Opinion, by Mark Brummel
When Microsoft closes a door, they open a window. Sure I miss working with the classic client where I could make forms look however the customer wanted them to look. All the colors available withing the RGB pallette, a simple report designer and the database is one file.
If NAV, pardon me, Business Central, was still “that” we would have been out of business for sure even though someone told me 75% of NAV installs are still classic.
We live in a connected world with Web Services, Machine Learning & Serverless Computing. Windows is no longer the dominating operating system.
So Business Central is running cross platform and is a cloud first citizen. Microsoft invested millions of dollars/euro’s to make that happen.
Back to the title of the blog. Project Green… again.
Two weeks ago I managed to get the whole Great Plains community against me. Boy I can tell you these people are well organized. So in this blog I am not going to talk again about Great Plains and where they are in this stage.
Let’s talk about CRM and AX, oh, and Common Data Services.
Last year Michael Nielsen challenged me to co-present at NAVTechDays about PowerApps and Common Data Services. For me that was an eye opener. We agreed I would do PowerApps and he would do CDS.
A good thing from presenting something you know *** about is that unless you want to look like a fool you better learn it. Did not help me though, I stil looked like a fool.
I ended up connecting Navision 1.1 to PowerApps and Michael showed CDS 1.0. I was told, but this can be wrong, that CDS 1.0 was based on AX technology. I think the concept is great but if you watch the video you probably agree that it was not ready for prime time yet.
Word reached me that Microsoft was not happy with CDS 1.0 and was looking for something better. The concept is great.
The CRM people got a shot at it and last week I was reading on LinkedIN that the marriage between xRM and CDS is no longer a secret. Aparently the CRM experts also have different opinions about their new baby.
Yes, XRM Is The New Common Data Service
No, Common Data Service is not the new XRM
I did not have time to read it yet and don’t have an opinion. Last thing I want is the CRM community all over me.
In essence what I know about it, CDS comes together with Common Data Model. You get a pre-defined database with a service that runs transactions. CDS 1.0 did not have the latter. I’ve been told CDS2.0 supports transactions.
On top of CDS and CDM you can use PowerApps as a front end. PowerApps is a cross platform WYSIWYG UI tool.
No, that would be silly, you can read it again. But if you are smart enough you can guess that this is not that much different than the idea of Business Central. You get a pre-defined database, a service and a front end.
Isn’t it a bit silly? Why would Microsoft do the same thing twice? Well, you have to wait a minute, because we have not talked about AX just yet. Or Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
D365FO is also a pre-defined database with a service and a front end. But than in the size of an elephant. Just like Business Central it uses extensions to be customized.
How would I know. It just sounds a bit silly that Microsoft spends millions of dollars maintaining similar platforms. I am not in the Microsoft Board but you can guess consolidation will continue right?
Sidenote to my Great Plains readers. You are still there, no worries. You are just not part of the consolidation. I am a bit jealous.
For now I guess everyone will just keep on rowing in the boat they know. If you are a NAV developer it is quite easy to learn how to make extensions and if you are a CRM developer you can now do CDS and CDM. It’s just ever more confusing for those poor recruiteters who can send their emails to even more candidates hoping they hit something.
It took “us” 15 years to get here. The first decade or so was spent making mistakes and trying stuff that technology wasn’t ready for yet. The last few years things are getting more serious.
The Business Central team has to integrate with CDS and CDM. That is not a question, but an order. If you run BC, you will be able to access your data through the CDS API.
This means you can probably customize NAV, shoot, Business Central, also via more ways. You can build PowerApps.
You can probably also migrate back and forth from BC to FO or the other way around as they are both connected to CDM. If more stuff is connected to CDM your life will be easier.
CDM is probably something you will want to keep an eye on if you make a living doing EDI.
If you build IP for Business Central it can only be used by BC users, not by AX users. If you build for FO it’s the same story.
