Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 2 (2021 release wave 1+2)

This is part 2 in a series of blog posts about Analytics, BI, and reporting in Dynamics 365 Business Central from 2020 until now. In this post, I will tell stories from the 2021 release waves 1+2.

If you missed it, maybe start from the beginning. Open part 1 in a new browser tab

Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 1 (2020 release wave 1+2)

and then get back here.

Focus areas in 2021

Let's rewind time to 2021. Focus for many development teams in the Business Central product team was still making the product working the cloud. Still focus on making the web client good to great, moving the developer experience from C/AL to AL, and for my team (the AL Runtime team) still making things work at scale in a (very) multi-tenant environment. So our reporting investments were mainly still to support customers that chose the online version: printing, fonts, and resource governance of reporting workloads. But we can see something else showing up here as well: AL enhancements for developers and things related to the user experience (report inbox and a glimpse of new Excel features)...

Printing in the cloud (continued)

We were not done with enabling printing in the cloud (go back to part 1 to read the prequel). First of all, the Universal Print feature was made Generally Available (GA), so we made a printer extension for that. We also made a prototype for an executable that could be installed locally and that could connect to Business Central to poll for print jobs. But we had so many other priorities in the product team that we decided not to pursue this idea further and instead leave additional print functionality for the ISV partner community to fill additional gaps in.

Second, since we now had support for two "printer drivers" (email print and Universal Print) that shipped with Business Central out-of-the-box, we added a capability to the request page feature to allow users to choose a printer there (and as I recall it, also allow an administrator to define default printers for different reports).

Fonts, fonts, fonts... (continued)

With the introduction of security and MICR fonts for checks in 2020, we got additional requests to also support one- and two-dimensional barcodes with fonts. As all the legal work had already been done when we licensed security and MICR fonts from IDAutomation, we decided to extend our contract with them and also license their solutions for barcodes. For more information, see Barcode Fonts - Business Central.

Based on questions and support requests from partners and customers, we also documented which fonts are installed and available to use in Excel, Word, and RDL report layouts. For more information, see Document Fonts - Business Central | Microsoft Learn

Cloud scale (continued)

The limits for resources that reports could consume that we introduced in 2020 helped a lot reducing performance issues caused by reports. Our next investments were around the idea of perceived performance of reports, not by making them run faster, but by enabling them to run in the background and notifying users when the result was ready. You can see features related to this thinking immerging in the 2021 release: new property AllowScheduling on the report object and a new report inbox page (see more about this below).

Reporting features for developers

We introduced a new property AllowScheduling on the report object because some reports manipulate the request page XML prior to running and therefore they cannot run in the background). This was both done to reduce support cases (for customers that tried to run these reports from the Job Queue), but also as a building block for our ambition to run all reports in the background (we are not there yet here in 2024).

Our compiler team introduced report (dataset) extensibility into the AL language, laying out the foundation for self-service by power users on document reporting (make it possible for developers to extend report datasets and then have power users deal with layouts.) You can see use executing on this vision in the 2024 release waves (stay tuned for more on this in the upcoming weeks...)

And then a little bit of User Experience (UX) improvements...

As part of the running reports in the background initiative we also gave some love to the report inbox feature (more on this in part 3), which we thought would make a crucial part of the user experience of running reports.

And then you see Excel on the list for the first time... In 2021, we only made it possible to get the raw report dataset in Excel (from the request page), but under the hood, this was the beginning of a larger plan... (stay tuned for more in part 3).

A pattern for shipping features that are part of a larger initiative

When looking at how the different features supporting the running reports in the background initiative pop up, you might notice a pattern: the different building blocks ship when they are ready, not necessarily a a single "wow" in one specific release wave. This is common across how we work as a team. Since we ship every 6 months, when a feature can bring value on its own, we ship it. A typical feature within reporting require work done in the AL language (which is done by our compiler team), support in the AL runtime (typically done in my team), work needed in the client (done by one of our client teams), and maybe uptake in the Business Central application (done by one of our app teams). All of these teams also work on other initiatives, so sometimes one part cannot make it for a release wave. When this happens, we always seek to find finished parts that would bring value as a stand-alone.

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That's it for now. Thanks for reading along. Do comment on things that resonated with you when reading the article. Next post will be about reporting improvements in the 2022 release waves 1+2.

If you are present at the Days of Knowledge Americas 2024 conference this September in Atlanta, then you can hear the full story in one of my sessions there.

Want to read earlier posts in the series. See them here:

• Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 1 (2020 release wave 1+2)

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