Microsoft quietly changed how it scores its Dynamics 365 partners, and I don’t think enough people noticed.
In August, Microsoft updated its Sales, Service, Finance and Supply Chain partner specializations.
Eligible deployments are now counted by monthly active users rather than monthly consumed value, and the gross growth requirement has been removed.
A partner used to get credit when a customer paid for licenses; that’s how it’s been forever.
Now it gets credit when the customer’s people actually log in and use the system every month.
That is a much bigger shift than it sounds. For years, the incentive in this channel pointed at the go-live. You sell it, implement it, hand it off, and move on to the next one, and an unused license still counted.
If adoption is now the scoreboard, the people who drive adoption become some of the most valuable people a partner can have. I mean the functional consultant who can actually train a finance team, the customer success manager who notices when usage drops, and the architect who builds something people want to use.
Those people have always existed in this channel, but they rarely got the credit the implementation team did.
It matters in a major beneficial way on the customer side now. If you run Dynamics in-house, your partner now has a real reason to care whether your users are getting value long after go-live, and I would absolutely bring that up in your next conversation with them.
This is why I keep saying the best ERP hires aren’t always the people who implemented the system; often, they’re the people who got everyone to use it!
Source: Microsoft Partner Center, August 2026 announcements, Monthly Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program update (August 13, 2026)
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