Building on James's Dynamics 365 Business Central priorities for Microsoft in 2021.

James Crowter's is prolific on Twitter. He strikes me as someone who wants the product to succeed but shares my doubts that Microsoft is fully engaged with a viable long term strategy in what is a very tough market. That said, I feel that perhaps his commentary could benefit from the perspective of a current customer and someone experienced with using and implementing competitor products.

1. Improve Business Central's marketing and positioning

Although I agree the marketing content is an issue, I also suspect that Microsoft is primarily targeting migration of legacy NAV/GP customers. This is the easiest low hanging fruit. It seems that they either do not feel ready or do not want to invest in competing with the huge volume of marketing material from NetSuite, Acumatica and SAP in this market segment. That's not really an issue for me.

My issue is the implications of this decision. If Microsoft is not confident of the products long term competitiveness they have a duty of care to tell these customers (and the odd ones who are not migrating from NAV/GP) to inform us about the long term.

Getting companies to invest a time and money in a business platform that they don't believe in is problematic at best. If they plan to eventually converge Business Central and the wider Dynamics platform (which seems to be implied from where resources are being spent) - then what is their plan for true zero cost and zero impact migration?

2. Skills Development

Customisation is a key strength of the platform.

The main problem is that without fairly massive customisations (both to address functional gaps and specific to our own business needs) I doubt any customer would get a return on investment - or would have a negative Net Promoter Score from their customer.

In fact I couldn't recommend the product if a customer didn't have this capability in-house or had a trusted partner who either already had IP to be applied or could do it for a reasonable price.

This is not true of some key competitors like SAP B1 and NetSuite (when sold with their SuiteSuccess) platform. Both are more readily usable out of the box for standard business scenarios.

So I think James has hit.a nail on the head with this one. Especially since Business Central lacks the in-built interactive business user focused tools for building queries, reports and simpler customisation that competitors have.

But Microsoft are making it worse as the standard offering requires a long of effort to really make it usable in even standard scenarios.

3. Reward long-term performance

As a customer doing work mostly myself, even I can support the imperative to reward partner contributions. In fact I think it should not just be around revenue generation but substantial reward for building community and contributing to knowledge both in Microsoft's channels and on social media. Rewards for open source contributions should also be there.

I'd personally like to see a way that you can engage with more that one partner and as a customer reward partners that add value, even if they are on-record as your license reseller.

4. Business Central is an ISV platform

Spot on. That's my experience. My only caution is that others are aggressively buying apps in community to ensure that everything needed for core industry verticals and cross-platform functionality is within the solution to simplify the sales process. My 2c is that divergent app-source apps (how many detail with deficient document generation) diffuse investment in a core capability and add confusion - sometimes Microsoft should pick a clear winner and double down on them.

5. Accelerate the functionality gaps closures

Spot on again and really related to point 4. I'd actually go further. Ideas website itself is deficient as is the product management approach for guiding investment and delivering user experiences that are competitive.

If Microsoft is not willing to actually create product teams/tribes/squads focused on key areas of product functionality who are passionate about user experience, understand the business domain and can work with cross-functional platform teams I am afraid they will continue to deliver functionality that is patchy, inconsistent and falls behind competitor products.

I stress that I am amazed at some of what is delivered in the platform and I have no doubt they all of the product team are working hard. But it is hard not to suspect they are under-resourced, constantly distracted by competing requests and being forced to context switch constantly to fight fires in different areas of the product.

There are also areas that just need to be fixed in the user experience. Fix once and for all easy and intuitive navigation between related entities where a table relationship has been defined both when a page is editable, not-editable, in a repeater or card.

I would also love to see Microsoft focus on functionality that can't be delivered within the current platform. There are many examples like Global Search and Document Navigation that can only be sub-optimally delivered at best by partners as they need new fundamental components in the UI and platform.

6. User-definable reporting

I agree with the problem diagnosis but not necessarily the solution. Clearly NetSuite Analytics (what a video demo) is what James would love. Fully integrated, aware of data relationships, business meaning and usably consumed within the application. Realistically it is clear Microsoft is not going to invest that way in the application. So instead I've love to see them actually not depend on APIs in Business Central - I get why for the on-premise application - but in SaaS - the data already exists in the cloud, likely in the same region as Power-BI. Why is it you can consume a SAP Hana data model from SAP, but don't have that capability for Business Central.

