Last week was a busy week in Milan! From the 27th to 29th of October, took place the Directions EMEA 2021 event, the biggest Dynamics 365 Business Central conference for partners in the World.
Arquiconsult once more attended to the event and it was the 5th year that we attended not just an attendee but also as a bronze sponsor. Being present as a speaker was also an experience that Arquiconsult has been consolidating. We did it once again!
From the community-building, contacts and networking at our stand, to the session-attending, we acquired new knowledge to share, add-ons/solutions to track and ideas to improve our work methodology.
Below are some of the more interesting insights about the content we had access to:
Functional Sessions
Directions EMEA provided a lot of sessions so the functional consultants keep the pace in the fast-changing technology and features of Business Central. These were some of the most interesting sessions attended by Arquiconsult:
- What´s new: Application: Microsoft has delivered some new interesting features in the latest release. This session provided an overview of some of the newly released features in finance, sales and relationship management, inventory, planning and manufacturing.
- Telling the Twins Apart: Differences between Business Central online and On-Premises: AJ Ansari is a Microsoft MVP and, in this session, explained the small (at naked eye) but important differences between OnPrem and SaaS environments.
Technical Sessions
Hearing from “gurus” like Waldo, Stefano Demiliani, Vjeko or Freddy Kristiansen is great in order to improve our technical skills. These were some of the sessions attended by Arquiconsult, which we chose as the most interesting:
- Running Pipelines, Cops and Validation the “easy” way: Freddy Kristiansen was the host of a session where BcContainerHelper was the main character. This session went through some simple PowerShell scripts that can help running AL Cops or AL Validations.
- How to stay in AppSource: One of the most recognized MVP’s in the technical area, Waldo, provided a session to highlight some of the requirements in the work methodology, in his point of view, to maintain and support an app already published to the AppSource.
- Branching by Abstraction: To avoid conflicts when integrating new changes in older branches, Vjeko provided a solution by creating an abstract layer of objects.
- Boost Your Troubleshooting On Business Central SaaS Using Telemetries: In this session we learned how to use telemetry data to help us monitoring and troubleshoot real-life scenarios, like performance issues. Whether running online or on-premises, you can set up your tenants to send telemetry to Application Insights (hosted in Azure).
- Business Central Cloud Migration: In this session we learned how to migrate data from an on-premises SQL server to a Business Central online instance. The process uses Azure Data Factory (ADF) to migrate data between databases directly
Networking and Add-ons
Milan was the place to be to (re)connect with partners and to know about add-ons and product market offerings. These were some of the most interesting solutions seen by Arquiconsult:
- MxAPS from Insight Works: A planning and capacity scheduling add-on, that can turn time-consuming into responsive and highly-accurate tasks.
- EAM from Dynaway: Work Order management, asset management, preventive or condition-based maintenance are some of the key features of this add-on.
