Connecting Business Central On-Premises to Power BI: Step by Step

When you’re using BC online, connecting to Power BI is a breeze. On-Premises? Not so much. The devil is in the details, and it can stump even the best BC or BI consultant. I will show you step-by-painful-step how to prepare your Business Central environment to connect not just to Power BI Desktop and the service. Welcome to the world of SSL certificates, FQDNs and more.

Business Central online vs. On-Premises: Telling the Twins Apart

Users may not be able to tell the differences between the Online and On-Premises version of Business Central, but can you? While it is essentially the same product, it is far from identical. You, as the BC Partner and Consultant, have to guide them towards making the right decision for their business, and it starts with knowing what is different about each version and how it impacts your customer. With each new release, the differences change – whether it is in the application area, the platform, or the licensing. Make sure you are armed with the most current knowledge and not just something you heard from a friend or read on the internet. This session is updated with the latest information to reflect all the changes made through Business Central 2022 Release Wave 2.

Demo to Win. What Do Prospects Really Want from you in a Presale Demo?

A common mistake that organizations make is tasking the consultant with the deepest product knowledge to perform demos for new prospective clients. Demonstrating knowledge of the product is only one part of the equation. How well you understand the prospect's business needs, the motivating factors driving the purchasing decision, understanding the audience in the room - these can be far more critical. Between 2008 and 2018, I have led hundreds of presale efforts and demonstrations for prospective clients across organizations of different sizes and focus, and both as a VAR and an ISV. I am trained in the ways of Bob Riefstahl's "Demonstrating to Win" philosophy and enlightened by Matt Dixon's "The Challenger Sale", and I have seen firsthand how the lessons from these have impacted our presale success rate. Join my session to learn how you too can improve your odds of winning by focusing on the things that matter most to your prospect.

Hiring Young Talent? Here are 10 Things You Must Do to Succeed: Lessons from the Field

In 2019, we at DSWi embarked on an aggressive growth plan, with recruitment being one of the cornerstones of our strategy. More specifically, recruiting talent straight from local colleges and universities and mentoring them to grow into productive employees and superstar consultants. It was a rough start, but we are now beginning to reap the rewards of this initiative. In this session, I will start with WHY we see this as a cornerstone for growth and success, and then share 10 tips you that we've learned from our successes and our failures. If you're looking to hire young, this is a must-attend session.

How Efficient is Your Business Central Practice? And how do you even measure it?

As the old saying goes, "you can improve only what you can measure." Your team and company spends all of its time improving business processes and performance for your clients, but have you implemented any KPIs to measure your Business Central Practice's performance? Whether you are a small practice of 5 people or a large practice of 50, join my session to learn 5 effective ways to measure and track the health of your practice. Whether you are the practice leader of your BC team, or a business manager / owner, this will put you in a better position to make both tactical and strategic decisions regarding your team such as whether you are overstaffed or understaffed, do you need to increase your billing rate, how much more work your team can take on without adding headcount. There are just a few examples. You won't want to miss this session!

Source Code Management for Dummies (and Smart BC Consultants / Developers who aren’t using Git yet

If your idea of source code management (SCM) is adding comments with two // in your code, I have news for you. That’s not really SCM. It may have been the common way to do it in NAV, but there is a better, more effective way of doing it in AL with Visual Studio Code. I will teach you in a way that is simple and straight-forward so that you can put it to use right away on your projects. Where you are a single developer or work in a team of developers, it will make your life easier and it will save you and your customers a lot of time, tears, and money over the long run.

What do Partners expect from ISVs and what do ISVs expect from Partners?

Partners and ISVs... the Partners bring the clients and the ISVs bring the solutions that bridge the functionality gaps. In theory, it should be a perfect relationship like peanut butter and jelly. But some days it feels like a "can't live with them, can't live without them" situation. Each side wants the other to do more. Partners want ISVs to make everything quick, easy, cheap, and perfect. ISVs want partners to carry their own weight and invest more in the relationship. Where's the healthy medium? What works? What kind of ISVs would Partners prefer to work with? And what kind of Partners would ISVs want selling their solutions? Join this townhall panel of 3 Partner and 3 ISV representatives who will share their insights. Bring a pen, a paper, a bag of popcorn, and your questions to this can't miss session!

Power BI Cookbook: 5 Recipes for the Business Central Consultant

Are you a BC Consultant / Business Analyst who is great at creating reports in BC or Excel, but struggling to get the most of Power BI? In this session, I will teach you how to use Columns, Measures, and the Power Query Editor to get the outcomes you need to meet your customers’ needs. This session will follow a cookbook style approach and show you 5 practical recipes that you can apply to help you with any Power BI report you create from now on!

5 Things Every BC Functional Consultant Should Know in AL

Are you a functional consultant who was able to make simple changes in NAV C/SIDE, but struggle to do the same in Visual Studio Code and AL? I am one of you and I have lived through this exact pain. In this workshop, you will learn the basics that AL boot camps and workshops targeted at developers do not teach you. You will learn how to download and set up your environment to create extensions, work with fields, tables, pages, add actions to the ribbon, create processing reports and how to avoid common mistakes. And you will also get some helpful theory on the basics before we start the exercises!

This session can be done in different length formats, as a workshop, a 90 minute session, or a 45 minute session.
I also have a sequel to this session. While it would be great to have both sessions accepted, each session is fully independent and the audience will get great value even if they just one of the two sessions in the series.

5 Best Practices for Data Migration

When it's time to move from your old ERP or accounting system to Microsoft Dynamics 365, don't be a digital hoarder. Contrary to popular belief, you do not need every last byte of historical data from your old system to work effectively. Join us as we go over best practices for data migration so you can be strategic and save your organization a lot of time, effort and money!

Session Objectives
1. Which areas of historical data should you migrate during an implementation?
2. How much historical data should you migrate?
3. At what point(s) in the implementation should you migrate historical data?
4. What happens to the data that didn't make the cut?

Part 2: The Next 5 Things Every BC Functional Consultant Should Know in AL

This is the long-awaited second part in my “AL for BC Functional Consultants” series. Are you a functional consultant who was able to make simple changes in NAV C/SIDE, but struggle to do the same in Visual Studio Code and AL? I am one of you and I have lived through this exact pain. My goal is to help you do more for your clients, and more importantly, help you do it the right way so that both your clients and your development team are happy. Join me to learn 5 more important things in AL - and as always, all code examples will be available for you through GitHub.

I have done the “5 Things Every BC Functional Consultant Should Know in AL” are previous Directions EMEA, Directions North America, Community Summit and DOK NORDIC conferences. This is the next session in that series and shows functional consultants how to do some more advanced things in AL.
While it would be great to have both sessions accepted, each session is fully independent and the audience will get great value even if they just one of the two sessions in the series.

It’s a Date! How to make sense of all the dates on Sales (and Purchase) Orders in Business Central

Ever wonder how a Posting Date is different from an Order Date or a Document Date? And how does Business Central calculate a Promised Delivery Date? And how do all of these dates flow on Sales and Purchase documents? Come to this session and I’ll help you make sense of it all. The concepts and information you’ll learn here will also come in handy when you’re trying to understand how date calculations work in Business Central’s MRP and Order Promising functionality.

This session applies both to Business Central as well as NAV (Navision).