A customer review of Business Central 2021 wave 1 update

I have had a little time to run through the functionality focused release presentations and read some documentation through the eyes of a 'technical' customer and without a partner lens worried by upgrades, supporting customers, etc.

For what it is worth, and unasked, here is the good and the gee I wish they also did this sections.

The Good

Email

The team appeared to have listened and really stepped up their game on the new email story. My staff (and my own chief complaint) around unfriendly permission errors stopping anyone reading outbound emails to customers and the inability to see both the transaction and the entity related to the email have been fixed. They are rapidly closing in on basic functionality for NetSuite, but with more advanced functionality around outbound email accounts and use of your own email API's they are ahead in other ways. Keep it up product team. I have only a minor gripe about better integration with the interaction history that already exists.

Lot Info

As heavy users of Lot Info cards we are overjoyed that their creation has been streamlined. Every little bit counts. This is a case where we were forced as users to take an action that must be done according to system rules and requires no special human input. More of this approach would be welcomes with a relentless focus on system tasks and errors that can be avoided, automatically dealt with, etc. would go a long way.

Bank Reconciliation and Payment Journal

These changes are huge for us. For a SME it is just unacceptable to say "sorry this critically incorrect action you have performed can never be undone." The forgiving philosophy of undo is not only important it is critically to embed that philosophy in the team. They might never re-engineer the tool to have dynamically created on-demand ledger entries like NetSuite (which is closer to the QuickBooks model with layers of complexity for auditing built on top), but the closer they get the better.

Contacts

With heavy customization of using a per-tenant extension of the whole relationship management area to make it more useful we are interested to see that it is not completely forgotten. The separation of concerns between primary contact and contact details of customer/vendor make business sense and adding interactions more visibly is useful. There is a long way to go - but it is a good start and no doubt will make for easier integration with Dynamics 365 Sales.

Return Record Link instead of Text

This one is a little technical. Unlike returning complex types that just makes for efficient code this technical addition fundamentally allows for a future in which relationships are based on GUID (hidden from a user) and the user only ever sees a understandable description without the need for a unique code. This helps us in a number of areas as we are hoping this is the start of the team making availability many-to-many selectors without resorting to complex space taking interfaces.

Reservation Extensibility

Again more technical. However it looks like the team have started the process of engaging with some very complex technical debt that has real world usability consequences. We have done some fairly extensive usability extensions in our Per-tenant extension so that a regular person can interpret reservations and navigation between documents and customers/vendors. Although it sounds mainly structure and not functional we can only hope that this lays a strong foundation. Just some areas that are sub-par right now include:

• multiple reservation entries against the same supply source without logical reason

• a bias towards preventing change rather than simulate impact of changes and then giving a user the ability to make a choice about what action should occur

Word Merge

God I wish they called this something else - like ad-hoc marketing templates. Although I have a love/hate relationship with word the ability to create a segment and target it with email and marketing communications is table stakes. I like that they seem to have enabled legacy, but according to their presentation are pretty quickly moving to focus on the scenario most used today - outbound email communications.

Performance

Any focus on performance improvement is good. In our experience as a customer with less data in their tenant and a smaller number of users our performance seems more randomly impacted by what others may be doing on shared infrastructure. One hopes that improvements in their efficiency will help everyone. Sometimes its got so bad we report an outage just to get someone to pay attention to us.

Report Extensions

Now I admit we haven't touched any report extensions. I just added this section to plug the amazing ForNav with whose extension we have built some amazingly both simple and complex documents that then allow flexible changes without coding in a WYSIWYG environment. I just hope these changes will enable to ForNav team to enrich existing reports and enable them for use with their document design and generation platform. I still have no idea why they do not have the ability to schedule reports to be emailed as html or pdf to certain staff - but rather rely on the report inbox.

The gee I wish they also...

