Conference

Directions EMEA 2020 – Day 1

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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.

All Dynamics events in 2020 are going virtually

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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.

My Sessions during Fall 2019 Conference Season

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This fall I’ll be active and attend to four conferences as lecturer. If you want to see some of my lectures or to meet me, register for some of these events:

BCEE People, Prague – Business Central Roadmap in CEE countries

Directions EMEA, Vienna – Demystifying Posting Groups in Business Central (for partners)

BCUG Summit NA, Orlando – Demystifying Posting Groups in Business Central (for users)

NAV TechDays, Antwerp – Business Central with Power Platform (together with Renato Fajdiga, MVP)

eXtreme 365 in Amsterdam

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eXtreme 365 conference is one of very important partner oriented conferences. After eXtreme 365 in Austin Texas in December last year, now it is a time for European eXtreme 365, this time in Amsterdam. If you still didn’t register, and if you are available in period March 25-27, you can do it here.

For sure, you can find a lot of interesting sessions there. But I want to announce my sessions. If you are newbie in Dynamics 365 Business Central, it will be helpful to attend the whole-day workshop: What is Business Central? A hand on Experience. It will be held the second day on conference. But first day will be reserved for my session What can you Expect in the April ’19 Business Central Release.

See you in a few days in Amsterdam.

eXtreme 365 in Austin and Business Central

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After amazing conference in The Hague this fall – Directions EMEA, we have two another great events until the end of this year. First in Europe, NAV TechDays will come in November 22-23 and after that we will go to US on eXtreme 365, December 2-6, Austin Texas.

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This event was dominantly Dynamics CRM conference for a years, but in a last few years, we have more and more topics in ERP area as well. And now it is Dynamic 365 conference and it is very important because we have more and more partners from CRM world who want to start ERP practice as well.

This time we will have a lot of interesting content there and I’ll provide six sessions about Dynamics 365 Business Central, each in 75 minutes (7,5 hours in total – not so bad).

For beginning, I’ll have session in two parts: BC02/BC03 – An Introduction to Business Central. It will be workshop for all newbies in NAV/Business Central.

After that, you can find the following sessions (two of them will be provided together with my friend and colleague Dejan Pervulov, PTA in Microsoft):

If you are in Austin in the beginning of December, come to see this great conference.

My Session(s) on eXtreme 365 Conference

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This year I’ll start with my sessions little bit earlier then usually. My first conference where I’ll have a lecture will be eXtreme in Dubrovnik. In a past, this conference was mainly for the Dynamics CRM solutions, but from the 2017., we have not only CRM, but AX, NAV… as well.

So, this year I’ll be there with minimum one session. I’ll speak about Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’ (and NAV as well) in a real world of integrations using Flow and CDS. I hope it will be interesting. If I’ll have more lectures, I’ll announce it here as well.

In a mean time, you can go and check more details about eXtreme 365 conference here, and I recommend to register if this is suitable for you.

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NAV TechDays 2017 Recap

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One day after NAV TechDays 2017 in Antwerp is finished. Again, amazing conference with 1.236 attendees this year and big thanks to Luc Van Dyck for organization of this event.

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There were a plenty of amazing sessions provided by Microsoft staff and by some well known MVPs. But I think that this NAV TechDays is marked with new NAV and Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’ challenge, ie Extensions v2 in Visual Studio Code, new integration directions, new deployment models… I don’ want to write in detail about all these sessions; as I mentioned all where I was been were amazing. But soon, they will be published on mibuso official channel on YouTube and I’ll make reference on them in the next article when they will be published. And, then all of you who were not been there can see these sessions.

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But just to know, attending this conference is not just about sessions, but also networking, because you can fins 1.000+ professionals all around the world on one place.

I’m waiting the next year and November 22-23 in Antwerp (schedule these dates right now). And once more, thank to Luc, all speakers and sponsors…

The most important NAV events in 2018

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We’ve just finished amazing NAVUG Summit in Nashville and got all confirmation about NAV future as SaaS and on-prem options. But in this period we can start to make a plan for the next year about the most important events, because almost all of them are already announced.

First in the spring 2018, we will have Directions Asia in Bangkok in period March 15 – 16. By my opinion, this event will be very important to attend, because Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’ is planed for this spring.

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After that, one month later we will move to Europe to Summit EMEA in Dublin, Ireland in period from April 24th to 26th.

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Later this year after summer, on the fall 2018, we will have another well known conferences. First we will start with Directions NA, this time in beautiful California, in San Diego between September 30 and October 3.

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This time, NAVUG Summit will come before Directions EMEA, and it will be in October 15-18 at sunny Arizona in Phoenix.

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And on the end, one month after North America premiere, we will have Directions EMEA, this time in Hague in Netherlands. It will be held in period October 31 – November 2.

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Of course, we have one more very important – NAV TechDays, but we still don’t know when it will be the next year.

But if you want to plan all Dynamics important conferences (these four and even more), you can open my page with Dynamics conferences with all details.

My sessions on this fall conference season

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This fall Dynamics NAV conference season will start soon, in two months and it is the last moment to register on conference you planned to go. This season we expect thick events schedule and officially season will start in Orlando on Directions NA at September 17th. If you need the full list of Dynamics conferences, you can find here.

I’ll have my session on three of these conferences. First I’ll start with Directions NA, then continue with Directions EMEA and finish my season on NAVUG Summit.

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I’ll have the same session on Directions NA and Directions EMEA – ‘Project Management Methodology in Dynamics 365 BE Implementation‘ and I already wrote about this topic.

My first session will be third day of Directions NA – September 19th at 3:15pm. As I said, I’ll have the same session on Directions EMEA, and it will be at the first day of conference, after Keynote – October 4th at 11:15am. After these two conferences where I’ll have soft skills topic (project management), I’ll have more technical topics on NAVUG Summit, starting from October 11.

My topics will be how to use Flows with NAV, where I’ll show not only technical topic, but also practical example how and where to use it. And then, I’ll have topic about variations in Manufacturing in NAV, where I’ll try to transfer my experiences in a lot of Mfg implementations. Schedule is published, but it will be changed for sure. I know this, because I need to provide two sessions in the same moment 🙂 … and I know myself, I cannot do it 🙂

See you there…

Dynamics ERP and CRM Continue Together

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I didn’t write a blog for a while, but these few days I’m on eXtreme 365 conference and I decided to share some observation. For some time, since there is a Dynamics 365 product family, we created a closer collaboration between ERP and CRM products. Generally, it was mostly based on technology.

But now, I see the next steps. First, more and more ERP partners try to learn more about CRM and the same situation is with CRM partners and ERP knowledge. Now, I’m at eXtreme 365 conference that was originally CRM conference, but from this year this is not only CRM conference. We have a lot of sessions about D365 for Financials, D365 for Operations, Common Data Service, PowerApps, Flow… And as I see, there are some NAV partners (and MVP’s as well J). Also, I saw announcement for Directions this year and there is a same situation, this will not be only NAV event and we will have CRM sessions as well.

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This is very important, because all of use started with thinking that we need to continue with both products together. And this is a huge opportunity for partners. This is opportunity for upselling and if they know both products they will be better on a market.

And about a conference. Great conference and great opportunity for networking. This is the first time I’m on some big conference that was not originally NAV conference and this is the great opportunity to see some new people, sometimes with different attitude. I also met some friends from a NAV world here and I can say this is a great mixture. I’m expecting something similar on Directions as well.

OK, in some next posts I’ll write more about some news with these products, but for sure we can expect more and more news in this world in next few months.