For me the reporting is easier - it is accessing a meaningful, business focused semantic data model that transparently accessed near or real-time data is a fail. That should be a priority for SaaS and the fact its not there and everyone is forced to use API or Webservice to replicate data is not only wasteful of resources, it also impacts the performance on everyone's tenants.

Yes I'd also link a simple way to make and use queries within the interface, but I at least have a few workarounds in that area.

7. Data & Records Management tools

Not having massive amounts of data yet in our tenant I find it hard to understand these points. However, I do have one suggestion. Rethink the whole concept of archived documents! Bear with me. The first time I saw 15 line items repeated with 0 quantity when I posted a multiple shipments and invoices from a single sales order I said 'what the hell.' I'd never seen such insanity before. It took me a while to understand that unlike all other ERP's, Business Central doesn't just indicate a sales order or line on a sales order is closed - it actually deleted it! This means that the system tries to capture the data on posted documents as it has no guarantee the original is kept. This necessitated duplicate archive tables and pages. Personally I think this was a terrible design decision that results in a massive technical debt, confusing user experience and poor data models.

Try this on for size.

• Stop trying to manage the problem

• Design a audit trail and change log as a service (similar to telemetry)

• Eliminate concept of archive documents and replace with open/closed status on originals

• To support introduce enhance state based rules for actions/fields

• Ensure underlying ledger entries always match source document. Currently they don't because there is a worry about the audit trail of what was originally done.

8. Complete moving all workflows to Power Automate

I have neither experience with the in-built workflow engine (besides looking at docs and running a mile) and using power automate for Business Central. In principal this all sounds like an excellent idea, provided that just like Business Central should surface conversations from Teams in the user experience, so too should relevant Power Automate flows be contextually surfaces and be accessible.

What I guess I don't want is another flashy demo such as MS Teams where they show something like 'wow - Business Central pops up an embedded browser window' that helps just about no-one. This is a good point to criticise the Microsoft Teams integration. Its pointless beyond ticking off some marketing collateral and making some internal Microsoft management team happy. It is precisely the opposite of a well thought out user experience that makes businesses more efficient. I am actually very frustrated that resources that could have been applied to global in-app search or on purchasing applications like Navigate Pro that could benefit all customers all of the time.

9. Full authentication flow support, specifically system to system

I recently saw on Twitter a quite experienced consultant asking for resourcing on how to connect to API's via OAuth. Why? Well the documentation actually doesn't really tell you how. Some blogs do a better job - but some are ageing now and its not clear which has official endorsement.

I understand that support for App-to-App is definitely on the way, but as a customer I'd also like to see a comprehensive answer to supplier/customer authentication into systems where the primary data they are accessing is in Business Central. Microsoft have all the pieces to make this work. Ideally those who provide eCommerce / portal solutions can then plug into those components. Other ERP and Inventory Add-ons now have this solutions out-of-the box. I don't yet see Business Central having an answer to this.

10. Monetisation for AppSource

Not being in the Partner ecosystem I've never really understood this one. Xero, Intuit, Netsuite and others have fairly thriving ecosystem of application partners who don't share a common monetisation platform. The penny only dropped for me recently when I realised that those developing their Apps for Business Central are often only developing them for the application and are rarely selling directly, but through partners with all the complications that entails.

So I get it now - me being able to buy on app source, select the partner I want to bill this through and then get entitlements would lower the cost of sale for everyone. Yet I still don't think this is the biggest problem with app source. I still think it is having no date filtering or sorting and not actively pruning the catalogue to remove applications that have been replaced by core functionality or are obsolete and not actively supported. I think this comes from a focus on overall number, rather than business value - a focus I wish they would get away from.

So that is my response to James Crowter's excellent article. I hope it adds some additional perspective and carries forward the discussion. Now I wonder who picks up the basketball next and throws it at the ring.