TOP 5 takeaways from the event

This week I’ve spent a lot of my time attending a huge number of sessions at #Directions4Partners (formerly “Directions EMEA”) a virtual event focused on all things D365 Business Central. As the name states this is an event that sets a direction for Business Central partners for the next year.

I was hoping for a live event, but it couldn’t be done for obvious reasons. Still, a shout-out goes out to the event team for pulling this off and bringing in record attendance numbers. If you really stop and think about it, an all-digital event like this would be considered as something too unrealistic 20 years ago.

But more to the point, these are my top takeaways from the event: 

Growth and Covid-19 impact

D365 Business Central showed substantial growth in every possible category, from partner count to the number of dedicated extensions in the AppSource. AppSource was getting consistently better in my experience, they’ve added an actual mobile version and drastically improved their UI. Business Central now has the most dedicated apps in the AppSource.

All in all COVID-19 had minimal effect on the financial results of Microsoft as it has beaten the market expectations for both sales and profit. In regards to partners, during day 2 I had the chance to see a partner study which stated that 70%+ of Microsoft partners actually made new hires during the pandemic and are looking forward to either stay on the pre-pandemic performance level or surpass it.  

International availability

Brazil, Ireland, and Lithuania are now SaaS-ready. With Turkey, Greece, Romania, and India to be added to the list with Wave 1 in 2021.

Lithuania was left out last year with Latvia getting the better of us, but Business Central SaaS is now officially available in Lithuania with an official localization coming in very shortly. This means that all of the Baltic countries are now covered with both Business Central on-premise and SaaS versions.

The rise of Power BI, Teams and cutting off the middlemen

Power BI got a lot of attention during the event, the product is more connected than ever. You can now not only embed Power BI reports in your Microsoft Teams conversation, but also collaborate on them, although via just a basic experience.

Earlier this month Microsoft Teams introduced its compatibility with Business Central. Now you will be able to not only share the cards but also edit them in the Teams environment, which now makes Teams a must-have collaboration tool for anyone running Business Central.

This feature will not work with on-premise, hosted or private cloud deployments of Business Central, only the SaaS version will be supported. On-premise versions of Business Central are getting less and less attention every year, but cutting off the hosted or private cloud deployments might be a sign of things to come.

The importance of user experience

We also saw a Business Central roadmap for the next wave of updates in 2021, Microsoft will be emphasizing the importance of user experience, performance, and integration. We are set to get a Business Central customer onboarding tool (basically a Quick Setup Wizard) for new users, continuous improvement in performance (pages will display quicker, faster updates on low-level code and fewer SQL queries) as well as more integrations that will further improve the user experience.

Business Central standalone cloud competency

Business Central will have its own cloud competency, where you will be able to achieve a Silver or Gold status. However, only the SaaS-relevant achievements (like consumption, revenue, and exams) will count toward this competency ( The beta exam is already live HERE). The same thing will happen with Finance and Operations starting from April 1st, 2021. Your on-premise competence will still likely be displayed via the Enterprise Resource Planning competency (Silver or Gold), but the Business Central competence will help you further differentiate yourself from the competition.

We can now see a real push for Business Central user experience improvement: making the product faster, more agile, connected and user friendly. SaaS has been the main talking point for the past 5 years and nothing has changed in that regard, Microsoft still has tunnel vision on the cloud and the current situation will only speed things up in regards to its adoption. The on-premise product is still alive and well, but we can already see the signs of it being less relevant every year.