Cloud Partner Competencies and Business Central

27/07/2020 atotovic Business Central, Certification, Dynamics 365 Business Central, certification, cloud, Cloud Business Application, competency, CRM, D365, D365BC, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, ERP, exam, gold, Inspire, Microsoft, Microsoft Inspire, Partner Network, silver, Small Business, SMB

You are involved only in Business Central business and now you have Enterprise Resource Planning competency. But this competency is not in the cloud and if you want to get Cloud Business Application competency you can choose one of the options as a two different paths in achieving competencies:

Customer Engagements options
Unified Operations option

The first one is for CRM partners and the second one is in ERP. But when you read details, this is for Finance, Supply Chain Management, Retail and Talent (F&O) and all required exams are from F&O. If you want to continue only in Business Central and want cloud competency as Business Central is cloud product, you probably don’t know how you can fit with these requirements.

OK before I continue, I need to mention that this is my private text and it doesn’t represent Microsoft official statement, and this is not an announcement. Everything I’m writing here is based on Cecilia Flombaum presentation on the Microsoft Inspire a few days ago. If you want to see whole presentation, session is still available here (first part of presentation is mostly about Partner Contribution Indicator, but you can find BC details from cca 13:30).

She mentioned that we can expect a Business Central differentiation as well as Power Platform differentiation if you are focused only on one of these solutions. That will allow Business Central partner to achieve their silver and/or gold statuses in Cloud Business Application competency.

Currently we don’t know what will be required to achieve competency and statuses and if it will be connected with recently announced BC exam (probably yes).

But Business Central implementers will have one more opportunity – to achieve Small and Midsize Cloud Solutions competency through a Business Central differentiation opportunity. Probably there will be some differences i.e. slightly different threshold.

OK, this is everything we know for now. As sook as we have more information, you can find it on the Microsoft Partner Network.

Editing PowerBI Reports in Business Central

13/11/201813/11/2018 atotovic Business Central, Dynamics 365, Power BI Business Central, cloud, D365BC, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, embed, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics, Power BI

Having embed PowerBI in Business Central is well known fact, but recently in Fall ’18 release, Microsoft made it even better because now you have already added PowerBI reports on all pages where they were planned to be. OK, it is nice to have and it can be time saver, because you don’t need to waste your time to add reports to page-by-page.

But what if you are not satisfy with it how these reports looks like? If you want to change something? Previously it was locked, but now… Now it looks amazing. You don’t need to leave your Business Central environment… everything you need, you will find in your Web Client (of course I’m speaking about cloud version 🙂 ).

Let’s show… Find some PowerBI report and choose Manage Reports command.

When you run this command, you will open PowerBI Management in Business Central (PowerBI Designer) and you can design your reports.

You can change your existed reports or eventually add new tab with new charts… you can do as you want.

When you finish, you just need to save it or to save this new report as a copy (if you want to keep original).

When you close it and open this report in Business Central, you will see that now you have your new report. Simply, right? Amazing job!

Dynamics 365 Business Central Roadmap

01/10/201801/10/2018 atotovic Business Central, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics NAV Business Central, cloud, D365, D365BC, Directions NA, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, intelligent, Microsoft, NAV, on-prem, roadmap

Directions NA has just started this year. Unfortunately, this year I have to miss this event, but thanks to my friends I can share some information. This time, I’ll share only the future roadmap for Dynamics 365 Business Central:

Also, something new is that from the next year, Directions will held during the spring and the next year it will be in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Dynamics 365 Business Central October release

07/08/201807/08/2018 atotovic Business Central, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018, AL, Business Apps, Business Central, cloud, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, extension, features, hybrid, NAV, News, October, on-prem, Power BI, VS, Web Client

Long time no see. I’m currently on vacation and finally found some time for writing. I don’t know if you already read Business Applications Release Notes – October ’18. If you are, don’t read this article :). But if you didn’t already read, you can get some basic overview what we will get in October.

First one technical news, from October we can use Business Central, on-cloud, on-prem and in hybrid deployments. And even more, you can use existing Dynamics NAV on-prem solution in hybrid model connecting to the cloud through Business Central. In both of cases, using Business Central or NAV on-prem, you can have your tenant on a cloud, where your data will be replicated. If you decide in one moment to continue only with cloud, it will be very easy task for you. But it is important to know, in this scenario you need to have all your customizations based on extensions. Actually you can have code customizations as well, but in this case your system will temporarily disconnected from cloud. If you refactor your code to extensions, you can be connected again.

OK, now there are some very important improvements on a Web Client, all of us expected. One of them is Advanced filtering and to be precisely Limit Totals feature. This feature is very important for regular usage of system and finally we got it on Web Client. Now we can use one of the most popular features in filtering in Dynamics NAV where we can filter aggregated values from another tables. And even more, we’ve got some new filtering shortcuts. There is not new filter pane added to the side of our lists which allows us to:

Get an overview of the currently applied filters, and see if they were set by you, by a filtered view, or by the application itself.
Add as many filtered columns as you like by typing to quickly search for more fields on the source table.
Get assistance with specifying filter values using lookups or the field’s data type.
Create complex filters using operators, ranges, variables, and shorthand.
Filter to the current cell value in the list.

There is now improvement in search where the Search field replaces the Search for Page or Report field. We can use it to find objects such as pages and reports, but also to find actions and product documentation, but R&D team also improved the logic behind the search with much better results.

