NAV Techdays 2018 Recap

I started to write this post while flying across the Atlantic Ocean on the second of a three leg journey home, a BA flight from London to Phoenix. It has been a very long trip that started when I traveled to Holland for Directions EMEA in Den Haag at the end of October. Since Directions and NAV Techdays were relatively close together, I decided to just stay with my family in Holland for those 4 weeks rather than fly back and forth twice in less than a month. This has been the longest that I’ve ever been away from home, and I was SO ready to be back in my own house.

NAV Techdays ended last Friday, and it’s been another fantastic week, as we’ve come to expect. As far as I can tell, the attendees in my pre-conference workshop were happy with the content, I can’t wait to get the feedback and see what I can improve for next time.

As per usual, Luc has posted the videos in record time, less than a week after the event. The whole playlist can be found here, and I wanted to highlight some of my favorite sessions. One of the most important developments in current technology is machine learning and AI. Dmitry Katson and Steven Renders put together an awesome session to introduce machine learning to us. The award for most entertaining session goes to Waldo and Vjeko, who put on a concert and wowed the audience with some really cool content. I also want to point out the session about CI/CD, which is going to be one of the most important things for everyone that is serious about implementing a professional development practice. Of course, I have to also mention the Docker session, which is the technology that makes it all possible.

Furtunately, next year’s event is not scheduled on Thanksgiving, which is a national holiday here in the US, one that typically involves lots of friends and family, and lots of food. I’ve had to miss it the past couple of years, and each time I’ve been bummed to hear the stories of all the great meals and gatherings that my family got to have without me. Next year I’ll be home for Turkey Day!

Thanks for another super event, it’s one of my favorite weeks of the year.

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.

Inspire 2018 Recap

One of the cool things about the Microsoft Inspire event is that IT. IS. HUUUUGE! One of the most annoying things about Inspire is that it is HUUUGE! It is so easy to get lost among the 10,000 or so attendees that are milling about, going to sessions across a bunch of floors, walking around the immense expo floor with what seems to be thousands upon thousands of vendors peddling their wares.

The best part about this event was that it was in Vegas. Not that I particularly enjoy Vegas, but it is a drive away from my house. This means that I got to leave at a convenient time, drive my own car, and bring a guitar with me so that I can play in my hotel room.

Two of my partners made the trip from Europe, and we had a bunch of meetings scheduled with some potential and existing customers. It is always nice to spend some time with them, we had great food, saw some cool things. I was looking forward to going to the Bruno Mars concert at the big event, but the night in question was hotter than hell, and there was no way I was going to go out in that temperature. Bruno will have to wait to have me in his audience at a later date 🙂

So…. what was the buzz around Inspire this year? For me it was a further crystallization of Microsoft’s digital transformation strategy. The marketing heads have come up with something called ‘Intelligent Edge’ which is a way to categorize everything into a big connected amalgamation of connected technologies. There were many slides about machine learning, AI, a BIG emphasis on Azure. All of this with unlimited scalability in the Microsoft Cloud, which comes with an incremental subscription fee of course.

Microsoft seems to realize that they need the partner channel to do most of the selling for them, so the way they organize that has gone through some further evolving. It’s still very shortly after the event so I haven’t had much time to let this stew and find some good resources. I’m actually not sure if I will have much time for that anyway. I am knee deep in working on hours of new training material that needs to be finished before the next event, so we’ll see if I get to do some research on all of this.

For me, I like to dive a little deeper into specific topics. Inspire is a bit overwhelming for me, and it is an extremely expensive event to boot. We’ve been to Inspire two years in a row, and if we’ll come back next year (which I doubt) we will probably just get a room near the conference and use the event as a means to be in one place with our customers and Microsoft people.

Image: a slide showing the Intelligent Edge

NAV Techdays 2018 – I’m Speaking!

Registration for NAV Techdays 2018 is open, and this year is going to be SUPER exciting for me, because I am going to teach an all-day pre-conference workshop! Go to the sessions overview page of the NAV Techdays website to see the details of all of the sessions and the pre-conference workshops. Of course I would LOVE it if you sign up for my workshop, but really you can’t go wrong with any of them.

My workshop is called “A Day in the Life of a Business Central Developer”. I still need to put the material together, but the plan is to cover all aspects of what it means to be a developer for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Think about the development environment, how to create an app, how to create multiple apps with dependencies (an extension of another extension), how to connect to web services, how to use source control, and even design patterns and Docker.

