Kennies reflections from Directions EMEA 2023 - reporting/BI, telemetry, and documents

The Directions EMEA 2023 conference is over and the dust has settled a bit from last weeks. I really enjoyed reading many of the reflection posts from the Business Central partner community and thought that I should pitch in with some of my notes from last week.

First of all, I think that the execution of the conference was very smooth. With such a large event, there will always be small glitches and things that can be improved for next time, but my overall impression was very positive. Kudos to the organizers and the team behind the event.

This year, my impact on the conference was mainly on delivering content, either delivered by me and co-presenters, or helping other speakers sharpen their their message and getting it out there. In this newsletter, I will first discuss some of the latter sessions and then move on to discuss my own messages. Why discuss other peoples sessions? Well, because I believe that these speakers and their content deserve extra mentioning and I hope that you read this newsletter and that these mentions start a background session or two within you.

Contributing to documentation (docs)

One of our great technical writers Susanne Windfeld Pedersen and her manager Morgan Hill hosted a roundtable on docs and how to contribute to this (as all Microsoft documentation is open source). I think this was Susannes first session at Directions, so #kudos to her for doing that).

I heard lots of praise for their session and learned that a few of the participants already had done their first pull request (PR) to the GitHub repository (repo) that hosts content. I am a huge fan of community collaboration and personally believe that the more things we open up like this, the better it is both for the Business Central product, the partners, and for our users. Looking so much forward to following progress on this and observe Morgan, Susanne and their teams success in this area. When (not if!) you have done your first PR to the docs repo (notice how we abbreviate everything in Microsoft?), consider telling the world about it on social media (LinkedIn/X/...) with a #wedothedocs shoutout.

To learn more, go check out https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/help/contributor-guide

Understanding extension lifecycle

My colleague Pooya Kharamesh from the developer tools team (you know, those people who develop the compiler, the VSCode experience, and more) also did his first session at Directions (#kudos). Pooya is the developer behind the micro-service in the online version of Business Central that validates (compiles) extensions: for appsource apps, the service validates them against next version of Business Central (and alerts the publisher via email and in app telemetry). For per-tenant extensions (PTEs), the service also validates them against next version of Business Central (and alerts the publisher via email and in environment telemetry). The service also validates PTEs that are uploaded using the Extension Management page in the Business Central application.

With his work on the validation service, Pooya hopes to be able to influence our partners to get more reactive on resolving issues that delay upgrades for customers. Over the last many months he and I worked on getting telemetry in place for these validation attempts and we finally finished the work during September/October this year. I hope that you will pick up on this and help your customers get a smoother upgrade experience. And do give Pooya feedback on how we can improve the extension validations if you get ideas.

To learn more, go check out

• Appsource validation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/telemetry-appsource-submission-validation-trace

• Per-tenant extension validations: https://github.com/microsoft/BCTech/blob/master/samples/AppInsights/KQL/Queries/ExampleQueriesForEachArea/PTEEnvironmentValidation.kql

• Extension upload validations: https://github.com/microsoft/BCTech/blob/master/samples/AppInsights/KQL/Queries/ExampleQueriesForEachArea/PTEUploadValidation.kql

Business Central Performance Toolkit (BCPT)

Over the last year, I have been working with Henrik Frovst Madsen and Peter Christensen (aka Bugsy) on how we can get a broader usage of the Business Central Performance Toolkit. We identified a few key ingredients that we wanted to focus on in 2023:

1. removing friction (making the tool easier to use and add support for DevOps test pipelines in AL-GO)

2. identify and document personas and scenarios (see https://aka.ms/bcpt)

3. involve the partner community (the tool can now source test suites from a GitHub repository)

Henrik and Bugsy delivered a great session on how we have improved BCPT on all three dimensions, they demoed how easy it is to spin up a test (it really is as easy as 1-2-3) and also talked a bit on how they saw future investments of the tool. Sitting in front row, I noticed a lot of participants take notes and discuss amongst each other how now might be the time they should start using this back in their ISV and VAR practices. I really hope that partners will pick up on this, both running tests in Devops or before go-lives, but also start contributing to the open source test suites on GitHub. Together, we can reduce performance issues before they surface users.