One of the “small” improvement is continued modernizing of user experience. If you saw some pictures from the previous Directions, you could find some differences between those pictures and Web Client in already available Business Central. But now all those features are here in October release:

As you can find in original documentation: “Now users get a more streamlined navigation with the back button displayed prominently on the left of the page and with special dynamic system commands occupying the middle section. These elements move the navigation closer to users, allowing them to stay focused on the data and task at hand.” There will be improved already amazing PowerBI embed experience and lot of other different news (I mentioned only few of them).

But one of the biggest improvement is in development area and it was maybe one of the biggest blockers in development with extensions. This feature now enable enums (options) from the base application as well as create new, extensible enums in your extensions.

Now you can extend even more in you extension as for example Report data sets and Field groups. As new feature, their is now Event discoverability and of course, there are a lot of new events added to system.

And these are not only improvement in development. There are Debugger, IntelliSense and Translation enhancements, .NET Interop, Working with permissions, OData-bound actions in AL and lot of “small” Visual Studio Code AL Extension enhancements.

If you want to find all details, you can go to the official Microsoft page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/October18/dynamics365-business-central/

Dynamics 365 for Talent

06/06/201706/06/2017 atotovic Dynamics 365, HRM cloud, D365, D365 for Talent, Dynamics, Dynamics 365, HRM, Operations, Preview, SaaS, Talent

Effective July 1st, Microsoft will announce new Dynamics 365 family member. This is new HRM app – Dynamics 365 for Talent. Of course, this will not be only one news, but I want to say a few words about this product. First, we can run and test technical preview and I want to share some first experiences. We still cannot find all features here, but we can make the first sight. For example, we will still wait integration with LinkedIn. It will be very important integration, especially in recruitment process. But we still don’t know all areas where integration will be done. But again, lets see what we have here.

This will be standard SaaS solution with web client, very similar with D365 for Operations. And of course, it will be integrated with this solution. And I would like if we can get integration not only with this enterprise solution, but also with D365 for Financials. Minimum, I’m expecting some App for this.

If you try to run a few basic features in demo database, you can notice that it works fast enough and very smoothly. When we open app for the first time, we can see a menu as default dashboard and in the left side in the same moment. If icons are not clear enough on the left side, we just need to click on three-lines, and it will be expanded so you can see the names of these commands. Also, when you run system for the first time, you will find very good “Get Started” with very good prepared videos and with a lot of step-by-step manuals. And if this manuals are not enough, you have a awesome tool where you can create task saving; you just need to choose this tool, run it and do everything what you want to do; when you click on stop, system will create nice manual step-by-step and you can choose how and where you want to deploy it.

In this first text, I didn’t plan to speak about features, just to make some basic overview. In my next texts, I will write more about features.

More details about this technical preview, you can find here:

https://community.dynamics.com/enterprise/b/dynamics365fortalent/archive/2017/06/05/dynamics-365-for-talent-technical-preview-is-here

What is a Cloud Sure Step?

12/08/201521/08/2015 atotovic Conference, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015, Azure, cloud, Conference, Directions, learn, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, NAV, NAVUG, O365, Office 365, R2R, Sure Step, WPC

Cloud Sure Step is a new Microsoft program. This program should evolve the Road to Repeatability (R2R) program. The main goal of this program is to make an ease transition to the cloud for the most of partners. The NAV team has promoted this new program to WPC 2015 attendees, with the goal of transitioning more partners to cloud-based deployments that focus on fast, repeatable implementations that bring partners’ own IP and vertical specialization to bear.

This is something that we could expect, as second part of Satya Nadella’s mantra “Mobile-first, Cloud-first”. With the newest NAV version, we will get new Azure and O365 integration enhancements, and it is naturally that we can expect more and more cloud based NAV implementations. The most important is that some of these enhancements will decrease cost of NAV deployment on Azure (e.g. using Azure SQL…).

Because of that, you can see that Cloud Sure Step is actually completely strategy, not only some lesson. Microsoft wants to prepare all NAV partners for the future. Because NAV in this new vision uses Azure and O365 as base, Microsoft has prepared Cloud Sure Step in two parts for both of their bases and you can find here more about it for Microsoft Azure and for Office 365. Using these information, you can learn everything from the beginning to the end: what are the Azure and O365, overview of these products and how to grow and optimize your business.

More details about Cloud Sure Step will come at fall partner events. If you are planning to be on Directions EMEA or Directions NA this October, you can find Cloud Sure Step sessions.

NAV 2016 on Azure SQL Server

14/07/2015 atotovic Microsoft Dynamics NAV Antwerp, Azure, cloud, Conference, deployment, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, NAV, NAV2016, NAVTechDays, NAVUG, SQL, WPC

NAV 2016 database can be deployed on Azure SQL Server. Until yesterday, this news was a secret. I wanted to write about it, but it was by the NDA. Now, this news was published at WPC in Atlanta and we can discuss about it. But, the most of this is still by NDA and I cannot speak everything about this topic.

This feature will enable the better experience of NAV on Azure and better possibility for migration of NAV implementation to cloud.

Regarding that, I will have session with this topic on NAV Tech Days 2015 in Antwerp, Belgium. If you want to know how to deploy and configure NAV 2016 database on Azure SQL Server, come on this awesome conference and be patient J.