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

Microsoft 365 Business Central

For about a year now, we have been talking about “Tenerife”. Despite going to great lengths to calm down the partner channel, the name and what it stood for has caused massive misunderstandings and great anxiety. Hopefully that anxiety will come to an end because today the new name has been announced: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (click here for the announcement and click here for the overview page). A catchy, easy-to-pronounce, 14 syllable name, and it is scheduled to be released on April 2, 2018.

I just wanted to put this out there, and I don’t have a ton of things to say right now, but watch this space for much more stuff to come. This week is Directions Asia in Bangkok, and there will be plenty of information coming out of that event. With the release of the new product there will be some new requirements for partners to get their IP into AppSource, and I will have plenty of things to share about that. Microsoft is working incredibly hard on getting all the information out there, including new material in the learning portal (the link that I had wasn’t working when I wrote this, so I owe you that one) and a ton of new and updated content in the new technical documentation site called ‘docs’.

I am in a very fortunate position to be involved in the very early stages of Business Central, I’ve had the pleasure to be working with the new product for a while now. I have to say I was skeptical of the Web Client and having everything in the cloud, but as I’ve gotten used to how it all works, and how the new ecosystem is forcing to improve our internal processes, I can’t help but be happy about the way that my industry is taking me into a more professional approach to my business. No longer do we get away with flying by the seat of our pants, and do whatever we can get out there in a short term, quick and dirty way. We must adapt and get ALL of our ducks in a row. Our approach to design, architecture, coding, marketing, delivery, automated testing, EVERYTHING must be in top shape in order to be successful in the new age.

This is the time where you have to adapt, or be disrupted. For me personally, it scares the heck out of me, but I also welcome the challenge. I am looking forward to what is to come next, I hope you are too.

Webinar – Dynamics NAV Dev Tools Preview

This morning I was part of a panel to host a webinar to show the development tools preview. It was my pleasure to provide the demo part and show the attendees a taste of what is to come in the new development tools for Dynamics NAV. The demo part was just about 25 minutes, and then we opened up the floor for questions. We had some good questions, and it was a lot of fun to be able to share that with everyone.

The webinar was recorded and uploaded to YouTube, and you can watch it here. Oh, my name is not Erik Ernst, not sure how that happened 🙂

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.

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.

Dynamics 365 and AppSource

I read this blog today, and I tweeted about it too. What struck me about the article is how it talks about how Microsoft wants to help you focus on your business while providing a connected set of systems that seamlessly work together for you.

You might have read about ‘Project Madeira’, for instance on Waldo’s blog, or Erik Hougaard’s blog, or many more just like it. Even Marko Perisic, the General Manager for Dynamics SMB wrote about it. Today’s announcement is about where Madeira leads, and it’s called “Dynamics 365” and the new “Microsoft AppSource”.

The landing page for Dynamics 365 is still very confusing to me. There seem to be a lot of products underneath it all, like ‘For Sales’ or ‘For Operations’ and more like that. Then on the pricing page there is another subdivision into  an “Enterprise Edition” and a “Business Edition” where you can play around with some configurations. Now some of those are based on NAV and some of those are based on AX. What always annoys me is that it is not clear at all to figure out what is what. If the Business Edition is based on NAV, how come I can only see a small subset of the functionality?

The part that does seem to be clear is that there will be a store of some sort where you can purchase, and they have called this store “AppSource”, check out this link. They even created a video with one of those supremely irritating cute little Ukulele ditties.

The article goes into some marketing fluff like “Helping customers transform with a new approach to business process” and “technology is transforming our lives”, but overall it does a pretty good job I think to talk about how business processes interact and how you need different systems to execute those processes. There are a lot of moving parts, like PowerBI, Cortana, Office 365, common data model, work flow, and a bunch of other ones. The purpose of the article seems to be that Microsoft is working on putting together a set of cloud solution that can help you put it all together.

Two new names to keep track of: Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource. I’m sure in the months to come there will be a lot of new information about these. If you are a NAV partner, I would certainly consider going to Directions this year, and as an end user I’d look at the NAVUG events.