D365BC

Where is the limit in Business Central CRM capability when integrating it with D365 Sales? (part 3)

Marko Totovic Business Central, CRM, Dynamics 365, ERP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM , , , , , , ,

As I have told you in the previous blog post for part 3, I will introduce you to the Data Synchronization feature, and I will try to explain all capabilities of Data Synchronization.

Before we start creating and explaining how it works, one step needs to be made before we Synchronize Sales Professional and Business Central. You will need to create Synchronization between Dataverse and Business Central first. The procedure of making it is the same. The difference is in the number of tables and the type of synchronization. In Dataverse Synchronization, you will get full sync of Contact, Customer, Vendors, and Currency. It is important to mention that this data sync is easy to set up and work with. As was the case a few years back, you don’t need an Admin User and Integration User (Non-Admin) in Dataverse. Now everything is done through a wizard in Business Central. All you have to do is go to the Assisted Setup in Business Central, choose Set up a connection to Dataverse and follow the steps. You have to pay attention to this setup at the beginning, where you have a question: Would you want to create a Virtual Table? It is up to you. You can switch it off or on, but we will not need Virtual Tables for our Dynamics 365 Sales Professional Synchronization.

Now that we have created Dataverse Synchronization, it is time to focus on our Sales Professional Data Synchronization. After you have created Dataverse Synchronization next step is to choose on the same page in Business Central Set Up connection to Dynamics 365 Sales. What will welcome you is almost the same wizard you got when you were created previously, but as you go through the next page, you will see the possibility of going to the Advanced setup of Synchronization. If you click on advanced, you will see the option to choose some of the tables for sync, my recommendation is to select all of them except Enable Legacy Sales Order Integration, but you will see that if you choose to Enable Bidirectional Sales Order Integration, you will not be able to select Enable Legacy Sales Order Integration.

Now when we choose Finish and let the system do its job, we will end that now we have a much more extensive list of synced tables than previously whit Dataverse synchronization. For example, we have Items, Opportunity, Sales Quote, Sales Invoice… etc. And of course, we see here which type of connection is made to which table, Bidirectional or To Integration Table or From Integration Table, but leaving this on the side more important is now to do coupling criteria. What are we doing here exactly? We are setting which field we want to do, checking duplicates, setting case-sensitive fields, and deciding whether we want to create e New record if he can’t find an existing one.

So, we now have to define Coupling criteria for all tables where the system asks us to do it, and when we finish, we will choose Run Full Synchronization. And the system will do its job, create all records, and match all already existing records on both sides.

Now that we have synced systems and what can we do with them?

In conclusion to this whole blog post, I will give you some examples of what you can do and how you can use the synchronization on and, of course, one CRM (Dynamics 365 Sales Professional) and one ERP (Business Central) for SMB altogether and use the best of both software and to get the best value at the end.

For example, as I have mentioned leads in previous blog posts, this is Sales stuff, and it is good not to mess with Business Central Customers as you may create some Invoices or a lot of financial transactions. So, let’s keep our ERP clear, and those data where we have some contact with somebody, let’s keep it in CRM. But this Lead is getting more interested, and we are getting the possibility to sell something to him (Athens Desk 1896-S, 😊), and he is becoming an Opportunity. We now have Synchronization between ERP and CRM and customer info in both systems. Still, what we can do more from Sales professional because we have Items, UOM, and Sales Quote Synced, we can create a quote in Sales Professional. Now when we want to do Invoicing, we can go to BC and get out the Quote that we made in Sales Professional (because of synchronization), and from that Quote, we will create an Invoice and successfully sell our product to our client. But this is not the end, because we know that in CRM works Salespersons and that for them it is important to understand what we have sold to somebody. This Invoice will be synced back to our Opportunity, and when it is on Opportunity, it will automatically be attached to the Account Table. Each Salesperson will know in the future what this client has bought for what amount and when. This process is called the Lead to Opportunity to Cash business process in two software which works together perfectly.

