What’s in a name?

You’ll notice that throughout this site, we will refer to either Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations, Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (without the “for”), or D365 F&O. We stick pretty rigidly to this nomenclature, in line with Microsoft’s own Finance and operations application documentation, but there’s some ambiguity in the market, so we thought it deserved a brief explanation.

The platform has had different names over the years:

• 1998: IBM Axapta
• 2000: Axapta
• 2002: Microsoft Axapta
• 2006: Microsoft Dynamics AX
• 2016: Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations (D365O)
• 2017: Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations (D365 F&O)

In 2020, the licensing for the product split, making it possible to purchase…

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, and
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (D365 SCM)

…separately. This has led to some people, including occasional Microsoft employees, referring to the combined platform as D365 FSCM or D365 F&SCM.

The problem is, the term D365 FSCM is flawed, because there are actually four licensable products within the platform:

• Dynamics 365 Finance¹
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
• Dynamics 365 Commerce
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources

With this logic, the acronym should be D365 FSCMCHR, or some other alpha-spaghetti combination of those initials, which is clearly ridiculous!

Furthermore, as there’s almost no use of the term “D365 FSCM” on any official Microsoft webpage², we’re sticking with D365 F&O, to be fully inclusive.

There’s a very real chance that in the future, we’ll see a change to the architecture, application names, and further wholesales changes to the platform in general – likely all three. If you know, you know. But until then, it’s still D365 F&O!

1. There’s now a Finance Premium option too, but that’s for a future post. ↩︎
2. We’ve only found two exceptions, (i) this FastTrack page on GitHub, and (ii) this MS Docs page, which is actually about Oracle PeopleSoft! Any references on AppSource don’t count, as descriptions aren’t written by Microsoft. ↩︎