DIRECTIONS EMEA 2019
To start with, here is a bit of statistics from Microsoft shared by general manager of Microsoft Toby Bowers:
450 + Business Central solutions available on AppSource.
1400 + Business Central partners selling Business Central worldwide.
75% of Business Central partners also sell other Dynamics 365 products.This time it took place in Vienna, Austria. It was all about sharing knowledge, experience, networking and Microsoft's strategy around Business Central and business applications from their eco-system, such as Azure, Power BI, Power Apps.A bit of statistics from Microsoft shared by general manager of Microsoft Toby Bowers:
450 + Business Central solutions available on AppSource.
1400 + Business Central partners selling Business Central worldwide.
75% of Business Central partners also sell other Dynamics 365 products.
A new Business Central release.
Traditionally, a new 2019 release, wave 2, was introduced. The list of new features, already mentioned in our previous blog, is also described in the official video from Microsoft.
And, as was announced a year ago, a long era of C/SIDE, C/AL and Windows client is over with this release to give a way for AL and the extension-based approach. This time the base application is delivered exclusively in AL:
- Development environment - Visual Studio Code only
- Programming language – AL only
- Client – Web client only
Also, the geography of countries with a localization available from Microsoft is extended:
The focus for investment in 2020/2021 for Microsoft is going
to be on application enhancements, expanding the list of supported countries,
ISV compatibility, migration tools, usage of Power Platform and continuing the cloud
service.
The main messages from Microsoft:
Repeatability and investment into IP
The message about importance of repeatability of packaged IP was addressed during the whole event. It was confirmed by stories of success from Business Central partners.
GTM investments
250 million dollars is planned to be invested in go-to-market activities, including increasing number of sales and channel managers for SMB.
Business Central certification.
Microsoft has started working on Business Central certification for application consultants. However, they don’t expect it to be ready in 2020.
Architectural change
After the conversion of monolithic CAL to Base and System AL applications, the product team keeps working on breaking down these apps into even smaller separate extensions.
Breaking changes
Microsoft guarantees that any destructive change, such as deleting a field or moving a procedure to other codeunit, will be done via implementing obsolete markers and warning messages to let partners adapt their code to the new structure of standard apps till the next release.
