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The future of Business Central - our predictions & wish list
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is fast moving, ever evolving software. It has twice yearly major updates which unveils brand-new functionality and features to help businesses to make manual processes quicker and easier. In this episode we discuss where we want the software to go in the future, our warehousing, development and licencing wish lists and why sometimes ISVs know users better than Microsoft. Listen today!
- Hi, welcome to Tecman Talks Dynamics podcast. I'm joined today by Matt and James, and my name's Liam. Just to set some context, we've just gone into April, which means Business Central has started shipping the Wave 1 release for BC2022, and so we-
- '23, '23.
- '23, sorry, yes. I'm a year behind, BC23.
- I know these releases have coming fast, but we are in '23.
- Yeah, so they've just started shipping out and what we were talking about in terms of our subject matter today, was if we could have a wishlist or a dream list, I think you called it a Dreamcast.
- Which was it?
- An old-say console, which you made up. But, yeah, so we feel we'd have a conversation next.
- Conversation next.
- What would we like them to do next, or what do we think they would do next, so.
- What should they do?
- What should they do, that's very, very, yeah, what Microsoft should do compared to what they will do is-
- You kind of think that once they finish one release, they'll be planning for the next one or the next one after next or-
- I hope so.
- Yes.
- But, that's so, yeah. So, we thought we come up, we've broken it down into a couple of different areas. So, we've talked about functionality. We said we'll have a little chat about licencing and just really see where the conversation goes. So, as the two people that are heavily involved with the, you know, the projects that we do, the functionality there, what type of things would you like to see in the future releases of Business Central?
- Well, I think functionality. I mean, they've actually, this release we've just had, had probably more functional change in it. I guess we were a little bit biased being in the kind of warehousing-distribution space a lot. But they certainly did more in that and, you know, more of the same to improve what's there. I'm not a fan of them building lots more function, you know, starting massive new functional areas. I think there's a lot of scope for them to actually improve what's already there, and fill some of the missing gaps rather than impinge on the ISV space, you know, because that's the danger if they go after something big and new, is that some of the ISVs that were already there are already in that space, and that, for me, doesn't do the platform any good. We should use ISVs that probably will be better at it because they're more focused and more dedicated to that particular aspect, rather than ask Microsoft to build a whole new module.
- So, I guess for anybody that, who's listening that isn't maybe as is technically up to speed an ISV is a third party that writes some additional app that will work with Business Central to add additional industry specialisations or functionality or improve on something that comes out the box. Okay, so you're saying Microsoft continued to build and improve what's there? Fill some of those gaps but in terms of adding a whole new, right, we've added this, this, this, this, this. If that's already in AppSource or available.
- I, you know, taking that Microsoft has limited resources, I know their resources, you know, we always quote the billions of pounds they invest into Dynamics and all the rest of it but that has to go a very long way across all the Dynamics products and all the rest of it. So, there is a limited amount that they can achieve. I think they would be first to acknowledge that and, you know, would I rather they improved some core bits that are there, like they've done in the last couple of versions. Yes, I would, I think there's some fundamental kind of re-engineering changes that we could do. You know, the application is still very, what are called document-centric. It's still back to the old paper paradigm where you take a sales order and you fill all the details in, you know, and the warehouse transactions as well. We tend to find that everything's happening much more line-by-line so, you know, line-by-line approvals, line-by-line updates so that I can pick one line the... We can make that, we've made that work as an ISV, but I think it would be much better if they could work because people are using electronic devices end-to-end anymore. Nobody goes back to, well, very few Business Central users now go back to the screen with a piece of paper that somebody in the warehouse has written on or somebody in production has written on and so on it. People want it real-time end-to-end. And there's some thinking about how that works because some of it is a little bit clunky.
- I think a lot of that's driven from, certainly, from the distribution customers that we have is there's been a, you know, a massive movement into e-Commerce and, you know, a lot more of our customers selling direct or B2B. And I think that's driven more requirements around the warehousing to, and it changes the way that you physically do things that, you know, if you've got an order for two products and you've got a huge warehouse, you don't want to go and walk all the way up, pick those two items, come back, pack it, and then go out again. You know, you wanna be able to go and pick a whole set of orders and things like tote picking that I'm picking it into, you know, into containers, but that I want to go back and I want to pack those products as a separate process. You know, BC doesn't really support that, to do a separate-pack process, you know, there are some ISVs out there that can fill some of those gaps. But I think it's quite fundamental to the way BC's structured and the other side of that is then loading it onto to a vehicle. So, those elements I think will be good to get into BC because I do think from a distribution side, we're seeing a lot more way of working that it is more aligned to a-
- It is wider than that.
- An e-Commerce supplier.
- If you think about timesheets, you know, the timesheet entry is pretty prehistoric in terms of, and it's really designed, you come with your records of what time you've spent infinity.
- Yes, yeah.
- It's not like, "Right, I'm working on this now," you know-
- Stop stop.
- Of stop, stop. Or even I've spent 10 minutes on this and I just, you know, allocate against the job site I've spent time on. So, you know, in the professional services sector, I think the vertical, you know, the people who provide for that vertical have had to do a fairly major engineering exercise to build that capability. So, I think this aspects of what, as I say, of what they've got that they need to go and, you know, and some of the front, again, you know, we, some inquiries the way that you find information across it. So, you know, when we are preparing for this, you said availability and kind of understanding, okay, something changes on a purchase order, what sales orders, goes through what production orders does it affect.
- Difficult one for the user to answer.
- Yeah, lots of difficult clicks, lots of different lookups. Lots of different filters that potentially searches that they've gotta do. It's not right, this has changed. What's the kind of consequence of that? Which, you know, all comes down in that area to reservation entries, doesn't it? And-
- Yeah.
- wow.
- Who wants to go near those? So, you know, that's a dangerous place to tread.
- Use 'em, but just don't change it because it's... It's, well, maybe we would like it change, but it, yeah, it's a complex area of functionality from a development perspective to go changing. You know, many versions ago we used to get issues with it, you know, it's for quite a few years now. That's been pretty settled I think. But I think it's settled and it's just been left kind of do it on the side. Don't touch it, yeah, don't touch that, and in terms of usability, it's still a bit clunky to use as well. So, you know, I think the concept of it is great. Now, a lot of customers love the fact what it does and allows me to say, "Yes I'm having that stock." But then the reality hits in and it gets a bit harder to lose.
- Well, there's no midway, you know, you've either reservations are on or off. And you've either gotta do it pretty completely or you've got not do it at all. A kind of soft allocation is often a requirement isn't it, where kinda see where, you know, where this inventory is potentially gonna go and...
- I've got two production orders for the same thing. All requiring the same components but I haven't got enough to make both of them, which one can I make? You don't know, yeah, there's an availability report and they'll both say you can make it because they look at it independently, which is just useless for most people.
- So, when you said though, look, that'd be great if they could do something with that. Is there, that must be incredibly difficult for them or Microsoft, I call it them, but Microsoft do a great job on the product generally, but to go and almost rattle something or product a wasps nest or whatever, you know, you wanna do it.
- Yes, but we, you know, from a pre-sales perspective when I'm speaking to prospects and if we're in a competitive situation, you know, having that ability that a purchase order's gonna be late and it tells you which sales orders I need to go and, you know, other products have that.
- Yeah.
- It is that kind of alerting, it's turning Business Central into something that's proactive rather than reactive at the moment, you know, you come to your role centre and you, the best you've got is a few queues with, hopefully, a few numbers on, but even that scenario wouldn't be covered under that. And so, people are spending a lot of time going in and checking different lists, checking different, yeah, and analyse views might help to kind of dissect that information and show a number. But primarily, it would be great if it could come up with, this is a last list of things that need to change and what you need to actually go and organise differently.
