Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 1 (2020 release wave 1+2)
Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan
Principal Program Manager at Microsoft. I help ERP customers in the SMB space run their business.
To understand the past, you must understand the future...
Or is it the other way around? Probably. Anyway, this post is about Analytics, BI, and reporting in Dynamics 365 Business Central from 2020 until now. It is a topic that I have spoken on in conference sessions at Directions EMEA 2023, Directions US 2024, Directions Asia 2024, and will again speak on at Days of Knowledge Americas this September in Atlanta. Why all the fuzz about this topic? Well, for me personally, because this has been a core area in my professional life for the last 5 years in the Business Central product team (and to be honest, data and analytics have been core in my entire 25+ years of working within IT). But also for the product, analytics and reporting has been a key investment area since 2022. Why? Because customers expected more to be data-driven and we needed to up our game to help them get there.
There is also another reason for me to talk about the past investments in this area. That is what is coming. Soon. For that, you will have to wait a few more weeks, where the release plan for the 2024 release wave 2 is going public... I can't wait to show you all the new cool things that are coming, so stay tuned...
Focus areas in 2020
Lets go back a few years to 2020. Focus for many development teams in the Business Central product team was making the product working the cloud. This meant making the web client good to great (as the Windows client would not work with Business Central online), moving the developer experience from C/AL to AL, and for my team (the AL Runtime team) making things work at scale in a (very) multi-tenant environment. So our reporting investments were mainly to support customers that chose the online version: printing, fonts, and resource governance of reporting workloads.
Printing in the cloud
Why invest in print? Well, for on-premises installations of Dynamics NAV and Business Central, system administrators can install printer drivers on the operating system (OS) that hosts the server. And now users can print to local printers. In the cloud, this is not so easy. First of all, for security reasons, we cannot allow administrators to install things on the OS level. Secondly, there must be a way for the local printer on the local network to get information about print jobs. So in the AL Runtime team, we added new print events OnAfterSetupPrinters and OnAfterDocumentPrintReady to the platform to allow developers to write "cloud printer drivers". For more information about print events, see Developing printer extensions in Business Central . To showcase how to do that, we shipped a sample driver for email printing, knowing that for the low end of the printer market, email print was an easy-to-configure option available in most printers. For more information about email print, see Set Up Email Printers . During the 2020 calendar year, we also learned that a sister team somewhere in Microsoft were working on a cloud print service called Universal Print, but we could not tell the world about this before the service was announced. Anyway, the work we did for email print helped us learn that all the infrastructure was in place for when Universal Print was available (more about this in the next post). For more information about Universal Print, see Set Up Universal Print Printers .
Fonts, fonts, fonts...
Related to the things we needed to fix for printing in the cloud was fonts. Why was that? Well, fonts are installed on the server that renders document reports and we could not allow administrators to install them on our servers in the cloud for two reasons: first of all, installing fonts come with a security risk, so allowing outside parties that access was a total no-go. Don't believe me? Just search for "font security vulnerability windows" and check one the many articles on the topic. Secondly, some fonts need to be licensed to be used. If we allowed administrators to install such fonts on our servers in the cloud, we might be in trouble for hosting un-licensed IP (and the fonts would also be available for all environments running there.) We installed most Office fonts but our American partners also asked for special fonts needed for printing checks (MICR and security fonts). Really?? Yup. In Denmark where I come from, checks have not been a legal payment method for many years, so I was puzzled to hear this ask. But having lived in the Mid-West of the United States, I now know better. Checks are here to stay for quite some years to come. So we licensed MICR and security fonts for checks to be included in the online version of Business Central. For more information, see Available Fonts in Business Central online.
领英推荐
Cloud scale
The third type of investment that we needed to do was resource governance (for report workloads). Reports can read and consume a lot of data and hence also consume a lot of CPU and memory resources on our servers in the cloud. And these servers also run the AL runtime for normal end user sessions. So we needed to implement limits and the ability for the AL runtime and users to cancel long-running reports. For more information, see Operation Limits in Business Central Reports .
And then a little bit of UX improvements...
Having dealt with these fundamental issues, we did have time for a tiny UX improvement, namely to allow users to preview a report from the request page without us closing the request page. It sounds simple, but this work came with A LOT of refactoring of the AL reporting runtime as this was previously tightly integrated with the Windows client codebase. So behind the scenes, we move all of this code to the server to allow development teams in Business Central development group to remove the Windows client code from our codebase.
Signup to the newsletter (and/or spread the word)
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 2021 release waves 1+2.
If you liked the newsletter and think that others might benefit from it as well, please send them the signup link here:
I have a friend who has had a long and profitable career on several banks being a VP for check float. As long as the banks can make money from paper checks, they will stay around. Plus ACH, positive pay, and other bank services are profitable areas for our US banks.
Microsoft MVP, User Group Leader, Dynamics GP Guru, D365 Business Central Certified, DUG Advisory Committee
4 个月I just learned today that in Denmark checks have not been a legal payment method for many years.