But, if you build IP on top of CDM everyone can use your solution. Even a NetSuite customer because no-doubt someone will create a CDM connector to NetSuite.
Think about this for a moment… and then decide what your monday is going to look like. What are you going to learn tomorrow?
At this time not much information other than the links I’ve shared is available. Please share linked in the comments.
To be continued…
Sometimes you need an external signal to rethink your strategy. This morning I read this tweet on my timeline.
@markbrummel Thx for sharing your thoughts around business central. In your opinion… if your are looking at competing products. What might be a better option than D365BC? Say 50 concurrent users, multi currency, cloud only, easy to extend… sapB1?netsuite? Acumatica? D365FO? — Kim Kopowski (@KimKopowski) April 2, 2018
@markbrummel Thx for sharing your thoughts around business central. In your opinion… if your are looking at competing products. What might be a better option than D365BC? Say 50 concurrent users, multi currency, cloud only, easy to extend… sapB1?netsuite? Acumatica? D365FO?
— Kim Kopowski (@KimKopowski) April 2, 2018
Funny to me because I don’t see NAV or Business Central as an ERP first, I see it as a Development Platform first with some ERP for free. One that I know inside out better than almost anyone else.
How do you see it? Should we expect Microsoft to take a new approach with ERP first and Development Platform second? For years, or maybe even a decade, everything around NAV was about technology and developers.
With the API present and other development platforms superior it would not surprise me that Microsoft changes this strategy.
Should this old dog learn new tricks? What is the learning curve? Which other platforms? Share your opinion please!
Don’t forget to register for today’s webinar and let’s see if we can find out what happens to C/Side and Object Files. To Fob or not to Fob, that’s the question.
Yesterday I got an email from WordPress with a notification that my blog was down for a quick moment because they had to scale it up to a larger server because of the trafic. They also sent an email to Mark Zuckerberg to please notify ahead next time if there are to many people refering to the same website.
All jokes aside… there have been some unexpected side effects from some of my previous blogs that I want to address.
So nothing about Business Central today.
I’ve never seen as many roadmaps from Microsoft as I did yesterday, not even when attending Directions or NAVTechDays.
Let me also share some that I found on Google…
We will start with the NAV 2016 roadmap. No worries. NAV is all around and NAV will be around for a while. It’s actually true, we made it to NAV 2016 Next +2 which is according to my 7 year old son NAV 2018.
Let’s move ahead to last year when Dynamics 365 FOBE was released. (No wonder they changed that name).
Nothing wrong here. Still NAV ongoing development. Everybody happy, we don’t care if they branch of our code for some other product and party away. Hey, it was NOT NAV right? Who cares.
Now let’s role forward to a few months ago.
Ups. Hey, this is weird. Where is NAV. Ok, I see a NAV 2018 R2 but it seems like there is no vNext of NAV anymore. O wait, now FOBE = NAV. I think I understand but I am not sure.
Now let’s take last weeks roadmap.
Hmmm, I think someone forgot to put the R in front of the word evolotion. Where is NAV 2018 R2?
Roadmaps are a marketing gimmic. The world of technology we are in is changing so f*cking fast that nobody at Microsoft has a roadmap. You wake up in the morning and something has changed that you have to act upon today. This is why Microsoft moved to yearly releases in the first place.
Not shipping NAV 2018 R2 is, in my opinion a big mistake. Customers and partners already have very little confidence in these roadmaps anyway and just deciding to cancel a release does not improve that confidence.
Before I blogged about Business Central the statiscics showed my blog was dead. I was maybe getting 50 hits per day. My blog does not exist to promote my services. Hell, I would blog differently if I wanted to do that. Both the NAV community and the IT industry in general is screaming for developers. Everybody in our industry can work 400 billable hours a week. From home probably too.
If you try to google my blog you almost have to explicitly put my first and last name in the search criteria. There are at least 50 other NAV blogs that contain more actual information than mine. I stopped sharing technical stuff a long time ago.