- If that's what Copilot could deliver that. Now that would be, you know, a game-changer.
- But that's a, that, you know, there's no extrapolation. That's a fact isn't it? It's factual of this has changed and this was dependent on it. So, you don't need to, you know that, for me, that's not an AI area, that's the data is there, it's just not in a very digestible form at the moment.
- Okay, so there's a couple, we've started with then, you've mentioned reservations, you've talked about improvements in the warehouse, took like picking, and so on and so forth, what sort, what'd be third, fourth?
- So, I think there's a lot of challenges we could sit here and spend a whole podcast on functionality, you know, order processing I think is something that's, there's an awful lot and, you know, if they went to AppSource and had a look, but that brings you to, you know, where is the dividing line between what Microsoft do and what-
- The ISVs do.
- The ISVs do, and they've gotta be careful because, for me, Business Central is increasingly, it's... I think its success is that it's a great ISP platform. How many customers buy it without something on the top of it. And if you looked at the user counts, you know, that we get told that Business Centrals user count is continually climbing. The partners I talk to who the bigger numbers, you know, there's a lot of smaller low-user-cap deals that are sold that are perhaps more generic. But the bigger ones where the significant volume is going through all of those are add-on, you know, have some add-on on the top of it and usually three or four that kind of configure it into something that's very vertical-specific.
- We see that, don't we internally, I think as a partner, you know, there's, it's rare we sell, I can't even think where we've ever sold a vanilla version of Business Central out the box gonna do. There's always a combination of different things. And the ISVs obviously bring a big part thing to the party here because you've got like regional localizations that they're gonna know. I mean Microsoft, this is a global product, right? So, there's an element of localization they do, but there's always something unique about certain regions that the ISV would bring. They've got industry knowledge because they've worked with that, and they've got a very in-depth knowledge. So, it's difficult for Microsoft to have something that fits all because it's never, you're never gonna find a customer, the product of-
- Well, strengths, concentrate on the base, concentrate on that core and let the industries go after, you know, the ISVs go after the industry. So, I think that's what's good. What's not so good is, you know, AppSource's ability. If I was a prospect and I was looking at Microsoft and I wanted a distribution vertical or you know, think retail vertical, you know, how would I find LS? I probably got a much better chance of finding the LS retail website directly via Google than, because AppSource just points you to a number of different apps and doesn't really say which in, you know, I don't get a whole kind of service offers, and so on, for me. Have we ever had a lead from a service offer?
- Not yet, so we've not really put a huge amount of time. We, I'll let you know in about a few months because we've made some amendments and change on that. But you're right, I think you go to AppSource and it's almost like, it's unfair to say it's one big pot and everything's thrown in. You can list out, you know, segment it a little bit. You know, you go to Business Central-
- Can you filter by country yet?
- You can, yes, you can filter by country because it'll say what countries were available. We have to list that but that's difficult as well.
- But can you from, I know we list it when we submit the apps but can you filter it on the front end?
- Well, we've tried to find that certain things regionally it's not been accurate or even safe but find a partner that's very close to the Midlands, we don't always pop up, which is crazy on some of Microsoft systems. So, they're not great on that.
- In the country, at least.
- But I haven't played that source for a while.
- I haven't done it recently, but about four or five months ago, I tried one and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't doing it-
- Yeah, there's not much they don't seem to publish anything for us as a partner or marketing guide to say, "Right, if you, you know, here's our recommendation," how you list your product. "These are the type of things to do to get yourself up in these two areas," I don't think you can have like substitute words where if somebody said, you know, a particular phrase you can change it with maybe what we refer it to. So, there's some work to be done there because we are seeing more and more people find stuff on AppSource. Definitely, end users are driving that discussion now with their partners. But they, the experience isn't great and they might, I don't know about the quality of the apps in all the apps in there as well. Microsoft might need to do something about the entry point that-
- Which brings us onto the whole, you know, actually, the quality as the apps in there get more and more sophisticated because we are now what almost, you know, how many years since V2 apps came out and code, and that kind of whole piece. When was that? Probably, you know, you get in seven years.
- Must be something like that, I mean it's three years-
- Something like that, yeah, so-
- Pandemic time, it was way before that.
- You know, this whole new generation of apps that have been there that kind of suckled to your universal code kind of initiative. Some of those apps are getting pretty sophisticated is the word that comes to mind and now makes testing them a nightmare under the current testing regime. Yes, you can build unit tests, but your whole kind of scenario testing and, you know, it's a lot of deaf effort to maintain your test base on there.
- [Liam] Mm.
- And then you get scenarios where you have two or three apps from multiple ISVs and how do you build a test that goes across that and, well, you can I guess, but you know, you have to get the test libraries from those ISVs unless you start from absolute scratch. It's hugely expensive and it's hugely complicated. And you know, I think that's one area where, again, I would hope Microsoft as the kind of central leader could come to the party with something way better.
- I mean, to be fair it's the one thing they have done with AppSource, it is been on our dream list or our wishlist for a long time now with monetization and that's starting to appear in trials. I know it's not, and the end user won't see it just yet on everything but that will come and I think that's gonna be good for end users. They can just make a transaction with Microsoft being the, you know, the controlling party here rather than having to basically, find the app on AppSource that redirection to the ISVs website, then you have to have a, you know, commercial discussion around how that's gonna be charged-
- And a whole complete pleth of different ways of paying for it-
- Oh, yeah.
- Depends on the partners.
- Absolutely. I mean, we had someone the other day contacted Us and we transact in North America in US dollars. This is a Canadian partner, "Can't we do it in Canadian dollars?" We are not keen on that because it's just another problem for us if, you know, Microsoft with their global platform makes it sense to, you know, for them to do the transaction, yes, to take a small bit of the margin. But we'd happily give that up.
- That's a very small bit.
- Yeah, they've been very generous on that and I think it'd be good. But so, to refer to them, they do listen to what partners are saying. I know we all want everything immediately, but that's one thing that I think in the next 12 months, will be rolled out to, you know, more the apps side, yeah.
- I, you know, understand it that from the Business Central team they had to wait for a lot of things to get in place with the rest of Microsoft, so it's been a long slow road, but, yeah, it's been a four, five, well, ever since AppSource arrived. Really.
- Yeah,
- We've been asking for monetization and it has arrived and they are talking about, you know, other options other than per user coming later. So, you know, when they come I think then it will become the default method and no, no debts on that.
- At the moment, the monetization means you can only pay per user that you've got on your licence.
- On the trial they're running at the moment. If you've got 10 BC users, then you have to match that with your ISV app and which isn't always relevant. And so, but they've always said all the way through, we'll start here and we've got plans for the other licensee model, so, yeah.
- And you mentioned the L word.
- Licencing, yeah, so I think from our point of view from the sales and team, the one thing Microsoft has done for many years now is they've really simplified the licencing, so I haven't got a huge amount of wishlists or anything which I think would make a fundamental change. I think they've really done a good job on that, that it's very easy for end users to work out that they either need essentials users or a premium user. We've got Teams, we've got devices, but you know, they're quite easy for big customers.
- Devices is not a problem. Teams could be a bit more proper-
- Teams, yeah, well Teams are always selling a dream that you can get something really, really cheap and then when you look at it you've obvious only connect general tables and it doesn't really do it. So, it's a little bit of a frustration I think probably for end users they think, "Oh, we could probably squeeze in there without understanding what those limitations actually mean to-
- To read-only plus.