I realize that it is a very ambitious agenda, but I am sure that we can fill a whole day with great content. I’m not sure if there will be much time to do any extensive lab work, so I might end up just teaching all day and giving you some things to take home and work on after the workshop is done.

Most importantly – go register for NAV Techdays, it is really THE premium event for our industry. Spend an extra couple of days in Antwerpen for the pre-conference workshops, they are all fantastic and worth every penny.

See you in Antwerpen in November!

NAV Techdays 2017 Recap

My favorite week of the year has just ended. I’m in the high speed train from Antwerpen back to Amsterdam, which is over just like that so I don’t have much time to make this anything elaborate.

As per usual, the organization was superb. The venue is fantastic, with a great expo area, lots of good food and drink choices, and the seats in the great rooms are just about the most comfortable seats you can imagine. The Kinepolis is a movie theater that you can also rent for events. I think I speak for everyone when I say this is one of the most important features, and I hope we will never have to move to a different location.

My week started with a full day pre-conference workshop about automated testing in NAV. This workshop was hosted by none other than Luc van Vugt, who, as per usual, delivered a solid day of learning. I had misread the workshop description and the correspondence that we had prior to the workshop, so I did not get everything out of it that I could have, but Luc was so kind to offer assistance to me so that I could do the exercises at home. Any time you have an opportunity to train under Luc, you should take it.

My company was a sponsor, so we had a booth to staff. It was a pleasure to be there and talk to anyone who had any questions about what we can offer.

As per usual, the two conference days were stuffed with 90 minute deep-dive sessions on any topic you can think of. My favorite ones were Waldo’s “Rock ‘n Roll with VS Code”Anders and Nikola’s “Creating great APIs”, and the Docker session by Freddy, Tobias and Jakub. Fortunately for you, you can watch all of the sessions on YouTube, Luc had all of them uploaded within a week of the conference.

I can’t say enough about this conference. For any technical resource in the NAV channel (and I include Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations in that category), NAV Techdays is a must to attend, every single year. This is the second time that I’ve gone, and I am still kicking myself for not going the first few years. If I can help it, I will not make that mistake again.

See you next year in Antwerpen!

Directions 2017 EMEA Recap

After a supremely busy week, with lots of last minute session and workshop work, I’m getting ready to go sightseeing in Madrid with my wife and some dear friends. This week has been frustrating, as well as satisfying, as well as educational, although not as educational as I would have wanted because I was too busy doing sessions and workshops to have any time to attend any myself.

One of the key takeaways is that Microsoft is going to release NAV 2018 in December this year, so 4-5 months ahead of the spring release of “Tenerife”. The whole white label thing seems to be gone altogether, so partners can continue to use the Microsoft name in their marketing for their Dynamice 365 products. Still, there is some need for clarity about licensing, and about the long term future.

What everybody needs to acknowledge is that we now live in a world that is being disrupted continuously. Today, Microsoft is heavily investing in their current roadmap, one that they feel very strongly will succeed in the long run. You must understand that this world is moving at the speed of light, and if something happens to our ecosystem, Microsoft WILL react. When they do, they will focus on what they feel is their best chance to survive in this changed world, so it is up to US to make that happen.

This slide was shown at one of the presentations, and it shows where Dynamics 365 “Tenerife” fits into our world. As you can see, it is just one of many boxes. If the surrounding boxes change, there may be a completely different role for “Tenerife”. It might very well happen that the market shifts in such a way that there won’t be a need for it at all. Given everything that I’ve seen this week, I think the “Tenerife” story is awesome, and we are going to absolutely crush it in terms of features and capabilities. What I don’t know is whether we can grow this cloud business enough to remain strong over the long term. The key though, is to fully embrace the entire picture, not just the ‘NAV’ part of it. The days of just ‘NAV’ are over, and they’re not coming back.

If anything, what I get out of this week is that we all must play a crucial part in the success of our entire market. WE the partner channel WITH Microsoft, NOT Microsoft alone, will determine the success of this market. If you want to be a part of this ecosystem, you better adapt and embrace what is here to stay. Fighting it is a losing cause, and you will be left behind.

I say we take a deep breath, a chill pill, we take a good look at what we have to do, and we roll up our sleeves and make it happen.