The chance that somebody ends up on my blog that has nothing to do with NAV are virtually none existing.
I wanted to share this picture with you.
Imaging that my blog is the smallest block, all the way to the right. If you look at the size, there is no way that little block is going to make the large one at the end fall down.
But if other, larger blocks start moving and each time the blocks get larger then eventually the large block will start to move or even fall over.
Nobody is forcing you to read my blog. Nobody has asked you to follow me on Twitter or on LinkedIn. It’s very easy to unfollow or even block users if you don’t want to see their messaging. It works quite well I can say from my own experiences.
I will continue my blog series on Business Central. Maybe not in the next couple of days. Easter weekend is ahead of us and I also have to prepare a presentation and show up next thursday at QB Share in Leusden.
The next blog will be about the user. I believe by reading other peoples messaging we are focussing too much on ourselves (partners) or the product and we tend to forget making software is not a goal. Software is a means to an end. A tool people use to do their job and make decisions, or in the last years a commodity that we carry in our pocket.
This blog is the place where I share my thoughts and I appreciate you following me.
PS: I am not a Microsoft MVP anymore. I resigned last year and declined the award.
Continued from previous posts…
My daily driver is a Defender. You tech nerds should know enough but for those of you who don’t, a Land Rover Defender.
It’s 18 years old. I bought it a few months ago after a lot of research. I needed a car that can carry at least two adults, five kids, preferably more if they bring friends, a dog and luggage.
Some people have a hard time understanding the positioning of NAV vs. Business Central and I am going to use my car to explain this, the way I see it.
Let’s imagine that the Defender is Dynamics NAV and Land Rover is Microsoft.
The Defender has a great heritage. It’s a legendary vehicle that started 70 years ago if you include the Land Rover Series which was the orriginal version starting in 1947. What makes the Defender special is the few changes made to the concept while keeping it updated to modern road standards.
It’s a very flexible car that can be modified and custmized according to your needs. Some modifications however make it hard to move back to where you came from. You can see where I am going right?
You can buy two versions the 90 and 110. Or Business Essentials and Advanced Manufacturing.
It’s not a car for sissies. Don’t buy one if you don’t understand anything about cars. You will get your hands dirty. There are thousands of experts and a strong community. Some experts are so busy you have to book them 18 months in advance (like me). It is however very possible to make simple modifications yourself.
I bought a couple of new seats that I installed myself and I want to change the windows from manual to powerwindows. The back seat is replaced with one from a Iveco Massif which fitted after some small modifications to the chassis.
The frame had some rust and was welded by someone who knows what they are doing.
Let’s compare my Defender to NAV 2009 R2 where you can run both classic and role tailored. Older versions like the 109 Stage One V8 is pure classic and if well maintained they cost a freaking fortune.
The Land Rover Series is the Dos version. Ok? Caprice?
Land Rover updated the Defender in 2004 to what is called the Puma Edition. The price doubled and it came with a nice dash, airconditioning, leather seats, navigation system and a radio that you could actually hear while you were driving. It was updated to match environmental rules. The iconic 5 cylinder 2.5 litre Diesel was replaced by a 2.4 TD4 and more computers were added.
The more advanced cars get the more complex they are to maintain. You need to be more specialized to do troubleshooting.
Land Rover did not only build Defenders or Series. The Range Rover was introduced in 1970.
The Range Rover is a more high end vehicle compared to the Defender.
Let’s say that the Range Rover is Axapta.
The Range Rover has evolved in to something that kind of still looks like the orriginal but no living human being can afford buying a new one. Buying a used one is plain stupid because if something is wrong with the electical system you go bankrupt on troubleshooting and maintenance.
If you can’t afford a good one, you certainly cannot afford a bad one.
The new Range Rover is only for Rappers and Pimps and it has outgrown the orriginal target audience.
Land Rover tries desperately to use the Range Rover brand to launch other cars like the Range Rover Evoque, the Range Rover Velar and the Range Rover Sport. Kind of like breaking AX down into small pieces.