- Yeah, it's not-
- And it, you know, that, isn't that gonna get squeezed because this new thing where you can see your data in Teams without a licence.
- Yeah, possibly, possibly.
- You know, the Team's licence, the ones I hear the most complex are the people who, like we mentioned earlier, the ones who do professional services so they need to input a timesheet or something like that and a few other bits of functionality, you know, maybe put on a purchase requisition, which is a feature that we'd like in the Quora application, please, because it's not just professional services who do requisitions and seems a more common ask. But then, that Teams licencing with the custom tables that they're allowed to do and the three standard tables rapidly runs outta speed and almost very few seem to fit within that.
- Yeah.
- I know it's a Dynamics 365 kind of model they've got across multiple applications. So, again, it's not the Business Centrals Teams.
- Yeah and it'd be interesting because obviously, they've now just released the Team's premium licence, which is not, you know, you've gotta pay a bit more for. I wonder how long it'll be before you need perhaps an M365 certain version if you want that team's interaction with your Dynamics products, you know, might, I haven't done that before, but their licencing-
- It's an announcement by SATO wasn't it? That meant they all kind of had to comply with.
- Which makes completely sense but they've got so many products to so many different variations. It's hard to find a licencing model. I think the one thing that we would, I would like when we speak to customers in sales there's two areas. One, customers like predictability of price and especially on subscription, you know, that horrible thing, I'm gonna buy something and in 12, 24 months the price is gonna increase dramatically and I've got no visibility of that.
- Just when I'm dependent on it.
- Just when I'm dependent. Well, yeah, that's-
- That's absolutely right. So, I think a lot of customers we speak to would like to be able to lock in for longer, which Microsoft have done something. You know, you typically sign up for a 12-month term. I would say 90% of our customers do. You still can do 30 days, but there's a premium price which, again, customers seem fairly comfortable for. They understand if you only wanna sign up, but why can't I sign up for longer and then have a better price? Is one of the questions we have because even if you sign up for a three-year, there's no price incentive, it just locks your prize. But for the three-year there is an awful risk put on the partners. So, I think that's something which Microsoft are fully aware of. So, I won't go through that again now, but if we could do something where there is some form where it's not the pain and the risk isn't all on the partner, I think that would be, would be sensible. I mean particularly, for those customers outside America, because they seem to be aligning the currencies with the US dollar every six months-
- Every six months is the thing-
- Potentially, have a price change every six months.
- Yeah, yeah, that completely. So, that length of time and we know there are other Cloud products out there. ERP Cloud products will lock for five years, which, you know, when we're in a compete situation, that's one that does come back, why can't I do that? And the other thing we would love is for those customers that have invested in Dynamics over the years, still on perpetual licences, they do wanna move to Cloud but there's not really a compelling transition model 'cause they played an awful lot in terms of maintenance, and so on and so forth. Microsoft really could do with coming up with an upgrade or transition policy, whatever they wanted.
- The Bridge to the Cloud Two didn't really float.
- Yeah, it didn't.
- So, what's the options there?
- What's the options, so, if I could do that, I think Bridge to Cloud was a great idea where you take your EP and you split it over 12 months.
- EP in-
- EP in your maintenance. You pay every year on your perpetual licence. And if that was split over 12 months, which is great and you ended up on a Cloud-based model.
- So, you pay no maintenance.
- You weren't paying maintenance more than your enhancement. So, it got you a Cloud-
- Was that guaranteed for?
- That was guaranteed. Yeah, for you it was for, originally the first one was for 12 months, but you could renew for two and three years afterwards as well. You could renew each annual. Now, it's a three-year deal and the only problem with that is that it locks the customer in, which isn't a problem. But should the customer go bump, Mr. Partner has to pay the remaining two or three years or however long's left on that term. That's a big deal.
- This whole thing about partners in effect credit, ensuring customers, it's like we are confused aren't we? because are we insurers or are we partners and it, you know, and actually going off and should we go off to the insurance market and get third-party insurance and bundle out on the top of it. But that would just make us uncompetitive.
- And the other thing with Bridge to Cloud, which Microsoft last year announced that the enhancement plan maintenance we're gonna call it, had increased for the first time that I can remember from 16% of your licence value to 17%. From October this year it's gonna go to 18%. So, they are increasing that and I understand that they're leveraging people to move from perpetual onto Cloud, but Bridge to Cloud every year we have to say, "Okay, what's your enhancement value? And we'll then divide it by 12." So, they're gonna have an increase in years two and three if Microsoft continue to increase the enhancement plan of buy an extra percentage-
- Stop, be a little bit careful that customers just don't go right, I'm-
- Forget my payment enhancement plan, I'll just bank it or, and the other problem is whenever you go into that type of thing, it, there's a... If there's not a compelling commercial offering to move to the same, you know, it's Business Central in the Cloud, they'll go, "Well, if we've gotta re-implement and we've gotta re-license everything, I'll go and look at what else is out there." Why wouldn't I'm, I've, you know, invested in this product. So, I think that's a risk and that's a conversation we've had with some of our customers, you know, they have gone back out to market to see what's out there before making a decision. So, that's one thing that we in the sales team would really like to have and the customer engagement team to have that ability to talk to customers, go to Cloud, and really wanna do it, we show them the benefits of being on the product, they listen to the podcast and then they say, "Well, how can I get that?" It's quite, you know-
- And they've put in a lot of money into-
- Over the years, yeah.
- Over the years.
- Absolutely.
- So, now, Microsoft did have a good transition.
- Business Central should win because their knowledge base of how it works is it has tremendous value. They're predisposed to it but unless there's a commercial offer that makes sense to them, they won't do it.
- Yeah, no, they feel very... They feel like they've got them over a barrel and then they, you're gonna sting me for paying for it twice. So, you know, Microsoft do have a transition skew at the moment but that expires June. I'm hoping they're about to announce something as they come up to year-end. So, that would be great. So, that's on my wish list.
- So, from a kind of platform technical perspective then just coming away from kind of the commercial licencing bit, you know, there are a number of, I think, but Microsoft had done an amazing job of kind of making it a Cloud-first application. You really can't, there's very few areas now where you can kind of say this doesn't look like, you know, there's any compromise on something that was built for the Cloud from the start, at least from my perspective, I can't really tell compared to some others. There's one which is, you know, affects the kind of development community which is this whole thing around objects, object names, objects suffixes, prefixes, will it rest.
- Which goes back many, many years.
- Version, yes it does. Back to the earliest days of nav and, you know, the 50,000 to 100,000 object range and all this rubbish, which they've taken all the kind of, you don't have to buy objects in the Cloud now, you know, another, the reason for going to Cloud because- You get them whereas you still have to buy them On-prem.
- That was a lot of money for some.
- Oh, it was, those tables added up, and you know, added up the annual EP.
- Yeah.
- Annual maintenance as well, which constantly adds to it.
- We had customers that wanted to do some of their own development and it would cost 'em about, I think it's about £22,000 for the licence.
- By the whole development licence.
- So, that's all gone. But you've still got this thing where, you know, preventing clashes between ISVs and between customers. If you develop in the PTE range, potentially, you can't move it very far because everybody's 50,100. That's the default position. You've got, you know, potentially adding the same names if they don't know the rules to the sales line or the item table or which effort. So, you know, there's a concept called name spaces, which is how everything else works. Sooner or later, Microsoft in the last kind of 12 months killed the kind of FLF licence file situation for On-prem. Obviously, that didn't apply on SAS. You know, if they could introduce something that meant that we didn't have to worry about which object ranges we were using and all the rest of it that's just a historical anomaly for me that we should kill.
- Sounds like a big one.
