Directions ASIA has just started a few hour ago. On a first day keynote, we could hear a lot of interesting information. I’ll start with some numbers. As this is third Directions in Asia, number of attendees still increase every year. This year we have the following statistic:

• Number of attendees: 453
• Attendees from 157 companies and from 32 countries
• Number of sessions: 70
• Number of speakers: 55 (Microsoft, MVP’s and industry experts)

Now, what we could hear about product and market? Based on showed information, Business Central and NAV together are implemented at 223.000 customers with more than 3.3 million users in 196 countries. Impressive numbers, right? And I really hope, this solution will continue as previously and even better.

As this is announcement of Business Central Spring ’19 release, we can see what is new in this release and the full roadmap for this solution. During keynote, we could see that product team is extremely proud on stability, security and performance. Of course, there is a lot of new features. In my following texts, I’ll write about all these things.

Currently, we could see new roadmap for our solution, and it looks fine:

We can see that system already got a lot of new feature, especially trying to improve user experience. And I can conclude, they really succeed with this.

But if we look in more detailed roadmap, you will find two very important facts. This release will be the last one with Windows Client and with C/SIDE and C/AL.

From October ’19 release, we will have only Modern Client (web client) and VS Code + AL in development side. If you used only BC on a cloud, you will not recognize some difference, but if you used on-prem solution, then it is the right moment to migrate to web client asap. And in development, please start with extensions immediately. But to be honest, in on-prem solution you will still be in situation to change a code, but this time in VS Code using completely BC system as an App. But it will still be much better if you start to move all your customization to extensions.

Of course, there are some other news, but I cannot put everything in one blog post, but you can expect all this news soon.