For more information, see https://aka.ms/bcpt.

And now to something completely different...

Reporting (Power BI embed, Data Analysis, and Excel layouts)

Together with great co-presenters Enrico Cimitan, Niels-Henrik Sejthen, Blazej Kotelko, and Brian Nielsen from the Business Central product group, I did four different sessions on this topic, targeting different segments of participants: developers, functional consultants, BI developers, and sales people who need to know where we are talking this area in the product.

I only got two comments on repeat content (also on BCLE sessions compared to what we did for Directions), so probably ok to do many sessions, but not something I would do a lot in the future. My reasoning for the many sessions was that I wanted to get the message “The world is changing (in reporting)” out to as many participants as possible (if you have do idea about what I am talking about, check out https://youtu.be/qmLVKyHRhNc?feature=shared&t=62 )

Here is the sentiment and comments I got in this area...

Overall, participants love the direction we are taking reporting, both for capabilities and for content (that melts my little PM heart...).

My action items on reporting all up is

• Revisit reporting docs for developers and ensure that the message “The world is changing (in reporting)” is reflected there. Stay tuned - I will definitely speak up when we have news to share on that topic.

• Add the Introducing Data Analysis BCLE video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmLVKyHRhNc  to docs (if possible)

In the Excel layout session, half of the participants used Excel layouts with customers. This is a significant change since last semester. We got spontaneous applause when people saw a sample of the new Excel reports that we will ship in 23.x. I agree, the work that Brian Nielsen is doing with his team in this area is amazing and I cannot wait to share the news when the new reports are ready to hit version 23.x. Niels-Henrik Sejthen did a great job showcasing new capabilities to Excel layouts that are not even in main yet but that we hope to ship in 23.2 (I will make some noise about this and update the release plan when we get closer to something shippable). He is the engineer behind this (and many more reporting) feature, and I think that he did a great job giving just the right amount of details to the audience.

For more information about Excel layouts, see https://aka.ms/bcreporting and https://aka.ms/bcexcelsamples.

My action items on Excel layouts are

• Update Excel reporting docs with design guidelines for datasets and layouts. Also explain how to utilize different modelling concepts in Excel (Power Query/Pivot, Excel tables, dynamic array formulas, …). Will follow up with social media posts when docs changes are live.

• Maybe do an Office Hour session on Excel reporting when all 23.x features are in.

• See if I can do a recording of “Introducing Excel layouts” that we can add to our new Youtube channel and maybe also to docs.

For our new Power BI (PBI) embed capabilities: we got very positive sentiment and I noticed many developers taking notes during our session. Seems like we have filled a gap that will unblock getting more PBI adoption.

For more information about Power BI embed, see

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-power-bi-report-parts and

https://aka.ms/bcpbisamples

We also talked briefly on our strategy for Business Central and Microsoft Fabric. This definitely sparks interest with partners, specifically those who deal with with the upper part of the SMB segment. Participants liked that we have put this notice out on docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/admin-fabric

Telemetry

Still lots of interest in this topic. I had 600+ people wanting to join a roundtable on data-driven implementations! Got a full room of 400+ people attending, some people had to be rejected to get into the room.

I think that the adoption rate/partner maturity on this topic is changing: in the “whats new in telemetry” session, almost all participants had enabled telemetry - I have never seen this before. Our discussions were more on Return of Investment (ROI) and usage scenarios outside “the machine room”. A handful of partners now use telemetry in all aspects of their partner practice (sales, implementation projects, support). I have never seen this before. Very positive.

My action items for telemetry are:

• Revisit telemetry docs and adjust to make ROI and scenarios stand out even more.

• Go through the Ask Me Anything (AMA) questions and update the telemetry FAQ/docs. When docs changes are live, post on social media for visibility.

• Keep doing telemetry sessions at conferences, but shift focus from bits and bytes towards ROI, scenarios, and maybe partner testimonials.

That's all folks! Kudos if you made it all the way to the end. As always, comment on the post (or reach out to me in person) if the content triggered food for thought.