- I'm not, I mean I don't know because it's kind of the platform side but we need to manage it. I think the transition probably might be a bit painful but we're gonna have to do it sooner or later. So, we might as well get it over with sooner.
- I do, feel for Microsoft on that because they've, there's been times they've made quite radical announcements, we're stopping this and we're moving to that and you get half the partner channel, they go, "That's fantastic." They're the proactive ones probably going to Cloud on that journey. You've got the few, they've got a big legacy base and they're going up in arms in uproar about what they're trying to change because it's gonna impact themself.
- But those legacy bases, you know, if you look at those legacy bases now, they're BC '14 and before, I mean most of the people who, you know, once you get, BC '14, for me, is the watershed version. So, all of that historic stuff is pre that. Anything '15 above, well, '15, '16, '17, users on that now? They probably haven't ever up to '18, you know, and even 2022, you know? And they're gonna look at the analyse from reporting capability, they're gonna say, "I want that." So, if you're on extensions already, you're probably gonna do the word. It's not, actually, not that much and not that massive, and you know, if you do a little bit each release, even if you're On-premise for me, you should be thinking about doing an upgrade each year so that you don't get five years behind and then it becomes a massive jump and things like the web client works so much better in '22, you know, '21, even '20, the performance of it is so snappy compared to those early versions. You shouldn't be sitting, putting up with that, so-
- And you're at a war after 18 months anyway, so.
- Yes.
- So, you know-
- I think if you, if that, for me, makes a lot of sense that they're up there. So, yes, so, you know, if they moved to, and I don't think, I think it ought to be relatively simple for them to transition from an object, the object ID model to a name-spaces model relatively easy. I'm hoping, so we'll see what comes on that. I think the other major ask that I had on my list is, you know, the mobile app, how many customers, Matt, you have a lot of customer interaction. How many customers do you know actually use it?
- A few using the tablet app. Very few, unfortunately, using the phone app. It's a great sales kind of tool because I, you know, I think there's a lot of potential there but I think when you come down to use, especially on the phone app, I think it's, you know, there's room for improvement. It hasn't changed an awful lot over the years, is it?
- I, well, I think it, you know, for me, it had a fundamental flaw that this whole thing of like trying to move your role centre, you know, the fact that you can't have a mobile roll centre that you'll use a phone exactly the same way you use the full client. You know, most customers on our full client are on a, you know, almost 4K is default and certainly, HD is the minimum.
- Yeah.
- And trying to kind of really process that and present it onto a phone screen, there's just too much scrolling, too many kind of... Too much extraneous. You want a real cut-down focused-role centre I think for the phone, and you should be able to define for each user and you should be able to define.
- Per device type.
- Per client type.
- Yeah.
- What role centre they go to. Then we could do some cut-down pages that really focused on a few things that people want to do on their phone.
- It's strange because we were all out at a conference a couple of weeks ago and we, I think Liz needed to do something and she was saying, "Oh, have you got your app laptop so I can log on to BC" and everything else I do in my personal life, you know? You think I've got an app on my phone for that and I'll do tickets, whatever I need to do, do it on that. Not once did we think it was anything we got back and you said, "Well, why don't you just do it on your phone?" So, you're right, I think the mobile clients, it hasn't really ingrained itself into our day-to-day usage probably because we're not out the office that much. But, and that was a really good example and you said why didn't you use the mobile app, it's-
- I was using the website in my car the other day.
- I did see you sent me a picture, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- That was on the full screen on your Tesla, yes.
- While he was parked and let's just, yeah.
- Yeah.
- But I think, you know, it, you know, and okay, some of the stuff is moving outside of Business Central. So, things like approvals, you know, as we migrate from inbuilt BC approvals to power-automate-based approvals then, yeah, the power automate client works very well on the phone. So, I can do those approvals but it's a shame that I can't go and look at customer balance or.
- You can do.
- Check inventory on so on, yes.
- Okay, but, yeah, it's not so great. You know, it, I'm sure Microsoft can see from the telemetry how many people are using it and, yeah, the proof is whether people do it twice.
- because they might be looking at the same and going, "Well, no one's using this while we continue investing, or why, what we need to do something to get them using this make changes-
- That's partly what my contention is, Liam, nobody's using it because it's not a good experience, which, so they shouldn't give up on it is what I'm saying, I don't think it should be.
- Great idea, isn't it, the way, you know, when you go in the tablet mode, the, you know, it's assuming that your thumbs on the kind of left and the right and, therefore, most of the buttons and links are on that side, whereas, on the phone it's sent at the bottom. So, and it just does that dynamically. Some great technologies to deliver. I think it's just ready for an update really.
- I suppose my frustration is that I think it's 95% there, you know, it's not far off being perfect, but are people gonna, you know, at the moment you'd have to have a user and you'd have to have two different licences and that would screw up your modern workplace connections and all the rest of it. If you were logged in something different-
- I think a role per client would, that's a nice idea.
- I think that would solve a lot of it and you could, you know, provide a very cut-down interface and then build it up from there rather than assuming that you could re-represent the standard.
- I suppose as well in the majority of cases, most people that are using ELP in a traditional sense are gonna be desk-based or there, and there are some ISVs that then have, as we said earlier.
- You have a specific device if you're on a till or a-
- Yeah, yeah.
- Production floor or-
- But maybe the digital functionality for a role where someone needs to interact with BC maybe from being out on site and you login a report or whatever, login a timesheet or whatever. There are sources out there,
- Isn't it a 24/7 world these days and you know, if you get an email in the middle of the evening, don't you just want to go and check and see-
- Maybe you wanna click, in fact, there's a URL that's actually there, yeah, you're right.
- Yeah, to actually go and find your laptop and fire that up is a.
- I don't disagree with you, in BC we need to get, because you were talking about Teams, you know, I look, if it pings on Teams and there was something there with another link to BC, right, you click on that and then what happens then? And if it's a crap experience then you probably wouldn't do it again, would you? You wait 'til the next day or whatever, which isn't great from an efficiency point of view. So.
- Hmm.
- So, that's, I think there's, you know, that's probably my other major ask.
- We haven't asked for much, have we? Yeah, but look, we, it's always exciting to see what they've got, they're about to announce and what's coming down the line. I think it's the evolution, we've seen less big announcements but lots and lots of little ones and we were, you know, we were impressed with what came in '23 Wave 1. You, no, you're right to directions with North America.
- They don't care.
- I did actually following it.
- Yeah, so. Just to see the announcements, I would expect it, I'll announce a few things at North America and then a few things at Asia. I'm sure they'll listen to the podcast and they'll be amending their presentations for next week as we speak. So, but there maybe..
- Look, we're all in the same space. We're all working with the same objective.
- [Liam] Yeah.
- So, it would be surprising if they hadn't heard some of the requests we've put on, we've put out there from other people.
- Yeah, okay, well, look, the progression of the product continues to really move at a pace. So, they do do a good job, but we, no one's ever satisfied in life either, so we always want more. But it's a great product and it's great to see that it continues to evolve and grow every few months. So, it's good.
- Yeah, and you know, I saw a tweet yesterday, I was looking through my, something popped up and you know, the documentation freshly, the Wave 1 release is still getting added to it, so there's bits and pieces that they're realising, "Oh, we did that, we undocumented." So, that list is still going out there. So, we don't have to wait all the way 'til August to see the next list of enhancements before we get a few Easter Eggs, I guess in the current documentation.
