Insights From Directions EMEA 2022

The annual Direction4Partners Community event for EMEA was held on the 9-11 November 2022 in Hamburg, Germany. Nearly 3,000 attendees from 771 companies and 50 countries gathered to meet, learn, and network around all things related to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365BC).

It was 20 years ago that Microsoft acquired the Danish company Navision for $1B, and according to Mike Morton, VP of Dynamics 365 Business Central Microsoft, D365BC is one of the largest and fast-growing business applications at Microsoft. It is available in 100+ countries and it has more apps on the Microsoft AppSource store than any other in the Microsoft Business Apps Group.

What did we learn?

There were over 250 sessions presented by 80 community speakers and 55 Microsoft speakers. Getting to all of them was impossible, but we will share with you our findings from the keynotes and some of the sessions we attended.

• Growing Communities. There is a new community portal for news, information, events, groups, members, and a partner directory. Here you can also find webinars and other learning material. Two groups highlighted was Women in Dynamics and Yong People in Dynamics, both of which are attracting great talent and future leaders to the community.
• D365BC Robustness. Microsoft has made many investments on its cloud application to support global businesses, comply with financial regulations, increase application performance, offer disaster recovery and business continuity, ensure data privacy and sovereignty, provide over 99.8% availability of computing and database resources, obtain cross industry ISO and SOC certifications, and ongoing security investments. Sounds a bit boring, but certainly very assuring for customers that are contemplating moving online.
• Interoperability with Teams and Shopify. In 2021, interoperability with Teams and Shopify was announced and this year we go the demo. The Teams demo was a classic way of showing how “just in time” collaboration can assist with fulfilling sales orders, clarifying purchases, and other business processes running on D365BC. In addition, all Microsoft Teams licensed individuals will have read only access to D365BC at no charge. This will certainly make future customers very happy.
• Simplifying Adoption. Microsoft and partners are making large investments in simplifying migrations and updates. Recall that migrations are customers that are moving from Microsoft NAV to D365BC, while updates are feature updates that Microsoft makes online on a periodic basis. For greenfield D365BC customers, some partners can spin up an environment in less than 10 minutes including “add ons”. Migrations take longer but there are better tools and skilled partners to help. Customers now have many more options today to confidently make the migration.

How can TrueCommerce help drive adoption?

TrueCommerce is an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) with a Microsoft certified integration to D365BC automating 20 different import and export B2B transactions with external trading partners. This can be done with EDI or APIs. This means that Microsoft NAV customers migrating to D365BC do not have to develop these transactions as they did with Microsoft NAV. This saves time and money with the migration effort and with ongoing updates. Moreover, these transactions are executed automatically behind the scenes or triggered by users following standard processes in D365BC.

Many of these transactions were covered in the TrueCommerce presentation held on the last day of the event called Best Practices for EDI Managed Services. We covered the basic, advanced, and leading external messages supporting accounts payables, accounts receivables, and inventory movements with suppliers, customers, and third-party logistics & warehouse service providers, respectively.

In the session we also covered 6 important criteria that companies should consider when seeking to implement EDI with a service provider. The starting point is a certified integration to D365BC that the D365BC modern user experience to work and trigger transactions seamlessly behind the scenes. A managed service also ensures external communications with external trading partners are monitored for performance, maintained for compliance, centralized support for all aspects of the solution, and predictable costs.

If you missed the session and want to learn more, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you or meeting you at one of the future Directions4Partners community events.

About Author

Larry Velez is the VP of Business Development, Partner & Channels at TrueCommerce. He has over 26 years of IT leadership experience in Europe, including prior leadership roles at Data Masons, Tangoe, Microsoft, Meta/Gartner Group, and EIS International. He has a proven track record with customers and partners through open collaboration and clear communication. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Larry currently lives in Holland. He speaks Spanish, Dutch, and English, and enjoys a good workout!