Tag Archives: Directions

Dynamics NAV Events | Fall 2014

It is august 2014 which means that most people who go on vacation in the summer period are either just returning or maybe still enjoying their well deserved rest. At least I did for two weeks in Interlaken this year.

Is also means we are at the verge of the new event and release season which is each fall since the last few years.

NAV2015 will be released this year and I am very exited about the new features that will be shipped this version.

I will be attending and speaking at four out of five events.

1. Directions USA | San Diego

The first event is Directions USA in San Diego, from September 14th to 16th. I always enjoy Directions USA since the atmosphere feels nicer than in europe or at least that is my opinion. It is also the event where most of the Liberty Grove associates get together and meet each year.

DirectionsUSA

2. Directions EMEA | Poznan (Poland)

Each year EMEA and US switch in priority and this year EMEA is second after USA. Poznan Poland this year. The contents of the events is more or less the same.

The event is from October 8th – 10th.

MVP Track

This year is the first year that there is a dedicated MVP Track where 10 sessions are hosted my MVP’s. The track is lead by Gary Winter, a new MVP since this year and part of the Partner Ready Software team. I will be doing a session about designing MiniApp applications in Dynamics NAV.

3. NAVUG | St. Louis

Attending NAVUG summit was on my bucket list for many years and this year I will be representing Liberty Grove and presenting.

I do a lot of work for US customers and look forward to meeting some of them in real person. The event dates are October 14th to 17th.

NAVUG

4. NAVTechDays | Antwerp

I must admit my favorite, at least from a content perspective. This event is hosted in a cinema with huge screens and fantastic seats.

Partner Ready Software will be presenting this year again and we hope to bring you some new and fresh ideas as you are used to from us.

The event is in November from 20th to 21st.

logo_navtechdays_spacer

Pre-Conference workshops

Like last year there are pre-conference workshops. Together with Gary Winter I will be hosting a Partner Ready Software workshop again. There is still room available so book your seats fast.

prs-logo

And then…

So the question is what is the 5th event and why am I not there.

In November there is also Convergence EMEA in Barcelona. Unfortunately at the same time you have MVP Summit in Redmond. Since the latter is more interesting from my own development I choose to attend this and enjoy three days of inside Microsoft information.

Hope to see you in person at one of the events!

 

 

 

 

Directions EMEA 2013 | “In” Office 365 and “On” Azure

Back home for a day after Directions EMEA I am stil Baffled from what happened in Vienna. Even though I warned everyone in my previous post.

As my PRS “partner in crime” Gary already posted last monday Microsoft has announced a new strategy for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

“In” Office 365 and “On” Azure

So what does that mean in real life? Remember back in school if we wanted to know what something meant we broke a sentence down into smaller pieces. Let’s start with the first piece.

“In” Office 365

So what does that mean. The previous versions of NAV were already capable of interfacing with Office 365 so the new thing is not in this part of the sentence.

The new thing is in the smallest word. “In”.

Until this release, whenever we had an interface with a product, NAV was always “leading”. Meaning usually a user started from Dynamics NAV, pushed a button and Word, Excel or Outlook would open and do something.

With this release, office is leading. So if you log into Office 365 you would get Dynamics NAV as part of the subscription. One could even call it Dynamics365. You don’t even notice that it is NAV. Every part of NAV is integrated. You can see charts and lists as part of your Office 365 experience.

From a repeatable perspective this is a huge thing. There are way many office users than NAV users. Microsoft claims 1 billion office users vs. almost 1.x00.000 NAV seats. This means that only 0.1% of all office users have NAV. Imagine that those office users would have NAV as part of their suite just by clicking on the option. Even if we move to 1% it would mean an explosion of NAV seats.

We will be busy.

Wait…

We can’t be that busy, we don’t have enough people, not enough consultants, not enough developers! Panic!!

This is where the repeatable story comes in, and this is where Azure kicks in!

“On” Azure

As with Office 365 the news in this sentence is not Azure. We could already run NAV2013FP1 on Azure, we can even run NAV2009 on Azure infrastructure services. Hell, it’s “only” a virtual machine.

Well, that is not true and there is news.

Azure is not “just” a virtual machine. I’ll come back to that later.

What is new in this sentence is not in this sentence. That makes it more difficult to explain.

Multi Tenacy

New in NAV2013R2 is that it is a true Multi Tenant environment. Remember that I asked last year, what happend to Azure? Truth is that I found out what happend but won’t share this online. (nah nah…). Let’s focus on the fact that it’s there today.

What does Multi Tenant mean in combination with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

It means: “Running multiple independant legal entities on the same codebase on the same server”. So let’s say I am a lawyer, no let’s say I am a freelance consultant and I need a solution to make sales invoices, register my expenses, declare VAT and do bank reconciliation. That is not rocket science, even for someone like me. Asuming there are 100.000nds other freelance consultants out there that have the same needs, why not share the same software. This is now possible with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013R2.

With a simple powershell command it is possible to spin off a new tenant on a codebase and start working with a few setup questions like companyname, VAT number etc.

And it get’s better, it is integrated with Office 365! Wow!

But…

This is al extremely cool and sounds very simple to do, but how are we going to execute on this. Who is going to do this? Are the Dynamics partners in the current ecosystem going to change their models from single implementations with customisations to serve me as a small customer with a monthly subscription?

That I guess is the real reason why I am baffled after attending Directions EMEA 2013.

The software is ready for it, Microsoft is ready for it, the customers are asking for it. But who is going to deliver it?

Azure

I promised to come back to azure infrastructure services. Yes, if you use it it is a Virtual Machine, but in my opinion there are two things that differantiate Azure from any other hosted VM solution.

1. Portal Experience

If you never worked with the Azure Portal I can only urge you and recommend to try. I’ve been working with servers for 30 years of my life (and I am only 36 years old) and I have never, ever experienced seting up a new machine being this simple. Never. Just a few clicks and you are up and running.

I have two machines running in Azure and my current bill is under 3 euro’s per day! Is that cheap or what! Truth is here that I need to admit that MVP’s get 150 euro/month for free, but hey, don’t tell anyone please.

2. Powershell

Azure supports a full powershell experience. You can create new machines and install software all from powershell commands.

And now what?

Well it is one of the last summerdays in The Netherlands, 25 degrees still outside at 9pm. I am going to sit outside with my wife and enjoy.

What wil you do?