- Very sophical, very sophical. Okay, so well, James, Matt, thanks as always, for coming on and sharing your thoughts. Always an interesting topic. So, appreciate that and thank you for watching or listening to the podcast. If you've got anything you like on the wishlist, please stick it in the comments as we always interest to see what people say.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- And that would be good to see what end users or other people that listen to might say that would be great to be added to the product as well. Okay, well I think that's it and we'll see you soon on another edition of Tecman Talks Dynamics.
- '23, '23.
- '23, sorry, yes. I'm a year behind, BC23.
- I know these releases have coming fast, but we are in '23.
- Yeah, so they've just started shipping out and what we were talking about in terms of our subject matter today, was if we could have a wishlist or a dream list, I think you called it a Dreamcast.
- Which was it?
- An old-say console, which you made up. But, yeah, so we feel we'd have a conversation next.
- Conversation next.
- What would we like them to do next, or what do we think they would do next, so.
- What should they do?
- What should they do, that's very, very, yeah, what Microsoft should do compared to what they will do is-
- You kind of think that once they finish one release, they'll be planning for the next one or the next one after next or-
- I hope so.
- Yes.
- But, that's so, yeah. So, we thought we come up, we've broken it down into a couple of different areas. So, we've talked about functionality. We said we'll have a little chat about licencing and just really see where the conversation goes. So, as the two people that are heavily involved with the, you know, the projects that we do, the functionality there, what type of things would you like to see in the future releases of Business Central?
- Well, I think functionality. I mean, they've actually, this release we've just had, had probably more functional change in it. I guess we were a little bit biased being in the kind of warehousing-distribution space a lot. But they certainly did more in that and, you know, more of the same to improve what's there. I'm not a fan of them building lots more function, you know, starting massive new functional areas. I think there's a lot of scope for them to actually improve what's already there, and fill some of the missing gaps rather than impinge on the ISV space, you know, because that's the danger if they go after something big and new, is that some of the ISVs that were already there are already in that space, and that, for me, doesn't do the platform any good. We should use ISVs that probably will be better at it because they're more focused and more dedicated to that particular aspect, rather than ask Microsoft to build a whole new module.
- So, I guess for anybody that, who's listening that isn't maybe as is technically up to speed an ISV is a third party that writes some additional app that will work with Business Central to add additional industry specialisations or functionality or improve on something that comes out the box. Okay, so you're saying Microsoft continued to build and improve what's there? Fill some of those gaps but in terms of adding a whole new, right, we've added this, this, this, this, this. If that's already in AppSource or available.
- I, you know, taking that Microsoft has limited resources, I know their resources, you know, we always quote the billions of pounds they invest into Dynamics and all the rest of it but that has to go a very long way across all the Dynamics products and all the rest of it. So, there is a limited amount that they can achieve. I think they would be first to acknowledge that and, you know, would I rather they improved some core bits that are there, like they've done in the last couple of versions. Yes, I would, I think there's some fundamental kind of re-engineering changes that we could do. You know, the application is still very, what are called document-centric. It's still back to the old paper paradigm where you take a sales order and you fill all the details in, you know, and the warehouse transactions as well. We tend to find that everything's happening much more line-by-line so, you know, line-by-line approvals, line-by-line updates so that I can pick one line the... We can make that, we've made that work as an ISV, but I think it would be much better if they could work because people are using electronic devices end-to-end anymore. Nobody goes back to, well, very few Business Central users now go back to the screen with a piece of paper that somebody in the warehouse has written on or somebody in production has written on and so on it. People want it real-time end-to-end. And there's some thinking about how that works because some of it is a little bit clunky.
- I think a lot of that's driven from, certainly, from the distribution customers that we have is there's been a, you know, a massive movement into e-Commerce and, you know, a lot more of our customers selling direct or B2B. And I think that's driven more requirements around the warehousing to, and it changes the way that you physically do things that, you know, if you've got an order for two products and you've got a huge warehouse, you don't want to go and walk all the way up, pick those two items, come back, pack it, and then go out again. You know, you wanna be able to go and pick a whole set of orders and things like tote picking that I'm picking it into, you know, into containers, but that I want to go back and I want to pack those products as a separate process. You know, BC doesn't really support that, to do a separate-pack process, you know, there are some ISVs out there that can fill some of those gaps. But I think it's quite fundamental to the way BC's structured and the other side of that is then loading it onto to a vehicle. So, those elements I think will be good to get into BC because I do think from a distribution side, we're seeing a lot more way of working that it is more aligned to a-
- It is wider than that.
- An e-Commerce supplier.
- If you think about timesheets, you know, the timesheet entry is pretty prehistoric in terms of, and it's really designed, you come with your records of what time you've spent infinity.
- Yes, yeah.
- It's not like, "Right, I'm working on this now," you know-
- Stop stop.
- Of stop, stop. Or even I've spent 10 minutes on this and I just, you know, allocate against the job site I've spent time on. So, you know, in the professional services sector, I think the vertical, you know, the people who provide for that vertical have had to do a fairly major engineering exercise to build that capability. So, I think this aspects of what, as I say, of what they've got that they need to go and, you know, and some of the front, again, you know, we, some inquiries the way that you find information across it. So, you know, when we are preparing for this, you said availability and kind of understanding, okay, something changes on a purchase order, what sales orders, goes through what production orders does it affect.
- Difficult one for the user to answer.
- Yeah, lots of difficult clicks, lots of different lookups. Lots of different filters that potentially searches that they've gotta do. It's not right, this has changed. What's the kind of consequence of that? Which, you know, all comes down in that area to reservation entries, doesn't it? And-
- Yeah.
- wow.
- Who wants to go near those? So, you know, that's a dangerous place to tread.
- Use 'em, but just don't change it because it's... It's, well, maybe we would like it change, but it, yeah, it's a complex area of functionality from a development perspective to go changing. You know, many versions ago we used to get issues with it, you know, it's for quite a few years now. That's been pretty settled I think. But I think it's settled and it's just been left kind of do it on the side. Don't touch it, yeah, don't touch that, and in terms of usability, it's still a bit clunky to use as well. So, you know, I think the concept of it is great. Now, a lot of customers love the fact what it does and allows me to say, "Yes I'm having that stock." But then the reality hits in and it gets a bit harder to lose.
- Well, there's no midway, you know, you've either reservations are on or off. And you've either gotta do it pretty completely or you've got not do it at all. A kind of soft allocation is often a requirement isn't it, where kinda see where, you know, where this inventory is potentially gonna go and...
- I've got two production orders for the same thing. All requiring the same components but I haven't got enough to make both of them, which one can I make? You don't know, yeah, there's an availability report and they'll both say you can make it because they look at it independently, which is just useless for most people.
- So, when you said though, look, that'd be great if they could do something with that. Is there, that must be incredibly difficult for them or Microsoft, I call it them, but Microsoft do a great job on the product generally, but to go and almost rattle something or product a wasps nest or whatever, you know, you wanna do it.
- Yes, but we, you know, from a pre-sales perspective when I'm speaking to prospects and if we're in a competitive situation, you know, having that ability that a purchase order's gonna be late and it tells you which sales orders I need to go and, you know, other products have that.
- Yeah.
- It is that kind of alerting, it's turning Business Central into something that's proactive rather than reactive at the moment, you know, you come to your role centre and you, the best you've got is a few queues with, hopefully, a few numbers on, but even that scenario wouldn't be covered under that. And so, people are spending a lot of time going in and checking different lists, checking different, yeah, and analyse views might help to kind of dissect that information and show a number. But primarily, it would be great if it could come up with, this is a last list of things that need to change and what you need to actually go and organise differently.
- If that's what Copilot could deliver that. Now that would be, you know, a game-changer.