And one more thing, I’m not persuading you to start using and buying Sales Professional, but I just wanted to show you all the good stuff which comes for you for only 20$ per user per month as an Attached License if you are already a BC user.

And finally, there is always one more question. What if I need to add more tables to the synchronization? The answer is YES! I will stay on this answer because I would not like to rewrite your Microsoft Docs, but I’m giving you the link. In short, you will need a bit of BC development, but you will get it and make extra tables available in synchronization.

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Where is the limit in Business Central CRM capability and when integrating it with D365 Sales? (part 1)

Marko Totovic Business Central, CRM, Dynamics 365, ERP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We know that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (previously NAV) is primarily an ERP solution. But even so, this product has some customer relationship management capabilities. And name ‘Business Central’ probably comes because this solution can provide all business activities in one solution. But as this is primarily an ERP solution, the biggest strength comes in ERP, and in other areas, such as CRM or HRM, the level of functionalities is significantly lower. But let us make an overview of what is already in Business Central, but we can say it can be treated as CRM.

First, what we can find are a good customer and contact management. Still, as customers play an essential role in every ERP solution, we can emphasize more about contact management where we have some basic information about contacts and some segmentation.

You can also find some level of creating and tracking opportunities and sales quotes and interactions. You can also have some possibilities to make direct phone calls from BC or send an email. This is more or less what we have, but this is not a small number of functionalities.

Today I’ll not go into details about all these features. I just wanted to show some basic information about them and explain on a high level in which situation you should think about an additional and full CRM solution. As a full and independent CRM solution, I’ll focus on Dynamics 365 Sales Professional:

  • First, naturally, if you don’t have enough functionalities, you will take a specialized CRM solution, but let’s talk in detail on another occasion.
  • Second, the price can be an issue. If you have pure CRM users, they still need to pay $70 or even $100 for the license as they must pay a BC license even if they need only CRM capabilities. Sales Professional full license price is $65, and you can get full CRM. But with the new attach license for Dynamics 365 Sales Professional, BC clients can add a full CRM solution for an additional only $20.
  • Third, as I mentioned in the beginning, Business Central is still primarily an ERP solution, meaning its UI is built for ERP and not for CRM. Even if you have many CRM features, when we compare usage of these features, this is definitely not even close to being useable as in a regular CRM solution.
Dynamics 365 Sales Lead to Opportunity Business Proces Flow

Today I wanted just to make a high-level overview, but in future texts, I’ll try to be more accurate about when CRM in Business Central is enough for you and when you should think about integration with Dynamics 365 Sales.

What MB-800 exam can guarantee?

atotovic Business Central, Certification , , , , , , ,

I wanted to write this article as I recently passed this exam and I wrote about how to prepare yourself. I already mentioned in this article that if you have an experience in BC or NAV, you generally don’t need to prepare for this exam (but it implies you know and understand BC on the cloud). Now I’m not planning to continue in this direction how to prepare for the exam, but I want to discuss about what we can expect as result of passing this exam.

Generally the most of questions as well as case of study will show your real knowledge, but to be honest you can learn it even if you are not experienced and it cannot prove some specific level of knowledge. Of course, there are some questions non related with real implementation process and as a person with 15+ years in implementation I don’t know why someone thins it is important to know some report by heart, but there is not so many such a questions.

What is more important by my opinion is related with this that I personally am not a fan of this new exam models where we have one exam from whole solution. OK, for F&O we have 4 functional exams and there are similar situation with CRM exams, but there much more topics there and personally I think we have a small number of exams even in F&O and CRM areas. But when we talk about BC, I really cannot believe that one who will pass just one common exam can prove some serious knowledge. Generally BC is implemented very often as a big project and you cannot expect universal consultant who can implement all areas.

Based on my experience, we need to have minimum three exams: one core (we can use MB-800 for this) and another for essential features and third one for premium features (+WMS). And OK, we need development exam. In this case if these exams are prepared on the level as this one, they can prove serial knowledge.

