We present overview of this year Directions North America 2021.
Business Central online (SaaS) Momentum
- Business Central online (SaaS) has 15 000 customer all over the world.
- 1 400 apps on AppSource
- 200% annual user growth
- 2 700 partners
Interesting Facts from the Directions North America conference
- EeasyStep2 (partner from Netherland) provide barcode capabilities to GitHub.
- Business Central on-premise to be continued. This is very strong announcement from Microsoft about on-premises solution.
- Many Business Central Partners have suggested that Fix price model implementations is very good idea. That interesting idea because typical implementation in North America is based on Time&Material model.
- New publisher program has been announced. Here you can find details: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/it/2021/04/28/new-microsoft-dynamics-365-business-central-publisher-program-coming-in-2021/
What’s new in Business Central?
Bank reconciliation improvements – from the Bank Acc. Reconciliation page you can cancel a bank reconciliation that was posted with mistakes. After that, you can run a new bank reconciliation from Statements page. More details here.
Dimension corrections (for G/L Entries) – for one or more G/L entries, you can change the dimension values, add dimensions, or remove them. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2021wave1/smb/dynamics365-business-central/dimension-corrections-gl-entries
Universal print – Microsoft 365 service that modernizes print management and delivers a simple, straightforward printing experience. Now, it’s integrated with Dynamics 365 Business Central. More details here.
Report extensibility – ability to extend an existing report by making additive changes. For example, you can add new fields or a new layout to existing reports. More details here.
Onboarding – intuitive and modern instruction for users who starting work with the system. You can check how it look like on following screenshot:
Licensing
Storage plans has changed. Now, it’s more competitive, it’s cheaper. Still all base entitlement has 80 GB. But what is new is additional GB per user allocation. For each Essentials user will be 2 GB more space on storage, and more 3GB more space on storage per Premium user.
Also, prices for additional GB have changed. From 1st July It will be $10 per 1 additional GB and $500 per additional 100 GB.
| Base entitlement | 80 GB | 80GB |
| Per user allocation | None | 2GB/User (Essentials)
3GB/User (Premium) |
| Additional GB | $40 | $10 |
| Additional 100 GB | $4 000 | $500 |
Improvements in performance
- 20% faster to open Role Center page
- 98% faster to post Payment Journal
- 40% faster posting of background document batches
- 3-5x reduction of SQL reads with Dynamics 365 Sales integration
- API Performance up to 5-6x faster
- Report Performance up to 3-6x faster
Global availability
New countries will have coming in 2021 release wave 1: Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya, Lebanon, Malta, Morocco, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Tunisia.