- But that's a, that, you know, there's no extrapolation. That's a fact isn't it? It's factual of this has changed and this was dependent on it. So, you don't need to, you know that, for me, that's not an AI area, that's the data is there, it's just not in a very digestible form at the moment.
- Okay, so there's a couple, we've started with then, you've mentioned reservations, you've talked about improvements in the warehouse, took like picking, and so on and so forth, what sort, what'd be third, fourth?
- So, I think there's a lot of challenges we could sit here and spend a whole podcast on functionality, you know, order processing I think is something that's, there's an awful lot and, you know, if they went to AppSource and had a look, but that brings you to, you know, where is the dividing line between what Microsoft do and what-
- The ISVs do.
- The ISVs do, and they've gotta be careful because, for me, Business Central is increasingly, it's... I think its success is that it's a great ISP platform. How many customers buy it without something on the top of it. And if you looked at the user counts, you know, that we get told that Business Centrals user count is continually climbing. The partners I talk to who the bigger numbers, you know, there's a lot of smaller low-user-cap deals that are sold that are perhaps more generic. But the bigger ones where the significant volume is going through all of those are add-on, you know, have some add-on on the top of it and usually three or four that kind of configure it into something that's very vertical-specific.
- We see that, don't we internally, I think as a partner, you know, there's, it's rare we sell, I can't even think where we've ever sold a vanilla version of Business Central out the box gonna do. There's always a combination of different things. And the ISVs obviously bring a big part thing to the party here because you've got like regional localizations that they're gonna know. I mean Microsoft, this is a global product, right? So, there's an element of localization they do, but there's always something unique about certain regions that the ISV would bring. They've got industry knowledge because they've worked with that, and they've got a very in-depth knowledge. So, it's difficult for Microsoft to have something that fits all because it's never, you're never gonna find a customer, the product of-
- Well, strengths, concentrate on the base, concentrate on that core and let the industries go after, you know, the ISVs go after the industry. So, I think that's what's good. What's not so good is, you know, AppSource's ability. If I was a prospect and I was looking at Microsoft and I wanted a distribution vertical or you know, think retail vertical, you know, how would I find LS? I probably got a much better chance of finding the LS retail website directly via Google than, because AppSource just points you to a number of different apps and doesn't really say which in, you know, I don't get a whole kind of service offers, and so on, for me. Have we ever had a lead from a service offer?
- Not yet, so we've not really put a huge amount of time. We, I'll let you know in about a few months because we've made some amendments and change on that. But you're right, I think you go to AppSource and it's almost like, it's unfair to say it's one big pot and everything's thrown in. You can list out, you know, segment it a little bit. You know, you go to Business Central-
- Can you filter by country yet?
- You can, yes, you can filter by country because it'll say what countries were available. We have to list that but that's difficult as well.
- But can you from, I know we list it when we submit the apps but can you filter it on the front end?
- Well, we've tried to find that certain things regionally it's not been accurate or even safe but find a partner that's very close to the Midlands, we don't always pop up, which is crazy on some of Microsoft systems. So, they're not great on that.
- In the country, at least.
- But I haven't played that source for a while.
- I haven't done it recently, but about four or five months ago, I tried one and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't doing it-
- Yeah, there's not much they don't seem to publish anything for us as a partner or marketing guide to say, "Right, if you, you know, here's our recommendation," how you list your product. "These are the type of things to do to get yourself up in these two areas," I don't think you can have like substitute words where if somebody said, you know, a particular phrase you can change it with maybe what we refer it to. So, there's some work to be done there because we are seeing more and more people find stuff on AppSource. Definitely, end users are driving that discussion now with their partners. But they, the experience isn't great and they might, I don't know about the quality of the apps in all the apps in there as well. Microsoft might need to do something about the entry point that-
- Which brings us onto the whole, you know, actually, the quality as the apps in there get more and more sophisticated because we are now what almost, you know, how many years since V2 apps came out and code, and that kind of whole piece. When was that? Probably, you know, you get in seven years.
- Must be something like that, I mean it's three years-
- Something like that, yeah, so-
- Pandemic time, it was way before that.
- You know, this whole new generation of apps that have been there that kind of suckled to your universal code kind of initiative. Some of those apps are getting pretty sophisticated is the word that comes to mind and now makes testing them a nightmare under the current testing regime. Yes, you can build unit tests, but your whole kind of scenario testing and, you know, it's a lot of deaf effort to maintain your test base on there.
- [Liam] Mm.
- And then you get scenarios where you have two or three apps from multiple ISVs and how do you build a test that goes across that and, well, you can I guess, but you know, you have to get the test libraries from those ISVs unless you start from absolute scratch. It's hugely expensive and it's hugely complicated. And you know, I think that's one area where, again, I would hope Microsoft as the kind of central leader could come to the party with something way better.
- I mean, to be fair it's the one thing they have done with AppSource, it is been on our dream list or our wishlist for a long time now with monetization and that's starting to appear in trials. I know it's not, and the end user won't see it just yet on everything but that will come and I think that's gonna be good for end users. They can just make a transaction with Microsoft being the, you know, the controlling party here rather than having to basically, find the app on AppSource that redirection to the ISVs website, then you have to have a, you know, commercial discussion around how that's gonna be charged-
- And a whole complete pleth of different ways of paying for it-
- Oh, yeah.
- Depends on the partners.
- Absolutely. I mean, we had someone the other day contacted Us and we transact in North America in US dollars. This is a Canadian partner, "Can't we do it in Canadian dollars?" We are not keen on that because it's just another problem for us if, you know, Microsoft with their global platform makes it sense to, you know, for them to do the transaction, yes, to take a small bit of the margin. But we'd happily give that up.
- That's a very small bit.
- Yeah, they've been very generous on that and I think it'd be good. But so, to refer to them, they do listen to what partners are saying. I know we all want everything immediately, but that's one thing that I think in the next 12 months, will be rolled out to, you know, more the apps side, yeah.
- I, you know, understand it that from the Business Central team they had to wait for a lot of things to get in place with the rest of Microsoft, so it's been a long slow road, but, yeah, it's been a four, five, well, ever since AppSource arrived. Really.
- Yeah,
- We've been asking for monetization and it has arrived and they are talking about, you know, other options other than per user coming later. So, you know, when they come I think then it will become the default method and no, no debts on that.
- At the moment, the monetization means you can only pay per user that you've got on your licence.
- On the trial they're running at the moment. If you've got 10 BC users, then you have to match that with your ISV app and which isn't always relevant. And so, but they've always said all the way through, we'll start here and we've got plans for the other licensee model, so, yeah.
- And you mentioned the L word.
- Licencing, yeah, so I think from our point of view from the sales and team, the one thing Microsoft has done for many years now is they've really simplified the licencing, so I haven't got a huge amount of wishlists or anything which I think would make a fundamental change. I think they've really done a good job on that, that it's very easy for end users to work out that they either need essentials users or a premium user. We've got Teams, we've got devices, but you know, they're quite easy for big customers.
- Devices is not a problem. Teams could be a bit more proper-
- Teams, yeah, well Teams are always selling a dream that you can get something really, really cheap and then when you look at it you've obvious only connect general tables and it doesn't really do it. So, it's a little bit of a frustration I think probably for end users they think, "Oh, we could probably squeeze in there without understanding what those limitations actually mean to-
- To read-only plus.
- Yeah, it's not-
- And it, you know, that, isn't that gonna get squeezed because this new thing where you can see your data in Teams without a licence.
- Yeah, possibly, possibly.
