#1 How I have started the User Group – Beginning

This will be slightly different from regular blog posts, which you have gotten used to seeing and reading on this blog. This series of posts will be about how I have started and how I’m leading one Microsoft Business Application User Group in Serbia.

Regular blog posts about Microsoft Business Applications will continue to be published regularly. But let’s try to have something new as I have created one UG, and maybe somebody is doing the same at the moment, so this blog post serial will be some tips and tricks on starting and leading UG.

#1 Beginning

Like most things in life and business, you must start with an idea. My idea was to form a User Group focused on Microsoft Business Applications. Business Apps are my focus in my day-to-day job, and all my community work is also focused on Microsoft Business Applications. So, when I realized that in my county MS Business Apps don’t have any active User Groups where people with the same interest can getter and speak and share knowledge. I started to think about forming one.

With an idea, we come to the first and most important part of forming a User Group. You can’t do everything alone, so you need at least one Co-Lead. In my case, this was easy because I immediately asked my recent co-speaker on some events and my friend Nikola Pancic if he would be interested in starting a User Group with me. He accepted the idea.

As advice, if you don’t know somebody who shares the same enthusiasm as you, do search well because there is always a lot of work with User Group, especially in the beginning. Better slow down a little bit until you find someone, then rush with everything alone.

This leads us to the second important part of the beginning of founding your User Group. Think about the name. You have to think of an interesting name that can be connected to the main focus of your User Group and also be different from others. With a good name, you will be recognizable, and also, it is important because everybody who starts with User Group plans to stay with that group for some time, and the name will always be there.

When you have the team and name, you can continue to the third part. Contact your local Microsoft for support. Depending on how big your country and community this could be easy, or if you are from a big country, it could be much more complex. But with support and approval from Microsoft, you are on an excellent path to organizing your first meetup.

In our case, we connected with leaders of other User Groups, who introduced us to the Microsoft team. Then, we shared our idea, which was a good fit for Microsoft Community in Serbia, so support from Microsoft has come easily and fast. It will help you in the future, and of course, If you are starting a Microsoft User Group it is nice to inform them and ask for approval. But I know that in some cases, this will be challenging but do it.

After getting support from Microsoft, we are getting to the part where we must work on the design a bit. Create your logo. This step is important same as a name. The logo will follow you for a long time. Take your time and think about it. There are a lot of free online design tools, so you can use them, but try to create and create many different options and then vote for the best one. In the voting part, ask your friends and family because this is just the part where you create something that has to look nice.

After the logo, we are still on the design side. I recommend creating a PowerPoint template. It is not time-consuming, and there are a lot of tutorials and documentation on how it should be done. This was the first time I was working with PowerPoint templates, and it took me around an hour and a half to create a PowerPoint template.

Before our last step, there is one more thing to do. Create an email address. We wanted to avoid paying anything in the beginning. So, we have created a free Outlook account and are still using it. It is easy and fast. But it is important for our next step.

And now, for the first post about How I have created a User Group, I will end with the last step, which you have to do in this process, which is important. Create Social Media Groups. And when I say create social media groups, I mean to make them all.

At this moment, we have the following:

  1. Twitter
  2. LinkedIn
  3. Facebook
  4. Instagram
  5. Meetup

Social media are important for the future because you will attract users to come to your events and to see all the important things about your group.

With these steps, you have successfully created a Microsoft User Group, and you can be proud of yourself, as we are. For the next post, you will see how to organize your first meetup, and I will try to cover all things which were important to us and all those things which made our first event good.

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Dynamics 365 & PowerPlatform Conferences in 2023

We are close to the end of this, and we mostly have important conference dates for the following year. I would like to have all Dynamics 365 (and/or Power Platform) conferences in one place, with all dates planned for 2023. So, you can find them here and start planning your attendance as most of them have early bird:

  • Days of Knowledge US (September 2023 – TBD)

I hope I’ll se you on some of them.

Business Central Free of Charge

Directions EMEA has just been finished, and there was a lot of good news. One is access to the Business Central environment with the Microsoft 365 license. Now statement ‘free of charge” is partially correct.

What does it mean? You cannot get the Business Central environment free of charge as you must buy a minimum of one full user to get access (the whole article is about the cloud option). But when you have access to the environment, you can get free-of-charge access for all your users with Microsoft 365 license. This is huge news. As far as I know, there is no business solution (minimum, no global solution) to which you have free access. Of course, Microsoft will not cannibalize itself, and this access has some limitations, but this is a fantastic thing and can dramatically increase this solution’s use in the future.

You can find details in the following table about what you can use in Business Central with which license type. I hope it is helpful.

Business Central and D365 Sales

I know it has passed since I wrote the first part of this topic, ‘Where is a limit in Business Central CRM capability and when integrating it with D365 Sales (part 1),’ and people expect the second part. But as I’ll speak about this topic on Directions EMEA this year, I decided to postpone the following parts after this event. I would like to keep it interesting and show many of these topics in my session. Of course, as I cannot go so deep into details in 45 minutes, I’ll continue here with publishing my point of view related to this topic.

