The Microsoft Cloud

When I hear people talk about ‘the cloud’, I sometimes wonder if they really know what they’re talking about. For sure when I hear the sales pitch of “NAV in the cloud”, the hairs at the back of my neck stand up, because I know a bunch of different ways that you could interpret that. Are you implementing NAV in a virtual machine that is hosted online? Are you providing a managed service? Soon it might mean a Dynamics 365 implementation. Not to mention how many companies almost seem to gleefully try to confuse you even further when they talk about the cloud.

A few years back I was attending a Microsoft presentation, and they were showing us their plans to build some brand new data centers all over the globe. As they were talking about those data centers, it dawned on me…. The cloud is nothing more than buying processing power from some provider or other. Microsoft has their Azure platform, Google and Amazon have theirs, but all that “the cloud” means is that those providers charge you for the computing power to provide those services.

I was reminded of that presentation when I saw this video in my Twitter feed. Have a look and see if you find it as fascinating as I do.

The Skinny on Extensions

Earlier this month I wanted to write about what’s new in NAV 2017, and my fellow MVP and good friend Eric ‘Waldo’ Wauters beat me to it. So, my next plan was to write something comprehensive about extensions. I am signed up for a deep dive workshop next month, and I want to be well prepared. Again, as I am collecting information, this guy publishes a large post about extensions, and judging from the title it looks like it was the first of three posts. So…. instead of doing the work myself, I waited for him to post number three, and give you the links in here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I could try and say something intelligent about these posts, but I’d make myself look foolish. After the workshop I’ll have plenty to share anyway. Enjoy 🙂

What’s New – NAV 2017

Directions EMEA was this past week, and I was not there, which makes me sad. I wish I were there, not in the least because it was in Prague, and I’ve never been to Prague, and I REALLY want to visit Prague…

Anyway, ever since Directions US in Chandler, AZ, I was planning to write about what’s new in NAV 2017. Then, right before the weekend that I was going to work on that, my fellow MVP and good friend Eric ‘Waldo’ Wauters beat me to it. So, please go to his website and read this post.

Most important:

  • Office 365 integration
  • Flow and Power Apps integration
  • Power BI right on the Role Center
  • Some extensions out of the box (PayPal, Ceridian, Quickbooks Migration). By the way, there are mane more capabilities with Extensions, HUGE improvement over NAV 2016
  • Cortana Intelligence

Dynamics 365 Primer

Real quick one today, basically a repost of a CustomerSource post today.

The new Dynamics 365 offerings are a bit…. shall we say…. confusing? Ambiguous? The Dynamics 365 page itself seems to have a large number of products on it, they call it all sorts of names, there seem to be a couple of different editions, for different markets. This post is a good attempt at creating some clarity around Dynamics 365.

In a nutshell:

  • Microsoft wants to re-invent business processes. Personally I think that’s BS because the processes themselves won’t really change, it’s just that those processes will be executed by a set of online integrated products. Don’t get me wrong, the technology is moving at lightning speed, and the capabilities are mind-blowing. Microsoft calls it ‘digital transformation’. Now it is REALLY awesome to be able to have a conversation with a prospect, create a quote/order right from your email, have everything posted immediately in your financial system, and see sales figures in a dashboard in real time. The technology to make that happen is now becoming a reality, but the business process itself is really not that different.
  • Clarity about the Dynamics Portfolio. Really important to understand the various products and how they connect and relate. Dynamics 365 Business/Enterprise are based on NAV/AX respectively, GP/SL will technically not have a cloud offering. The consequences for SL/GP partners is that they will have to learn NAV/AX to go into the cloud.
  • Other Microsoft technologies, such as the common data model, PowerBI, Power Apps, Flow, Azure… These will all be offered in a way that allows you to integrate them in a seamless way. You can extract data for your PowerBI dashboard from any other Dynamics offering, and present the relationships in one look. You can use Flow and Power Apps to build your custom workflow, and use data from multiple systems in real time. VERY powerful stuff.

Have a read in this article, there are a ton of links in there for you to follow down the rabbit hole.