- You know, the Team's licence, the ones I hear the most complex are the people who, like we mentioned earlier, the ones who do professional services so they need to input a timesheet or something like that and a few other bits of functionality, you know, maybe put on a purchase requisition, which is a feature that we'd like in the Quora application, please, because it's not just professional services who do requisitions and seems a more common ask. But then, that Teams licencing with the custom tables that they're allowed to do and the three standard tables rapidly runs outta speed and almost very few seem to fit within that.
- Yeah.
- I know it's a Dynamics 365 kind of model they've got across multiple applications. So, again, it's not the Business Centrals Teams.
- Yeah and it'd be interesting because obviously, they've now just released the Team's premium licence, which is not, you know, you've gotta pay a bit more for. I wonder how long it'll be before you need perhaps an M365 certain version if you want that team's interaction with your Dynamics products, you know, might, I haven't done that before, but their licencing-
- It's an announcement by SATO wasn't it? That meant they all kind of had to comply with.
- Which makes completely sense but they've got so many products to so many different variations. It's hard to find a licencing model. I think the one thing that we would, I would like when we speak to customers in sales there's two areas. One, customers like predictability of price and especially on subscription, you know, that horrible thing, I'm gonna buy something and in 12, 24 months the price is gonna increase dramatically and I've got no visibility of that.
- Just when I'm dependent on it.
- Just when I'm dependent. Well, yeah, that's-
- That's absolutely right. So, I think a lot of customers we speak to would like to be able to lock in for longer, which Microsoft have done something. You know, you typically sign up for a 12-month term. I would say 90% of our customers do. You still can do 30 days, but there's a premium price which, again, customers seem fairly comfortable for. They understand if you only wanna sign up, but why can't I sign up for longer and then have a better price? Is one of the questions we have because even if you sign up for a three-year, there's no price incentive, it just locks your prize. But for the three-year there is an awful risk put on the partners. So, I think that's something which Microsoft are fully aware of. So, I won't go through that again now, but if we could do something where there is some form where it's not the pain and the risk isn't all on the partner, I think that would be, would be sensible. I mean particularly, for those customers outside America, because they seem to be aligning the currencies with the US dollar every six months-
- Every six months is the thing-
- Potentially, have a price change every six months.
- Yeah, yeah, that completely. So, that length of time and we know there are other Cloud products out there. ERP Cloud products will lock for five years, which, you know, when we're in a compete situation, that's one that does come back, why can't I do that? And the other thing we would love is for those customers that have invested in Dynamics over the years, still on perpetual licences, they do wanna move to Cloud but there's not really a compelling transition model 'cause they played an awful lot in terms of maintenance, and so on and so forth. Microsoft really could do with coming up with an upgrade or transition policy, whatever they wanted.
- The Bridge to the Cloud Two didn't really float.
- Yeah, it didn't.
- So, what's the options there?
- What's the options, so, if I could do that, I think Bridge to Cloud was a great idea where you take your EP and you split it over 12 months.
- EP in-
- EP in your maintenance. You pay every year on your perpetual licence. And if that was split over 12 months, which is great and you ended up on a Cloud-based model.
- So, you pay no maintenance.
- You weren't paying maintenance more than your enhancement. So, it got you a Cloud-
- Was that guaranteed for?
- That was guaranteed. Yeah, for you it was for, originally the first one was for 12 months, but you could renew for two and three years afterwards as well. You could renew each annual. Now, it's a three-year deal and the only problem with that is that it locks the customer in, which isn't a problem. But should the customer go bump, Mr. Partner has to pay the remaining two or three years or however long's left on that term. That's a big deal.
- This whole thing about partners in effect credit, ensuring customers, it's like we are confused aren't we? because are we insurers or are we partners and it, you know, and actually going off and should we go off to the insurance market and get third-party insurance and bundle out on the top of it. But that would just make us uncompetitive.
- And the other thing with Bridge to Cloud, which Microsoft last year announced that the enhancement plan maintenance we're gonna call it, had increased for the first time that I can remember from 16% of your licence value to 17%. From October this year it's gonna go to 18%. So, they are increasing that and I understand that they're leveraging people to move from perpetual onto Cloud, but Bridge to Cloud every year we have to say, "Okay, what's your enhancement value? And we'll then divide it by 12." So, they're gonna have an increase in years two and three if Microsoft continue to increase the enhancement plan of buy an extra percentage-
- Stop, be a little bit careful that customers just don't go right, I'm-
- Forget my payment enhancement plan, I'll just bank it or, and the other problem is whenever you go into that type of thing, it, there's a... If there's not a compelling commercial offering to move to the same, you know, it's Business Central in the Cloud, they'll go, "Well, if we've gotta re-implement and we've gotta re-license everything, I'll go and look at what else is out there." Why wouldn't I'm, I've, you know, invested in this product. So, I think that's a risk and that's a conversation we've had with some of our customers, you know, they have gone back out to market to see what's out there before making a decision. So, that's one thing that we in the sales team would really like to have and the customer engagement team to have that ability to talk to customers, go to Cloud, and really wanna do it, we show them the benefits of being on the product, they listen to the podcast and then they say, "Well, how can I get that?" It's quite, you know-
- And they've put in a lot of money into-
- Over the years, yeah.
- Over the years.
- Absolutely.
- So, now, Microsoft did have a good transition.
- Business Central should win because their knowledge base of how it works is it has tremendous value. They're predisposed to it but unless there's a commercial offer that makes sense to them, they won't do it.
- Yeah, no, they feel very... They feel like they've got them over a barrel and then they, you're gonna sting me for paying for it twice. So, you know, Microsoft do have a transition skew at the moment but that expires June. I'm hoping they're about to announce something as they come up to year-end. So, that would be great. So, that's on my wish list.
- So, from a kind of platform technical perspective then just coming away from kind of the commercial licencing bit, you know, there are a number of, I think, but Microsoft had done an amazing job of kind of making it a Cloud-first application. You really can't, there's very few areas now where you can kind of say this doesn't look like, you know, there's any compromise on something that was built for the Cloud from the start, at least from my perspective, I can't really tell compared to some others. There's one which is, you know, affects the kind of development community which is this whole thing around objects, object names, objects suffixes, prefixes, will it rest.
- Which goes back many, many years.
- Version, yes it does. Back to the earliest days of nav and, you know, the 50,000 to 100,000 object range and all this rubbish, which they've taken all the kind of, you don't have to buy objects in the Cloud now, you know, another, the reason for going to Cloud because- You get them whereas you still have to buy them On-prem.
- That was a lot of money for some.
- Oh, it was, those tables added up, and you know, added up the annual EP.
- Yeah.
- Annual maintenance as well, which constantly adds to it.
- We had customers that wanted to do some of their own development and it would cost 'em about, I think it's about £22,000 for the licence.
- By the whole development licence.
- So, that's all gone. But you've still got this thing where, you know, preventing clashes between ISVs and between customers. If you develop in the PTE range, potentially, you can't move it very far because everybody's 50,100. That's the default position. You've got, you know, potentially adding the same names if they don't know the rules to the sales line or the item table or which effort. So, you know, there's a concept called name spaces, which is how everything else works. Sooner or later, Microsoft in the last kind of 12 months killed the kind of FLF licence file situation for On-prem. Obviously, that didn't apply on SAS. You know, if they could introduce something that meant that we didn't have to worry about which object ranges we were using and all the rest of it that's just a historical anomaly for me that we should kill.
- Sounds like a big one.
- I'm not, I mean I don't know because it's kind of the platform side but we need to manage it. I think the transition probably might be a bit painful but we're gonna have to do it sooner or later. So, we might as well get it over with sooner.