In the meantime, if you will attend Directions EMEA in Hamburg this year, I warmly invite you to come to my session and discuss this. My session will hold on November 10, 2022, from 11:15 to 12:00 in Room: Hall Y4 – Dynamics 365 Sales Professional for Business Central Users.

But I promise I’ll continue with this topic here in my blog.

BizApps Wiki – a great place for ERP, CRM and other experts

New platform BizApps.Wiki has just started. On the first sight it looks like as well know Wikipedia, but there is ‘but’…

In comparison with Wikipedia there is highly focused content only with business applications (solutions/software) and other related topics. By the business application topics you can find information about almost all possible business application solutions as well as vendors (global and local). Also you can find information about partners or about the most impactful experts (MVPs or similar).

By the ‘other related topics’ it means you can find a lot information about project management, business processes, implementation processes, learning guides, certifications, events, communities, accounting… and so on.

OK it is obviously that topics are not related only with Dynamics solutions as this is Wiki about all business solutions, but there are for sure a few dozens of articles (maybe even more) related only with Microsoft solutions.

And on the end, there is one really good idea about building the digital business applications museum. Even if its history is not so big, it is very interesting how these applications looked like 20-30 years ago. And this is not finished project… as you can see on the first page, this is an ongoing project (always work-in-progress) where it is expected that community will take a part in building or editing this library of articles.

I’ll not write about the project in more details as you can easily go there and check. Definitely good for developers, consultants, project managers, but also for future experts such as students…

Dynamics Events in 2021

We are at the end of this year. I could hardly say – good year as we have global pandemic and people dye. But new year is coming and there are some lights at the end of tunnel; vaccine appears and probably we will have better year as I think it is not possible to have worse one.

Let’s see what events await us in 2021. I (and probably nobody) don’t know if these events will go virtually as this year or on site if this is possible, but let’s see what we will have.

In the first half of year, we will start with Directions events:

This is what we have on the list for the first part of year, but we have two more events already scheduled for the second half of 2021:

Of course we have more, but still not scheduled. What you can do now is to sign up and join mailing lists to be updated when they announce dates. Currently, I can suggest to do it for the following events:

Dynamics 365 Community Summits (Australia, Europe, US)

Microsoft Business Application Summit

On the end, I really hope we will win Corona virus and we will have minimum few events in live as conference is not only about content and it is about networking and building friendships. We as human beans still need live communications. Maybe we proved that a lot of things can be done in virtual environment, but some thing can be done only in real world.

I hope we will have healthier and more successful new year and I’ll meet some of you in person.

Directions EMEA 2020 – Day 1

Directions EMEA and Asia has just started today. This is the first-time virtual Directions ever and I can just imagine how challenged it was to prepare everything in very short time. But based on what I saw today, everything is well organized. OK, this is not the same as live event and I would like to have an opportunity to meet all of you in person, but it is still the great option with not only sessions but with a lot of networking opportunities. And just to mention, this is the biggest Directions ever with 2775+ attendees. Great achievement!

Today we had the first day Keynote and after that I had my first session. Now I want to share my experience from these two parts of today’s event.

Christian Sega started with good news about numbers (2775+ attendees, 60+ countries, 147 sessions, 101 speaker…) and future of this event and finally we had an opportunity to see Mike Morton as a new GM on the Directions stage… unfortunately not in live, but again this is the first time on Directions stage.

Mike presented roughly the most important directions from this BC release and they are:

  • Deliver seamless service and performance
  • Design for compliance and security
  • Develop ISVs and globalization
  • Delight customers by exceeding expectations
  • Drive better together Microsoft experiences

Let’s talk about these directions in the next days. Now I want to talk more about numbers. First time we had an opportunity to see official numbers about BC SaaS customers – there are 10.000 BC online customers and by my opinion this is an amazing result. And only this, there are other impressive results…

I don’t want to forget great rest of the keynote with Claus, Jannik and other PM’s where they showed some new and really good features.

And finally, Mike announced roadmap and some new features ready for the next release. First let’s make a look at new roadmap:

Now make a look at some of the next release’s features:

  • Finally, we will get Report Extensibility as this is one of the highest voted idea from users and partners… this is something we are really missing.
  • We will get enhancement printing features in BC, improving complex hybrid setup, taking care about user access to printers, eliminating admin of print servers or printer drivers, printing from anywhere…
  • Easily onboard of new clients to BC using step-by-step guide how to configure and prepare your solution, and it will be possible to use for partner’s addons as well.
  • Better integration of BC with Teams as using BC directly from Teams.

