The slightly more critical review of Business Central 2022 Wave 1 Release notes from Microsoft

I just got done reading @waldo's good summary. He links to everything else official and has a good wrap-up of what is on offer.

This blog is less about reaching customers (since I am already one).

It is instead aimed at whoever is making decisions in the product team that impacts Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Just come over here... I want a little chat. Sorry it is not private.

All the partners saying they are excited for 2022 Wave 1, the people telling you "What an impressive set of changes", a lot of them are just being nice in public. It is not that everything you are delivering is unwanted, it is that they are so underwhelming when taken in totality. If you think otherwise, you are potentially in a Microsoft bubble.

Out in the real world of brutal competition and product comparisons you are falling behind and you are falling behind faster and faster each year. I know they may have told you otherwise in the job interview, but right now you are not building the exciting future of SaaS / cloud business platforms.

If you are starving for investment cash of are being forced to waste time on features easily implemented by partners, frustrated with the showcase superficial integrations that few get benefits from and want to aspire beyond migrating 'legacy on-premises' clients I do feel for you.

This might make you feel worse but ask some insiders to give you the release notes for Netsuite, SAP B1, Acumatica and Odoo over the last two years. They are your peers, and they are overtaking you in areas you once had superior business functionality. They are being more innovative in user experience. They are figuring out how to make and integrate incredibly useful AI, data analytics and external business services that deliver value out of the box in key finance and supply chain processes that matter to everyday small and medium businesses.

I have noticed a common trend across them. They are all of them are focused on continually trying to make their application fit as closely as possible to the real-world, making it more forgiving when SMEs make a mistake or don't yet know the answer. They are automating what can be automated and assuming that there will be less and less manual data entry (often helping businesses achieve this with their own tooling).

Unfortunately, all the additional telemetry features, implementation of legacy parity, performance enhancements and skin-deep integrations with other Microsoft Services will not substitute for a lack of sharp vision and aspirational objectives that others are displaying.

Do you secretly have a plan to take that huge legacy of data, process and user experience design and provide a path towards platform that is a joy to use, is forgiving for small businesses and yet is fast, efficient, and flexible to use. Something that leverages Microsoft common technology and design investments?

I mean, I keep hoping there is a secret skunk works team who is refactoring away from posting routines and learning from NetSuite how to create a dynamic view of ledger impact behind the scenes. Perhaps a obsessive, compulsive detail-oriented group that exhaustively goes through every business process and identifies where there are unnecessary clicks and ensuring there are no actions that are impossible to easily fix when someone does something wrong. One hopes there is a team implemented a great universal search, recent records, related document shortcuts and persistent navigation experience that at least matches what the rest of the Microsoft Dynamics family. And of course, a team tackling my own hard core process problems where addons and manual processes just don't cut it like inbound shipment handling (and billing prior to receipt) and intelligent reservation strategies for stock.

If you suspect, one day Microsoft is going to wake up and tell customers sorry - but it is all just too hard. Please let us know - it is a moral and kind thing to do. No small business wants to be locked into an ever increasing monthly / annual subscription fee knowing that you are locked in by prohibitive costs of migrating to yet another ERP.

Personally, I have invested multiple years of blood, sweat and tears in customizing the product. I have compensated in so many areas for lack of inbuilt functionality and purchased amazing paid add-ons (shout out to ForNav). There is something great about the community and immensely impressive about how the team took a very ancient product and bit by bit made it a responsive and modern web application.

Here's hoping I am proved wrong, and I do not have to migrate to Netsuite, Odoo, Acumatica or SAP B1 in 2023.

Now I've got that out of the way here is the stuff that is valuable to me:

• Continued enhancements to sending email (may it long continue)

• Vendor/customer balance integration

• Excel layout maybe?

• Auto-deploy dependent projects in workspace & AL-Go for GitHub (which is where I live)

• Payment reconciliation journal improvements