Directions NA 2017 Recap

It’s been quite a week at Directions in Orlando. I’ve written about the confusion in the halls of the JW Marriott Grande Lakes resort, and I wanted to follow up about the closing keynote, and share an article by Microsoft’s General Manager for Business Apps & Strategy.

First the closing keynote, which was a very impressive thing to behold. This week has given me even more respect for Marko Perisic than I already had, because of the way that he owned what he said during the opening keynote, the way he listened to the event attendees during a few Q&A sessions, and how he has taken responsibility to do something with the feedback that he’s received this week. I already knew how much he cares and how much his team cares. Over the past decade I’ve gotten to know many of them quite closely, and they are really a great group of people that have their hearts in the right place. We are in good hands with them.

So, there are 4 items on the todo list:

  1. The ‘white label thing’ is not going to work. We are Microsoft partners, and we need the Microsoft brand.
    • I think the white label thing got taken out of context a little bit. I know someone said “once you change 1 line of code you own the product” but of course it’s more complex than that.
    • The point is that this is a Microsoft product, and we create things to extend it. We add to it, but it is still a Microsoft ecosystem, and we need to be able to leverage that
  2. Delaying the release until spring is creating confusion, and the delay in decision is going to cost many partners a LOT of money. Marko has committed to see if he can fix that
  3. Non-NAV Partners have nothing to sell at the moment. Microsoft needs to be more clear about how non-NAV partners can move into Dynamics 365
  4. Microsoft needs to be crystal clear toward the user group, and there is a firm commitment to be more involved with the user groups

Now toward the end, Marko shared a picture of a word cloud. This was the result of an internal survey, where everyone in the NAV team expressed their feelings toward the product and the greater community. I don’t know about you, but this gets me going every time. If I may speak for myself: the feeling is mutual.

One other thing that was posted a couple of days after Directions was this:

I think that the whole “NAV is dead” thing was totally misunderstood. Maybe someone was talking about the name NAV, but I really don’t think it actually is dead, or even that there are plans to kill it. I do think Microsoft at the corporate level doesn’t always have a clue (which is a polite way of saying that it seems like sometimes they have no clue whatsoever), and I also think that one way or another there is going to be just one “ERP” in Dynamics 365.

Personally I think that the NAV flavor has a really good chance of being that one flavor. For sure we are NOT dead, and there is a LOT of really good and exciting stuff ahead of us.

Directions EMEA 2017 – Madrid

For Directions EMEA, we are going back to Madrid. I am really looking forward to this one, because I have some business to take care of on Mallorca. While I am there I will spend some quality time with some great friends there, and in the planning stages my wife and I decided that it is of utmost importance for her to come with me. So my business trip now has a personal flavor as well.

My company is going to host a record number of sessions (13) and workshops (10), of which I will be hosting 3 workshops and 3 sessions. We also have a booth, but I am worried that we will not have much time to actually BE at the booth since we are all very busy with sessions. My contributions are:

  • Build your 1st extension in VSCode – This is a 2 hour workshop in which we will introduce you to Visual Studio Code, and you will build your first real extension using this development tool. This is the same workshop that we did in Orlando at Directions NA this year.
  • Migrate your IP to VSCode – in this 2 hour workshop I will present what you need to look at when you want to move your IP into Dynamics 365, we’ll take a look at how you can assess your current IP and do a feasibility study. In addition, you will get your hands on some PowerShell scripts to convert your C/AL objects into AL objects.
  • SCM Simplified – this session covers an introduction to Source Code Management, and why it is important for you to start using it today
  • ISV Development Center (session) – At the Inspire conference in Washington DC, my company was announced as one of only a handful of ISV Development Centers. At Directions we will host a session to explain what this means and what we can do for you.
  • Technical partner panel (Q&A session) – a bunch of Microsoft people and some MVP’s will answer any technical and non-technical questions you may have about the upcoming version of NAV and the new technologies that are used to develop extensions and apps for Dynamics 365.

Some of these sessions are a repeat of the ones that we did in Orlando, and some of them will be converted from mere sessions to workshops, since we had gotten some feedback that it would be great to get some hands on material in addition to the presentations. We are always happy to oblige such requests.

Come look us up at our booth, and leave us a message if we are not there, we really want to talk to you!

What’s Going On Out There?

In case you missed it, there were some unexpected announcement this week at Directions North America in Orlando, and as a result there’s some growing trepidation among my people of the NAV partner channel.