What I wanted to emphasize… completely experience with the Directions4Partners platform was/is great (if I forget some minor technical issues… who knows, maybe only at my place😊 because of my connection). You could have a feeling you are really on a site. This is briefly my experience from my first session. After 30 minutes prerecorded session, we had additional 15 minutes for live Q&A. I have a lot of questions and I had an opportunity to have a live answering session and it was good experience. As we probably had more question, we needed to continue our chat somewhere. For this purpose, we could go out to the Q&A session room and continue with discussions about all specific topics. Really great experience. I had an opportunity to meet some of friends and big thanks to Arend JK who attended my session and who continue chat with me and few other attendees in the Q&A session room. He also helped me answering on some questions. Big thanks for you Arend as well as to Christian Sega who joined us in after session time.

I’m looking forward to see more sessions today and next two days and I really hope it will be great experience.

15 Microsoft Ignite not-to-miss non-Dynamics Session

A few years ago, and earlier, every time when I attended some conference I’ve chose the topic I’m familiar with. For example, probably in 95% of my time I attended Dynamics NAV sessions or something very close with it.

But in the last few years I changed my attention to very different sessions. In these times, everything is different, and everything is changed. Now if you want to survive in your ERP or CRM world, you need to learn a lot of different topics outside of your primarily interest. Solutions are more and more connected and now nobody want to buy i.e. ERP, but they want to buy completely solution… and if you want to provide it, you have to me familiar not only with ERP, but with IoT, AI, ML…

Because of that, I want to write a small recommendation not-to-miss sessions for all Dynamics ERP or CRM experts on this Microsoft Ignite. As Microsoft Ignite will start in a few days (September 22-24, 2020) and registration is free of charge, be sure you registered and try to attend the following sessions:

Of course, there are a lot of other Dynamics topics and I can suggest watching sessions about solutions you don’t implement. You will expand your knowledge and in this era it is very important to know how to choose what to and when to implement; when to customize and when to integrate… Of course, this is just my opinion and prediction… if you think differently, do as you think. Definitely, try to enjoy this virtual event.

All Dynamics events in 2020 are going virtually

All Dynamics events until the end of 2020 will go virtually… or they are cancelled. I don’t know what to say… if it is a good or bad. Definitely virtual event cannot replace live one and I’ll try to explain why. But with given circumstances, I think that going virtual is the best possible option… on the first place because of our health and not losing community work.

Right now, we have the following situation with all our Dynamics events:

  • First, we will start with D365 Community Summit. It will go virtual instead in Nashville and it will be held in period October 7-9, 2020. Agenda is already ready and if you didn’t register, you can see details and register here.
  • Directions EMEA and Directions Asia, instead of Prague and Bangkok will be organized as a common virtual event in period November 3-5, 2020. More information here.
  • Directions NA, Orlando is unfortunately canceled for this year. But as Directions EMEA and Asia will go virtually, it means there is not any limitations for colleagues from North America to join this even.
  • NAV TechDays is canceled somewhere on the beginning of Corona crisis and we will not have opportunity to meet before next year.

OK, I wanted to explain why I’m not a fan of virtual events… but to be honest it is probably better to have them in comparison with cancelation all these events. With virtual event you can still have an opportunity to listen prepared content and this is good. But… attending conferences is not all about content… content is important of course, but more important is an opportunity to openly ask what you need and not to get an answer only from presenter. You have an opportunity for discussion on sessions, but probably more important during the pauses. All these networking is not possible to be created in a virtual world… minimum it is not possible in this moment. And communication between presenter and attendees actually doesn’t exist in the virtual event. And when I’m talking about all of these, this is not problem only for attendees, it is not inspiring for lecturers as well (it is not the same when you have people in the front of you and when you have camera and laptop).

But again, with these circumstances, this is much better to have virtual events than not having them at all. And I must admit in a few digital events I’ve already participated, organization was really the best possible what somebody can make in a virtual world… and probably beyond my expectations. But again, this is not the same ☹.

And on the end, our hopes for the next year are that we can see each other in a live. I hope we will have much better health situation and we will attend minimum these already scheduled events:

  • Directions Asia, April 15-16, 2021 – Bangkok, Thailand
  • Directions NA, April 25-28, 2021 – San Diego, CA, US
  • Directions EMEA, October 7-9, 2021 – Milan, Italy,
  • NAV TechDays, November 16-19, 2021 – Antwerp, Belgium
  • …and hope others will schedule events soon.

Sessions from NAV TechDays – day 2

As I’ve promised a few days ago in my previous post, I’m completing the collection of all session from NAV TechDays 2019.

Let’s see what we had in the second day of this amazing NAV/BC event:

Leveraging the power of the cloud

Build, test, deploy and deliver your app by one file

NAV/BC for high demanding environments

{Connect app}²

Business Central with Power Platform – more than ERP solution

…and of course, this is my session where I’ve talked about PowerPlatform with BC together with an MVP Renato Fajdiga… expect feedback here 🙂

The Power Platform for Business Central Techies

If you liked my and Renato session, I’ll highly recommend to continue with this session from Arend-Jan Kauffmann.

Make the most out of Business Central on Docker

Migrate your customers to the cloud, and manage them there

How to make AI work for your Business… Central