Dogfooding RapidStart Apps

From Dynamics 365 to RapidStart Apps

We didn’t always use RapidStart Apps. With our Partner status, Microsoft provides us with free Dynamics 365 Enterprise licenses — the same ones you would have to pay $95/user/month for. We had been using Dynamics 365 since 2011, four years before we created RapidStart Apps in 2015. We continued using it after our app’s launch.

Our first versions of RapidStart Apps, long before Dataverse, ran on top of Dynamics 365, seeking to simplify Microsoft’s product. As “sophisticated” software developers, we didn’t think we needed the “simplification” layer for ourselves.

A few years ago, Microsoft separated its apps from their foundations and renamed the foundation “Dataverse”. Not only do the Dynamics 365 applications now run on Dataverse, but so do all Power Apps. We saw and acted on an opportunity to move RapidStart Apps from above Dynamics 365 to a position next to it as a Power App alternative. Yet we continued to use Dynamics 365 internally. Why not? It was free to us.

The Moment of Truth

I was doing a RapidStart Apps demo for a customer one day, and she asked, “Is this what you use?” I responded that we were a “sophisticated” organization, and so we use Dynamics 365. She said, “We are also ‘sophisticated’. I guess if RapidStart Apps is not up to your needs, we should explore Dynamics 365 instead.”

I thought about this, knowing that RapidStart Apps was perfect for her organization but also seeing her point. I said, “How about this? If I move our organization to RapidStart Apps, will you move forward with us?” She said, “Absolutely!”

I have no idea why this had not occurred to me previously. She asked such an obvious question, yet I had never been asked that before. I talked to our team about making the move, and a few expressed concerns. “We have some pretty sophisticated processes running in there…”

I said, “Well, we originally targeted this for smaller businesses, but everybody is using it now, including enterprise organizations. How can we expect them to use it if we don’t?” And so we did.

Add or Migrate?

We had two options: add RapidStart Apps to our existing Dynamics 365 environment, or migrate our data to a new RapidStart Apps-only environment. If we did the first option, it would not prove that RapidStart Apps could stand independently as a robust solution, so we chose the second option.

To fully dogfood, we created a new empty Dataverse environment, navigated to AppSource, and installed RapidStart Apps the same way any customer would. I even got the email notification from AppSource that we have a new customer!

Moving from Dynamics 365 to RapidStart Apps, we would have to migrate our data, the same as any customer in that scenario would. We had been using Dynamics 365 since 2011, and many changes have happened to our business model along the way. Our Dynamics 365 instance was full of crap, bloated with data that was no longer relevant. In addition, it was full of deprecated processes and artifacts that we didn’t use anymore.

What a perfect opportunity to “clean house”! It took a couple of weeks, moving things in our spare time when we weren’t working for customers. When we were done, I realized that what I had been saying to customers was 100% true. We built one hell of an app!

Summary

Our entire “sophisticated” operation now runs on RapidStart Apps with many customizations specific to our needs. In addition, we use many of our RapidStart Apps add-ons in production and have customized those to meet our specific needs.

Between our old Dynamics 365 environment, our Production RapidStart Apps environment, and our development and test drive environments, we had 33 active environments. I looked at our statistics a while back and noticed that the old Dynamics 365 instance was consuming about half of our total capacity. I hit “Delete”, and never looked back.

Even though we have free Dynamics 365 licensing, we pay for Power Apps as our customers do. We’re sorry it took so long to demonstrate our confidence in our app in the most meaningful way possible. We made the move and have not missed a thing. Our usage has gone way up, so simple is indeed better!