Directions 2018 Recap

Today’s the last day of Directions EMEA 2018, which was in Den Haag in The Netherlands. This is the town where I was born, and since I haven’t lived in Holland for almost 20 years, it was kind of strange to be here on a business trip. The event was hosted in the World Forum, which used to be called ‘Het Congres Gebouw’ which translates to ‘The Conference Building’. I had never been there for any conference, but it used to also be the home of the famous North Sea Jazz Festival.

My contribution to both events (I did the same workshop and sessions for Directions in San Diego as well as Den Haag) were:

  • An all day workshop to introduce C/SIDE developers to extensions and VSCode. There was a great buzz around the room at both events. Last year there was a bit of anger about the direction of NAV, but now that is settled, I saw a lot of excitement about the new environment, and everyone was eager to learn new things.
  • App Source Test Drive. In San Diego I was a co-presenter with Mike Glue, one of my fellow MVPs, who has developed the only Test Drive experience that is currently in AppSource. He could not make it to Holland, so I did this session by myself in Den Haag.
  • Source Code Management. I was surprised at how busy this session was, there was pretty much a full at both events, and the audience in Den Haag even posed for the picture in this post, which was a lot of fun to do with them.

Other than being very busy with my own workshops and sessions, I was able to attend some sessions myself. The ones that I will remember most, and that I will want to learn much more about was the session about Machine Learning, and the session about CI/CD for Business Central development. Especially the latter one will be important, because if we want to do repeatable software on a bigger scale, we will need, we MUST, learn how to be more professional. The days of flying by the seat of your pants as a partner are over, we must all adapt and become the professionals that we’ve pretended to be for so many years.

During my sessions and workshops I asked almost every staff member who looks old enough to remember if they knew anything about the history of the rooms. I would have loved to be able to say that I shared a stage with some of the greats of jazz, leaving out the fact that there are decades between those performances of course. Unfortunately, nobody remembered, and there does not seem to be any history for the building that I can find. I did find old programs for NSJ, but nobody seems to know what the rooms used to be called.

Whether I can say I share the stage with anybody or not, it was cool to be in The Hague for this conference.

AppSource Test Drive

Everybody knows about AppSource by now. Everybody is also struggling how to make AppSource work for them, and especially how to provide customers and prospects a trial of their functionality. You could create a sandbox environment and try things out in there, but that doesn’t have test data that is specific for your product. You could install the product into a production tenant, but then you have an app in there that you might not want after all.

One of the lesser known features of AppSource is the Test Drive. This feature provides an ISV partner a completely isolated trial experience  of their product, in an environment that is completely in their control. What’s even better is that the Test Drive can be done in a number of different ways, so you can tailor it exactly to your requirements.

The Test Drive can be a part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, in which you can implement an environment that can showcase even the most complex features of your software, in a way that provides ample opportunity to your customers to learn how to use your product in a non-production environment that is still in the cloud, without having to get a team of consultants onsite.

The way that it works is essentially that the Test Drive is a standalone tenant that has a template company. This template company has your product already installed, and it has proper test data already populated. You can create all the data that you need for your product to run properly. Then, through the SaaSification techniques, you would implement a path into the features of your product, taking the user into your product one step at a time.

If you are interested in providing a Test Drive, please watch this video, in which I go into some more detail about this feature.

To find out more about the test drive, and other information about apps for Business Central, visit http://aka.ms/ReadyToGo