapped that codename for Tenerife. On the 2nd of April 2018, the renamed product, Dynamics 365 Business Central, went on public release, with plans for updates twice a year. Business Central also introduced a new programming language called AL, replacing the older C/AL codebase inherited from Dynamics NAV. It would not be Navision's only Danish sibling to end up inside Microsoft's portfolio.

• 4. The Axapta Line

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  Axapta began as a collaboration between IBM and the Danish firm Damgaard Data. It released into the Danish and American markets in March 1998. IBM returned all rights in the product to Damgaard Data shortly after the release of version 1.5. Axapta 2.5 followed in 2000, then Axapta 3.0 in 2002, once the product had passed into Microsoft's hands. Microsoft released Dynamics AX 4.0 in 2006, Dynamics AX 2009 in 2008, and Dynamics AX 2012 in 2011.

  By the time Dynamics AX 2012 shipped, it was available and supported in more than 30 countries and 25 languages. It ran inside over 20,000 organizations worldwide. Dynamics AX 7 arrived in 2016 as a major revision, replacing the old interface with a browser-based HTML5 client. At launch, it was offered only as a cloud-hosted application. Microsoft rebranded AX 7 as Dynamics 365 for Operations in October 2016, then again as Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations in July 2017. In 2018, the product's thick-client interface was removed entirely.

  Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen, known as MDCC, served as the primary development hub for Dynamics AX. Before Microsoft owned the product, information about Axapta circulated on a proprietary web-based newsgroup that grew to a considerable membership. Its oldest surviving Axapta Technet post dates to August 2000. After Microsoft folded Axapta into its Business Solutions unit, the newsgroup's content moved to the Microsoft Business Solutions newsgroup.

  In 2020, Microsoft split the Finance and Operations product into two separate applications: Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Its Human Resources module, spun off in 2018 as Dynamics 365 for Talent, was reintegrated in 2023. At the National Retail Federation conference in New York in 2016, Microsoft announced a partnership with Infinite Analytics. The Cambridge-based company specialized in predictive analytics and personalization.

• 5. American Origins

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  Great Plains Software operated out of Fargo, North Dakota, run by Doug Burgum. Its Dynamics Release 1.0 shipped in February 1993. It ranked among the first accounting packages in the United States built as multi-user, 32-bit software designed to run under Windows. Microsoft announced its purchase of Great Plains Software in late 2000, and completed the acquisition in April 2001.

  The product was written in a language called Dexterity. Earlier versions worked with Microsoft SQL Server, Pervasive PSQL, Btrieve, and C-tree. After the Microsoft buyout, every new version relied on SQL Server exclusively.

  In Findlay, Ohio, three co-founders started a different company in 1980, calling it TLB, Inc. Their names were Gary Harpst, Jack Ridge, and Vernon Strong. TLB stood for The Lord's Business, chosen, in the founders' own words, "to remind the founders why the business was started: to conduct the business according to biblical principles." TLB was later renamed Solomon Software, and after its own acquisition became Microsoft Dynamics SL. Great Plains, Solomon, and one more Danish product would all eventually need somewhere to retire.

• 6. Sunset Dates

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  Dynamics C5 traces to Denmark as well, developed as the successor to the DOS-based Concorde C4. Its creator, Damgaard Data, merged with Navision in 2001. That merged business was folded into Microsoft's 2002 purchase, at which point Navision C5 was rebranded Microsoft Dynamics C5. The product currently runs more than 70,000 installations inside Denmark alone.

  Several Dynamics brands, including SL, GP, and C5, now have migration paths into Business Central. Most have not seen a new release since 2018. Their later versions adopted the Role-Tailored Client interface first built for Dynamics NAV, easing that eventual transition. Dynamics SL's last major release came in 2018, with support scheduled to end on the 11th of July 2028. Dynamics GP's last major release, GP 2018 R4, shipped in November 2021, with support ending on the 11th of January 2028. Dynamics C5's last major release, from 2016, has support ending on the 14th of April 2026.

  While those three ERP lines wind down, Microsoft's separate customer relationship management line took a very different path, one that started under a different brand entirely.

• 7. From CRM To Cloud

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  Microsoft CRM 1.2 released on the 8th of December 2003, and the market barely noticed it. It offered no way to create custom entities. A software development kit using SOAP and XML endpoints let developers connect to it directly.

  The next version, released on the 5th of December 2005, skipped straight to version 3.0 and adopted the Dynamics brand, becoming Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. It replaced Crystal Reports with Microsoft SQL Reporting Services and added support for Windows Vista and Outlook 2007. Later updates brought mobile device access and integration with Siebel Systems. It was the first version of the product to see meaningful customer adoption. It also let users build custom entities with real relationships between them for the first time.

  Dynamics CRM 4.0, known internally as Titan, arrived in December 2007. It introduced multi-tenancy, stronger reporting security, and a hosted option called CRM Online, offered directly by Microsoft. Dynamics CRM 4.0 passed the 1 million user mark in July 2009, the first version of the product to reach that scale. Its interface borrowed the blue shading and rounded start button from the Office 2007 look.

• 8. A Global Partner Network

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  Business Central ships with 24 official localizations, each built to match a country's financial rules. Local partners supply another 47 localizations on top of that. The system complies with a range of financial standards to meet local requirements, including GDPR, IAS/IFRS, and SOX. It comes in two editions: Essentials, covering finance, sales, marketing, purchasing, inventory, warehousing, and project management, and Premium, which adds service management and manufacturing.

  Sabre Limited, a North American partner, focuses on manufacturing setups such as engineer-to-order, configure-to-order, and job shop environments, along with training and support. ArcherPoint and Innovia Consulting both work across retail, manufacturing, and distribution. Encore Business Solutions operates in Canada and the United States. Western Computer focuses on distribution and rental industries, and The NAV People, based in the United Kingdom, specializes in large-scale training and deployment. These are just a few names inside Microsoft's global network of Value-Added Resellers and Independent Software Vendors. Microsoft doesn't sell most of Business Central directly, so these outside partners handle consulting, customization, integration, training, and support instead.

  Independent Software Vendors add their own extensions through Microsoft AppSource, expanding what Business Central can do in areas like reporting, payroll, and manufacturing execution. With the arrival of NAV 2013, Microsoft shifted licensing to a concurrent-user model. That model split customers into full users with complete system access and limited users with only partial write access. When Business Central launched, the model changed again, moving to a per-seat license with a threefold concurrent-seat multiplier applied to older perpetual licenses. Customers who had bought the old Dynamics NAV Extended Pack license were moved into the Premium edition. In July 2018, Microsoft added one more layer to that ecosystem, announcing Dynamics 365 AI for sales applications. It was a feature built on top of the same partner machinery that still keeps every regional edition running today.