Over the past few years, Directions North America has become the time when Microsoft announces the new version of Dynamics NAV. All year long, the partner channel goes out and tries to time sales around this time, and they make promises like “just wait for Directions, the new version will come out, and we can get your project started right away”. Usually, partners go to the conference, attend all the sessions they can catch, and on their way back home, they put in their license orders.

This year, however, the announcement was that there would be NO new version right at Directions. Microsoft is working on the next greatest cloud product, and they have not yet decided what to call it, how licensing will work. We are told that the code is ready to go, but they’re not yet ready to pull the trigger, mostly because of marketing reasons. Since Microsoft wants to go big bang with this new product (identical “full NAV” on premise as well as in the cloud).

This announcement was made by Marko Perisic during the opening keynote, and that afternoon there was a Q&A session that got quite heated. I was not present at the first one, but because it was so “popular” they decided to do a repeat, and of course I did go to the repeat.

At the same time, some event was taking place with some big shots from Microsoft and some inner circle partners, where someone said that someone else high up in Microsoft said that “NAV is dead”. When I heard this, I was immediately skeptical about the accuracy of the quote, and even if it was accurate, that it was probably (likely) taken out of context.

I listened to Marko do some damage control, and to a number of people put forward their points of view, which were made with varying degrees of validity. My takeaways of this session were these:

  • In My Humble Opinion – Marko made a big mistake by using the product codename in the official announcement. Granted, it was in quotation marks, but still, that was not a good thing. Now we have ‘NAV’, and we have “Tenerife” and we also have this unknown product name. Lots of lobbying by the way for ‘Dynamics 365 Navision’ which I actually like, but is probably too retro.
  • No new NAV version is a BAD BAD BAD thing. Postponing the release until spring 2018 is an even worse thing. Many people have been postponing sales for the new version, and not having this new product will defer revenue until spring of next year, and that is going to cost a LOT of people a LOT of money.
  • What I thought was an excellent suggestion was for Microsoft to release the product as it is today (after all, they DID say the code was ready to go), only for on premise, and use current licensing. That way we can start implementing the new product, and we can just call it NAV 2018 as everyone was expecting anyway
  • This rumor that “NAV is dead” must be dispelled at once. Nuff said.

This Q&A session was brutal, there was a LOT of anger in the room. But one thing that I also took away from that session is that we are SUPER lucky to have someone like Marko at the helm of this great team at Microsoft. I observed this guy talk to everybody at Directions, and he always had a smile while he was being chewed out. He’s a very direct person (which I actually appreciate a lot) and that can sometimes be misunderstood. I’m in a fortunate position to be one of the MVP’s, and we had a private meeting with Marko this evening. Because of NDA I can’t share what we discussed, but I can assure you that this guy cares deeply for this community of ours. I for one have gained a TON of respect for how he stood up and listened to everyone that wanted to talk to him. He has heard everyone, and has taken everything to heart.

It’s still the middle of the conference. I have lots of session/workshop stuff to work on, so I gotta get going. Can’t wait for the closing keynote.

Directions NA 2017 – Orlando, Florida

This year’s Directions North America conference will be held in Orlando, Florida at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes resort. There will be product announcements, and lots of really good sessions and workshops. My company will be hosting a total of 8 sessions and 5 workshops (at the time that I am writing this post).

My contribution will be:

  • Migrate your IP to extensions (session) – in this session we’ll go over the things you need to look at when you want to move your IP into an app for Dynamics 365. We’ll cover assessing your current IP and doing a feasibility study. We will also go over SaaSified Techniques that are used to execute on the customer journey.
  • Build your 1st VSCode extension (workshop) – in this two hour workshop Waldo and I will introduce you to Visual Studio Code, and you will build your first extension yourself.
  • Technical partner panel (Q&A session) – a bunch of Microsoft people and some MVP’s will answer any technical and non-technical questions you may have about the upcoming version of NAV and the new technologies that are used to develop extensions and apps for Dynamics 365.
  • ISV Development Center (session) – At the Inspire conference in Washington DC, my company was announced as one of only a handful of ISV Development Centers. At Directions we will host a session to explain what this means and what we can do for you.

It is going to be a very busy conference for us, because we are also sponsoring the conference. We hope to see you in Orlando, and talk about how we can work together.