Directions EMEA 2018 – The Hague, Netherlands (October 29-31)
EBS has returned from the annual European NAV Partner conference, which was held in The Hague, Netherlands. The conference had over 2200 dynamics partners attending from more than 45 countries. The key topic of the conference is the new release of Dynamics 365 Business Central. There is now a cloud and on-premise version of Business Central available in Australia.
“Business Central” is the name of the latest NAV version, instead of “NAV 2019” is it called Business Central (BC).
Compared to the first release of D365 Business Central, there has been over 100 improvements in the last 6 months, mostly related to user experience. The windows client will not be available, instead there is a “Desktop App” that can be installed in Windows 10 from the Windows Store, this will allow for a dedicated application (and desktop/taskbar shortcut). The experience will be the same as within the browser.
Compared with NAV 2018 the menus and role centre has changed completely. Instead of the side menu, there is a navigation menu available along the top which is available from any window, which allows for quick access.
Key improvements in this latest version of Business Central:
1. “Tell Me” (what you want to do.. )
This replaces the previous searching for menu items, it is accessed using the shortcut “Alt-Q”
Instead of searching for a report or page, you can now use key works to explain what you are looking for and it will suggest options. It also has synonym searching, so it can find similar terms. It will also give links directly to help documentation.
Searching for “chart of accounts” will show a link directly to the page, but also related documentation.
When searching on a page, it will also display related actions on that page, For example, on the chart of account, searching for “dimensions” will give you a link directly to the setup of default dimensions on the current page.
2. Power BI Reports
When launching BC, for each user, (once enabled) a suite of PowerBI reports will be deployed automatically. This is assuming PowerBI has been used previously for the user.
The key benefit here is that users will NOT need a PowerBI Pro licence to use the default reports. Admin users can “Upload” Power BI reports (from a pbix file) directly into NAV and it will automatically add it to ALL users in BC.
On other list pages throughout the system, you will also see these BI reports, such as below on the vendors list:
3. Shortcut Keys
Copy and Paste rows is now available!
Ctrl-C to copy a row, the notification will appear to show the number of rows copied, then Ctrl-V to paste the row.
Below is a screenshot of the key new shortcuts as show at the Directions EMEA conference. There are many more available.
Click here top explore more Microsoft Dynamics Business Central keyboard shortcuts
4. Advanced Filtering
As suggested in the previous screenshot, Alt-F3 can be used to filter on the current highlighted value, and this will toggle the filter pane to appear on the left hand side.
From here, you can also “Filter totals by..”
This replaces the NAV “limit totals” filtering.
These filters will be remembered for the current session, when the user logs out they will be reset. Currently, there is no ability to “save views”, that will be available in a future release.
5. User Interface Improvements
- Paper like page layout, stacks of paper appear when new windows are opened.
- Back button to close instead of “X”. (there is no save button, as it will also auto-save)
• Action Bar replaces the ribbon (which can be pinned), and there is an action bar for subpages (lines)
• Navigate with arrows for next/previous
• New data item look and feel, such as a True/False
6. Edit in Excel
Lists can be Edited in excel, for example you can select to Edit the vendors list in excel which will open excel and you can sign in with your account, then you can make any valid changes, and choose to “Publish”, which will update the data in BC.
7. Intelligence
• Late payment prediction
From a sales order, you can use an action to predict whether the payment will be late. This is based on a data model that can be configured.
8. Intelligent Cloud Insights
If you are using the on premises version of Business Central, then to make use of all the benefits of the cloud, you can sync data to the cloud. Tables can be specified and scheduled and a “Replicate Success Rate” would be displayed.
This functionality would provide the ability to transition from on-premise to cloud, as all the data can be replicated to the cloud.
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Daniel Argus is NFP Division Manager at EBS. Daniel has extensive experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV implementations, providing training to multiple users and onsite support and guidance.