Just to clarify, I like this exam, especially as it comes after a couple of years with no certification for NAV and BC. This is really well done job, but I think partners will need more. Currently, when you see that someone passed MB-800, it can guarantee that this person have basic understanding and knowledge of Business Central. It can be a case that this person is an expert, but this is definitely not necessary to pass this exam.

But as my conclusion, I would like to encourage all BC consultants (and developers as well) to try to pass this exam. Generally I think it is a good idea and especially I would like to recommend passing this exam for junior consultants. Preparing for this exam, they can learn something new and consolidate knowledge. Start with Learning Paths as now we have a lot of really good materials there.

Disclaimer: Everything I wrote in this article is my personal point of view and based on my personal experience and opinion. It doesn’t represent any official opinion companies I’m connected with.

Business Central & Power Platform Exams Experiences

atotovic Business Central, Certification, Dynamics 365, Power Platform , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recently I’ve passed these two new exams: Business Central Functional Consultant Associate and Power Platform App Maker Associate and I would like to share some my experience about them. I’ll try to be brief and just to give you some basic directions.

First I need to admit that I’m not big fan of this kind of certification. Based on my previous experience 10+ year ago, it was more about getting certificate and less about proving a real knowledge. I had an opportunity to meet a lot highly certified persons, but they couldn’t implement even the easiest projects. But still, partners wanted to invest in certification as some kind of knowledge proof.

But with new exams in the last few years things are slightly changed and I had opportunity to check them. But with these two new exams I’m talking about, things improved drastically. And I can say I’m really positive surprised.

First what I want to say is that I didn’t prepare myself for these two exams. And when I say ‘I didn’t prepare’, I mean it for real. I wanted to see if it is possible to pass these exams with real experience and practical knowledge. And I succeed! From my perspective this is the most important fact – if you are waring with these technologies and have a real practical knowledge, you can pass them without any problem. It still means you should be focused on questions as they can sometimes be complicated, especially when it comes to the case studies. I didn’t want to say these exams are easy as they are not, but you don’t need to prepare yourself if you know topics. But to be honest, you can still find a couple of useless questions, you really don’t need in practice, but even if you fail on some of them you will still have big chance to pass exams.

What I want to mention about BC exam is to be prepared with SaaS topics as this is very important. It is not enough to know only features in system, as you need to understand cloud concept as well. On the other side, when we talk about Power Platform, you should know both Canvas and Model-driven Power Apps, Power Automate as well as other Power Platform features (AI, Chat Bots…) and CDS. But this is what we imply with the Power Platform knowledge.

If you are newbie, in this case you need to learn for these exams. But good thing is that if you want to start, you can find everything you will need on the Learning Path site. But one small note, when you start to learn from Learning Paths, I often hear that there are not enough information and some of people often fail on exams. This is because, you need to open every link you have in your learning path as often you can find basic information in this part of text, but when you click on some links, you will be redirected to Microsoft docs site with all necessary information with related topic.

On the end I want to say THANKS to all people involved in preparation these two new exams as they made a good result. And for all of you who didn’t register for these exams, do it… you will not make mistake.

Adding External Accountant to Your Business Central

atotovic Business Central , , , , , , , , , ,

If you use Business Central online, I’m sure that you need to connect your external accountant or your reseller partner to your tenant without buying new license. This is something you have included in your license. Never mind how many user you bought or if you have Essential or Premium users, you can invite up to 3 external users (External Accountants). These 3 licenses have the same use rights as your standard license except access to the user setup and admin tasks. What these users can do in your system, depends on you. But just to remind you… I’m talking about external accountant, not about internal accountant. This is important to remember as this license is not for internal stuff.

But let’s focus how you can add them. First open Users page and run Invite External Accountant.

When you run this action, new welcome page will appear. You should read it and if you agree, click I Accept (otherwise you need to stop and you cannot add user 🙂 ).

Click Next and fill in minimum mandatory fields. These fields are your external accountant contact details: Email, First and Last name. You will see there is a welcome message your accountant will get as email. You can change it or type in your language.