This is fun right? So where does Great Plains fit in? Or Solomon?
Like any modern car producer Land Rover had to grow. A purist only needs the Defender but people who are not mechanics also want a cool car with the same logo.
Land Rover launched the Discovery and the Freelander.
The Discovery is a poor mans Range Rover. It will still take you anywhere you want. They are not as customizable as Defenders and don’t hold their economic value over a longer period.
The Freelander has died a while ago. It had the Land Rover logo but everybody who looked at it knew it wasn’t really one.
The Defender ended in 2016, on 29 January when the last Land Rover Defender, H166 HUE, rolled off the production line at 09:22hrs GMT. A sad day.
But this year there was great news! The Defender is back! A special 70th anniversary edition was announced! It has a V8 and 400 bhp. It starts at 150.000 GBP.
You can guess in what colors I’m going to respray my 110.
In the same year Land Rover also announced a whole new Defender. Let’s have a look.
This has nothing to do with my Defender on which I can unbolt everything. Put the welder on and change whatever I like! This is just another modern car that stole a good brand name and reputation!
Although Microsoft is making a lot of money selling Range Rovers, Defenders and Discoveries they are desperately looking for a Golf. They envy Volkswagen. (Read Quickbooks…)
Project Madeira aka Business Edition was a big fail. Trying to make a comodity out of a customizable solution was wrong. Releasing Extensions V1 also did a lot of harm in our ecosystem. Should have never been released.
Those poor Solomon and Great Plains partners. They took a look at Project Madeira because they were forced to. And they saw a stripped down version of NAV that was incomplete with a terrible extension experience.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is based on Dynamics NAV. It has the same code base, but there is no native Windows client, only a Web Client that does not have all the features the Windows Client has. It does not have DotNet support and it does not allow you to replace code with your own code.
You can use Extensions to add functionality to it. But Dynamics NAV was never architected for this and the latest blog by one of the Microsoft MVP’s makes clear how rediculous the model is and how complicated it has become.
And you know what? It’s is still not good enough! There are 9 (NINE!!!) ways to extend an Insert and you know what people want? They want to either replace what Microsoft did or place their code in the middle.
The latter is possible with a tidious process where Microsoft will place an event manually in the code where the developer will take a dependency on that event being exactly there and the rest of the code not changing. These events are only shipped every 12 months. Which customer can wait that long?
I’m holding my breath for what we will get in October. NAV will die. 2018 is the last release ever and then we will get an on-premise version of Business Central.
Will “it” be the 70th anniversairy edition of the good old Defender? Will C/Side be there one more time? Can loyal customers upgrade one more time?
And then what? How will we move forward? There will always be customers who want to buy that special edition that they can customize.
Maybe we should all convert to the Mercedes G-Class.
Or, well… maybe… but let’s discuss that in the next blog…
Many great things come from Sweden. If all houses in the world containing IKEA furniture would collapse I would guess we’ld all be standing on a pile of rocks right this minute.
Did you know IKEA uses NAV? Yes they do. A solution based on another solution. Actually the guys doing that also had a consultancy session at my house. They are Dutch.
Navision is from Denmark. Great Plains from Fargo. Both cold in the winter. Dark early. What do you do when it is cold and dark? You write software! Guess where LS Retail is from. Damn, it’s cold there, trust me I’ve tried.
Let’s go back to the orriginal post and where we left off.
Business Central is NAV with a touch of GP, some SL and a large portion of Project Green.
Project Green is the reason I became an MVP. When Microsoft acquired Navision, I was 25 and just starting my career as a software developer. I was working for the largest reseller in The Netherlands.
Rumors where that Microsoft was going to replace Navision and I was excited and decided that I wanted to learn Axapta. The company that I worked for just started an Axapta practice and I was allowed to take a training of version 2.5. After two days I decided to move back to Navision and it was when I realized even more how much I liked working with it and I was going to fight for it.