- I do, feel for Microsoft on that because they've, there's been times they've made quite radical announcements, we're stopping this and we're moving to that and you get half the partner channel, they go, "That's fantastic." They're the proactive ones probably going to Cloud on that journey. You've got the few, they've got a big legacy base and they're going up in arms in uproar about what they're trying to change because it's gonna impact themself.
- But those legacy bases, you know, if you look at those legacy bases now, they're BC '14 and before, I mean most of the people who, you know, once you get, BC '14, for me, is the watershed version. So, all of that historic stuff is pre that. Anything '15 above, well, '15, '16, '17, users on that now? They probably haven't ever up to '18, you know, and even 2022, you know? And they're gonna look at the analyse from reporting capability, they're gonna say, "I want that." So, if you're on extensions already, you're probably gonna do the word. It's not, actually, not that much and not that massive, and you know, if you do a little bit each release, even if you're On-premise for me, you should be thinking about doing an upgrade each year so that you don't get five years behind and then it becomes a massive jump and things like the web client works so much better in '22, you know, '21, even '20, the performance of it is so snappy compared to those early versions. You shouldn't be sitting, putting up with that, so-
- And you're at a war after 18 months anyway, so.
- Yes.
- So, you know-
- I think if you, if that, for me, makes a lot of sense that they're up there. So, yes, so, you know, if they moved to, and I don't think, I think it ought to be relatively simple for them to transition from an object, the object ID model to a name-spaces model relatively easy. I'm hoping, so we'll see what comes on that. I think the other major ask that I had on my list is, you know, the mobile app, how many customers, Matt, you have a lot of customer interaction. How many customers do you know actually use it?
- A few using the tablet app. Very few, unfortunately, using the phone app. It's a great sales kind of tool because I, you know, I think there's a lot of potential there but I think when you come down to use, especially on the phone app, I think it's, you know, there's room for improvement. It hasn't changed an awful lot over the years, is it?
- I, well, I think it, you know, for me, it had a fundamental flaw that this whole thing of like trying to move your role centre, you know, the fact that you can't have a mobile roll centre that you'll use a phone exactly the same way you use the full client. You know, most customers on our full client are on a, you know, almost 4K is default and certainly, HD is the minimum.
- Yeah.
- And trying to kind of really process that and present it onto a phone screen, there's just too much scrolling, too many kind of... Too much extraneous. You want a real cut-down focused-role centre I think for the phone, and you should be able to define for each user and you should be able to define.
- Per device type.
- Per client type.
- Yeah.
- What role centre they go to. Then we could do some cut-down pages that really focused on a few things that people want to do on their phone.
- It's strange because we were all out at a conference a couple of weeks ago and we, I think Liz needed to do something and she was saying, "Oh, have you got your app laptop so I can log on to BC" and everything else I do in my personal life, you know? You think I've got an app on my phone for that and I'll do tickets, whatever I need to do, do it on that. Not once did we think it was anything we got back and you said, "Well, why don't you just do it on your phone?" So, you're right, I think the mobile clients, it hasn't really ingrained itself into our day-to-day usage probably because we're not out the office that much. But, and that was a really good example and you said why didn't you use the mobile app, it's-
- I was using the website in my car the other day.
- I did see you sent me a picture, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- That was on the full screen on your Tesla, yes.
- While he was parked and let's just, yeah.
- Yeah.
- But I think, you know, it, you know, and okay, some of the stuff is moving outside of Business Central. So, things like approvals, you know, as we migrate from inbuilt BC approvals to power-automate-based approvals then, yeah, the power automate client works very well on the phone. So, I can do those approvals but it's a shame that I can't go and look at customer balance or.
- You can do.
- Check inventory on so on, yes.
- Okay, but, yeah, it's not so great. You know, it, I'm sure Microsoft can see from the telemetry how many people are using it and, yeah, the proof is whether people do it twice.
- because they might be looking at the same and going, "Well, no one's using this while we continue investing, or why, what we need to do something to get them using this make changes-
- That's partly what my contention is, Liam, nobody's using it because it's not a good experience, which, so they shouldn't give up on it is what I'm saying, I don't think it should be.
- Great idea, isn't it, the way, you know, when you go in the tablet mode, the, you know, it's assuming that your thumbs on the kind of left and the right and, therefore, most of the buttons and links are on that side, whereas, on the phone it's sent at the bottom. So, and it just does that dynamically. Some great technologies to deliver. I think it's just ready for an update really.
- I suppose my frustration is that I think it's 95% there, you know, it's not far off being perfect, but are people gonna, you know, at the moment you'd have to have a user and you'd have to have two different licences and that would screw up your modern workplace connections and all the rest of it. If you were logged in something different-
- I think a role per client would, that's a nice idea.
- I think that would solve a lot of it and you could, you know, provide a very cut-down interface and then build it up from there rather than assuming that you could re-represent the standard.
- I suppose as well in the majority of cases, most people that are using ELP in a traditional sense are gonna be desk-based or there, and there are some ISVs that then have, as we said earlier.
- You have a specific device if you're on a till or a-
- Yeah, yeah.
- Production floor or-
- But maybe the digital functionality for a role where someone needs to interact with BC maybe from being out on site and you login a report or whatever, login a timesheet or whatever. There are sources out there,
- Isn't it a 24/7 world these days and you know, if you get an email in the middle of the evening, don't you just want to go and check and see-
- Maybe you wanna click, in fact, there's a URL that's actually there, yeah, you're right.
- Yeah, to actually go and find your laptop and fire that up is a.
- I don't disagree with you, in BC we need to get, because you were talking about Teams, you know, I look, if it pings on Teams and there was something there with another link to BC, right, you click on that and then what happens then? And if it's a crap experience then you probably wouldn't do it again, would you? You wait 'til the next day or whatever, which isn't great from an efficiency point of view. So.
- Hmm.
- So, that's, I think there's, you know, that's probably my other major ask.
- We haven't asked for much, have we? Yeah, but look, we, it's always exciting to see what they've got, they're about to announce and what's coming down the line. I think it's the evolution, we've seen less big announcements but lots and lots of little ones and we were, you know, we were impressed with what came in '23 Wave 1. You, no, you're right to directions with North America.
- They don't care.
- I did actually following it.
- Yeah, so. Just to see the announcements, I would expect it, I'll announce a few things at North America and then a few things at Asia. I'm sure they'll listen to the podcast and they'll be amending their presentations for next week as we speak. So, but there maybe..
- Look, we're all in the same space. We're all working with the same objective.
- [Liam] Yeah.
- So, it would be surprising if they hadn't heard some of the requests we've put on, we've put out there from other people.
- Yeah, okay, well, look, the progression of the product continues to really move at a pace. So, they do do a good job, but we, no one's ever satisfied in life either, so we always want more. But it's a great product and it's great to see that it continues to evolve and grow every few months. So, it's good.
- Yeah, and you know, I saw a tweet yesterday, I was looking through my, something popped up and you know, the documentation freshly, the Wave 1 release is still getting added to it, so there's bits and pieces that they're realising, "Oh, we did that, we undocumented." So, that list is still going out there. So, we don't have to wait all the way 'til August to see the next list of enhancements before we get a few Easter Eggs, I guess in the current documentation.
- Very sophical, very sophical. Okay, so well, James, Matt, thanks as always, for coming on and sharing your thoughts. Always an interesting topic. So, appreciate that and thank you for watching or listening to the podcast. If you've got anything you like on the wishlist, please stick it in the comments as we always interest to see what people say.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- And that would be good to see what end users or other people that listen to might say that would be great to be added to the product as well. Okay, well I think that's it and we'll see you soon on another edition of Tecman Talks Dynamics.