When you finish with details, just click Next and wait a little while. How long? It depends on many things, but it is usually a few seconds up to minute until system invite your accountant. When system finish, you will get a message that person you added was successfully invited. Close the page and enjoy.

You accountant will get an email message with text you entered in invitation as well as URL where he/she needs to log in. And yes, when you finish with adding accountant as user, do not forget to add user permission sets you want. And if you check license for this user, you will see: Dynamics 365 Business Central External Accountant.

OK, everything I described is related if everything is OK, but what if you have some trouble. I have two common issues you can often meet in a practice. Both of them will be met on the first step when you run invitation action.

First you can have an issue with licensing. Event if these 3 users are free of charge, they are not automatically added to tenant. CSP partner have to do it and if partner forget it, you will get an error message No External Accountant license available. Contact your administrator.

In this case only what you can o is to contact your CSP and to require adding these 3 licenses to your tenant. When these licenses are added, they will appear in your Admin Portal.

Now we have another case when you are not a global administrator or a user administrator in you AAD. In this case you can give yourself proper rights or you can ask administrator to do this task.

Directions EMEA 2020 – Day 1

atotovic Business Central, Conference , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Extensibility and Collaboration in Business Central

atotovic Microsoft Dynamics NAV , , ,

Recently I published an article about the functional areas covered with standard clean implementation of Business Central. But this is not the end as you can add much more features using built-in extend and integration features in Business Central. This picture is not a part of some official presentation, but this is my view on visualization and conceptual architecture of Business Central collaboration features (I’m suggesting to download this picture to see details in better resolution 2526×1370).

Extensibility

First when we start with only Business Central, we can say that this is completely solution with built-in security model, business processes and data validation. Even then, we can need more features and it is important to understand that you can easily extend its functionalities. You can do it using ISV solutions from AppSource, where you can find a lot of different solutions: Retail, Real Estate, Quality Management, Transportation, Payrolls… even different languages or localizations… Some of them are for free and for some of them you need to pay. But if you know AL language and if you have VS Code, you can easily build your own extensions and extend standard features with your customizations. My personal opinion is that every time you need industry specific solution, first try to find some ISV solution because it is probably already well proved in this industry. But if you cannot find it or this is not fit with your requirements you can build it with AL. If you don’t know how to do it, you can start with learning from here.

Collaboration

The most of experienced NAV people will be well prepared for customizations, but often they don’t know all integration and collaboration features. Because of that, very often I could see customizations in areas already covered with standard integration features. That is why I wanted to write about this topic. It is important to know that almost all integrations are done through API’s in Business Central. There are a lot of built-in API’s, but if you miss the for some of entities, it is not so complicated to create custom API. Let’s start with one of integration parts.

Office 365

Starting with the 2020 Wave 2, we can use Business Central inside the Microsoft Teams, where you just need to install an app from the Teams Store and this app will allow you to paste a link to any Business Central record into chat, and it will expand that into a compact card to share with your coworkers as well as to view card details, edit data, and take action without ever leaving Microsoft Teams… and soon you can expect even more.

Business Central Outlook add-in is well known for a while. With this add-in, you can see financial data related to customers and vendors, as well as create and send quotes and invoices from email or from meeting appointments. When you create document, you can even use AI for automatically recognition of text in your email body.

Business Central Excel add-in allows you to open any Business Central list in Excel respecting any filters on the page that limit the records shown or to edit in excel, where system will allow you to make changes to records in Excel and then publish the changes back to Business Central.

With Word you can be master of your outgoing documents, easily modifying documents layouts in Word and importing them back in Business Central where you don’t need to be a developer to change document layouts.

If your company uses the Bookings app, you can do bulk invoicing for appointments and it can be very useful. Unfortunately, based on my experience this integration is not used as it deserves.

You can use Microsoft Graph to access and manage your financials, work with your business contacts, and gain insights from your financial reports, all based on entities in the Business Central data platform. By integrating your apps with Business Central in Microsoft Graph, you can create experiences that span your business needs.