When I became a dad in 2004 I decided to switch to a much smaller reseller in the city I lived in. I biked to work every day (not ice-skating, sorrt), worked part time and loved it. But as we were a much smaller shop we did not get the news from Microsoft anymore and this is when I found Mibuso and MBSOnline (now Dynamicsusers.org).
David Singleton was the one who talked me into freelancing which I first started to do part-time but soon more permanently. He was also involved in me getting my first MVP award in April 2006.
Back then NAV was still two-tier with the classic database and classic client but changes were imminent.
I won’t bore you with my personal history any more than necessary. The years after this were quiet and I spent most of my time with SQL Server rather than NAV as I became specialized in performance tuning and troubleshooting.
It was not until 2009 that things become interesting again when Microsoft introduced the concept of the service tier, web services, DotNET and much more in NAV. I loved it and decided to move back from SQL Server to Dynamics NAV.
Project Green had discontinued. That was the official story from Microsoft. All of the business applications had inherited pieces of it. Microsoft had streamlined their ERP applications to a point where only a trained eye could see the difference between GP, SL, AX and NAV.
Let’s stop here as I think that this is an important point of time. This is when a lot of partners started to complain to Microsoft. Their main complaint was that the new NAV was not flexible enough compared to the previous version.
Classic Navision was fantastic at its time and one of its main advantages was that anyone could be a developer. C/AL was very easy to learn and the architecture was almost impossible to break.
This changed with the 2009 version as SQL was mandatory and the service tier required a better understanding of network technology. Pages were far less flexible than the old forms and I’m not even going to get started on reports.
At this point in time things went south. The partner ecosystem went against Microsoft and forced changes. This was very bad for the reputation of NAV. Competition smelled victory and used slogans like “We are more Microsoft than Microsoft”.
Ever since the introduction of NAV 2009 Microsoft has been fighting against themselves and their partners rather than taking the lead.
I’m writing this story from the perspective of a NAV developer based from The Netherlands. Whatever happened with GP or SL was none of my concern.
One of the first decisions Microsoft made after the acquisition of Navision was not to continue to try and make GP and SL grow outside the English-speaking parts of the world. This is probably where Microsoft signed the capitulation for these products.
GP and SL have been merged into Business Central. A few years ago, Microsoft did a fit/gap between the three SMB products. It’s when some new features appeared in NAV that were directly copied from GP and on App Source you can find an extension called “Progressus Software” which I’ve been told is taking features from SL into Business Central.
If Business Central is based on NAV and GP and SL are merged into it, where is the problem Mark? Nobody should be happier than you!
If you are still with me here than you have my respect. You’ve been patient enough to read over 2000 words to get here.
If Business Central is the intermediate result of Project Green than we should be proud that most of the ingredients are from Navision. Why is it then that I am not quite happy? The immense success of Navision is based on the simplicity of making raw source code modifications and being able to change almost all of its behavior.
At Directions ASIA Microsoft claims to have 160.000 installations and 2.7 million concurrent users. If these numbers are correct than somebody sold one million seats in less than a year. In an era of fake news, I would love to see that number independently audited.
Dynamics NAV partners should be happy about their product having won but this is not the case.
This has quite a number of reasons and this is what makes it so immensely complicated. There are quite a lot of companies still running on old (classic) versions of NAV and a lot of partners are still selling and supporting this. They struggle to move forward.
Did you know that most of the work for Events and Extensions on NAV is not done in Denmark but in Fargo?
The customization model of GP has always been Events and Extensions. For them this is normal. It’s only the Navision partners who are pampered with raw source code modifications but also have to drag around the negatives.
These companies can only dream of an extensibility model like the one Business Central has. They don’t even come close to the technology Microsoft offers. However, they run circles around Microsoft when it is about features and functions for the customer.
Let’s move into bits and bytes after this analysis of our ecosystem and I’ll layout my strategy for the next few years. Which may surprise you my friends…