The team at Microsoft have clearly been extremely busy. No doubt that they are investing in the platform and moving the ball forward on the court. Expanded countries, more robust coding platform, more extensibility. However, it still feels like they are focused on two things:

1) Addressing the needs of partners migrating legacy customers

2) Integrating into the power platform at a technical level

From my own selfish POV I think there is not enough focus on creating an inspirational SME focused internally consistent design philosophy that truly shows the value of having business central in their portfolio. It all still seems rather random around the 'this is a big company feature conversation'.

Visual components and tooling is sub-optimal

There is no improvement in the actual components (grids, dropdowns, text selectors, menus) that allow users to use the product efficiently and without frustration. If the strategy is 'no investment' until they recreate the business central in the power platform user experience components - then tell everyone - otherwise it would be nice to see dramatic improvements here. Just my small list includes:

• Persistent accessible menu not just accessible on the role centre / home page. Having to use alt-q on every other page is uniquely different to every other web app including those in Microsoft's portfolio.

• A grid that support dynamically merged/spanned columns so that comments can take up a whole line and potentially you can add subtotals and group discounts like we see in other platforms.

• A grid that supports some kind of map of the overall data so that you can jump to records without endless scrolling that both is wasteful of resources (unnecessary loading and calculating of records) but is inefficient for users who don't get an accurate picture of just how far they can scroll.

• A multi-select many-to-many relationship design that properly makes working with the product so much more efficient from selecting job roles for contacts, to classifying transactions or entities.

Don't just replace legacy tech-debt, refresh and integrate with it

I am a big fan of the new email tech (see above), but I am not a fan of the fact it completely duplicates a lot of functionality that the old interaction logging did. It would be great to see interactions given some love. Maybe turn it into an event history, make it an interface and have email, posted transactions and tasks all implement that interface. Give it a lovely timeline UI and in general look at bringing it into the modern era. Integrate interactions with Teams conversations. Not everyone is going to deploy Dynamics 365 Sales or Service! In fact that is part of the point of Business Central.

No break-through design or business process innovation

Just putting something in the cloud infrastructure and with a web user interface does not make it next generation. Would love to see some true innovation that addresses the targeted small and medium market and differentiates the product from its larger brethren.

• Introduce the concept of in-built inheritance map. Whether it is a transaction line inheriting data from a header, or a transaction header inheriting data from a customer, vendor or location - Business Central is already powerful in this area. Yet it is not readily apparent where a setting is coming from, if it has been overridden, if it is different to a new setting and if it can be overridden. Having that as a platform level attribute of a field, rather than something manually coded would allow the interface to represent that using modern user interface concepts and provide more flexibility for showing/hiding elements.

• Global search. I first banged on about this two years ago. Whilst Business Central is ahead of some of the competition in searching on tables (but not everyone) it is years behind others on one touch global search that allows you to go directly to the data you need. This problem is made worse for Business Central due to the duplication between 'draft' documents, posted documents, archived documents, etc. The user has to know where to go and it is often trial and error. With just a few clever attributes on records about the meaning of a field in the context of global search, business central could build a global search on par or better than leading competitors. With Microsoft's investment in the search space, this continues to confound me.

• Multiple dashboards per role. Let's face it the role centre looks tired, outdated and just frankly pathetic compared with its peers in industry. Slapping an awkwardly integrated non-contextual power-bi component in there does not improve things. Xero, QuickBooks, SAP, NetSuite, Acumatica, Odoo all are far ahead in this area of business process focused dashboards. All have recognized that individuals need more than one dashboard that is topic focused. All have realized you need dashboards that are specific to relationships. Micrsoft has all the UI components in their portfolio to do something special - but nothing happens.

• Formal synchronization of changes to ledger back to source document. Business Central has got slightly more flexible. You can change a due date on a customer ledger entry, a dimension on a general journal, a ledger description. Other attributes like external reference number quite annoyingly cannot be fixed at all. However, even if you can change something, almost all of these changes do not reflect back on the original document. I am sure there are rationale reasons for this - however it makes the business application unfriendly to SME users and introduces the fact that depending on where you look you get different info. We have customizations to show additional data from ledger entries on the source documents - but we really shouldn't have to.