Power Platform

You can make your Business Central data available as a data source in Power Apps or Power Automate through available Business Central Connectors (online and onprem) based on exposed APIs in Business Central. If you need more, you can create your custom APIs and custom connectors based on them. Power Automate allows more using embedded flows in Business Central for approval process in many of documents and other entities.

With Power BI you can get insight your Business Central data. Power BI retrieves Business Central data through OData allowing you to build dashboards and reports based on that data. And even more, you can embed all those Power BI reports in Business Central and looking all those data visualizations without leaving your system.

Azure

Using Business Central you will find some Azure built-in features such as AI (Cash Flow Forecast, Inventory Forecast, Late Payment Prediction) and Cognitive Service (Items and Contacts recognitions).

But with Business Central you can also use some advance Azure features such as Azure Logic Apps or Azure Functions connecting them through available or custom connectors. And you are not limited only to these tools as you can use many of them with not so complicated integrations. My recommendation for all Business Central experts is to pass Azure Fundamental exams to learn more about available tools and services in Azure.

Common Data Service

We already had an integration between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales, but from the previous release it is significantly improved and extended to full Common Data Service integration. As Dynamics 365 Sales is based on Common Data Service, that means now we can customize our integration and use it for many different CDS applications or build our own CDS apps and connect them with Business Central.

SharePoint

And on the end, you can connect SharePoint with Business Central using Microsoft SharePoint Connection Setup page in BC. This integration is not so complicated, and you just need to fill in a few fields, but unfortunately there is no official online documentation about this integration.

Business Central Localizations

atotovic Business Central, Dynamics 365 , , , , , , , , ,

As I’m from area where official Business Central localizations (made by Microsoft) don’t exist (CEE), it is not so strange that this topic is very important for me personally as well as for all partners I cooperate with and their existing and potential clients. Of course we have some partner based localizations as we had for NAV earlier, but this topic is important… no localization – no clients :). And yes, I wanted to make it today as we just got new release where we announced a few new localizations.

Based on available sources from official Microsoft site and information from AppSource, I created the following map (keep in mind I’m not geographer and maybe map is not 100% accurate :)) and table with details.

This map is good as an overview where Business Central is available. If you asking me if I’m satisfy, answer is yes and no. I’m happy we got so many partner based localizations developed as extensions, even the most of people suspected it will be possible. But when we talk about numbers, it is enough to remind that we had 196 Dynamics NAV localizations (info from one of previous Directions). Compared with that, we need more localizations. One of the reasons NAV was so popular was that we had localization in almost all countries and if we want to have Business Central SaaS with the same popularity, we need to have more localizations. In a meantime, if you are from country where we don’t have localization and you want to move BC to the cloud, I can recommend to read this article.

OK, now in more details. There is a table with all available localizations and who made them as well as together with available languages. You will see, this table is interesting (download table to get full resolution picture). You can find the most of these details on the official Microsoft site, but I tried to make it easier for understanding making combination of localizations and languages from different sources.

Just to avoid some misunderstanding, these information are based on official data from October 3rd 2020 and of course, it is subject of changing.

Business Central Functional Areas

atotovic Business Central, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics NAV , , , , , , , ,

Usually when I talk with people with a small (or without) experience in NAV or Business Central but with ERP knowledge, they don’t know what functional areas are covered with Business Central. Mostly, they find something on internet that it is for SMB and they assume it cannot be used for complex business processes. Yes, Business Central is on the first place for SMB, but it can be found in very complex business as well and it covers the big number of business processes. And yes, Business Central is full ERP system.

Because of that, I wanted to show simplified map what business process are covered with standard Business Central. But just to clarify, this map represents only an overview of business processes… and if you want to see all of them, I can suggest to discuss with someone who is experienced and who can show everything what is possible.

As this picture cannot be viewed good here on blog post (small resolution), I’m suggesting to download it and to open as a picture on your desktop.

And what is important on the end… Business Central is easily extended solution. You can extend it adding new functional areas from AppSource or developing them from your partners.

All Dynamics events in 2020 are going virtually

atotovic Business Central, Conference, Dynamics 365 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.