As a mobile warehouse data collection tool, Insight Works’ Warehouse Insight makes battling inefficient operations due to inaccurate warehouse transactions and time-consuming manual tracking problems a thing of the past. However, there’s a unique feature baked into this incredible mobile warehouse management system that many users aren’t aware of – one that helps companies that follow a specific process integrate the process (or processes) within Warehouse Insight itself.

It’s known as the Application Designer, and it requires no programming experience in order to take advantage of it.

First, let’s go over some of the ways Warehouse Insight relates to applications, as this will give you a better idea how they contribute to proving Warehouse Insight can easily adapt to any warehouse environment.

Warehouse Insight and Applications At-a-Glance

• At a high level, Warehouse Insight applications allow users to create customized screens and processes within the handheld application without the need to modify the underlying source or deploy additional files to the handhelds.
• Applications can be complete, complex and fully standalone modules (for example, existing modules like shipping/receiving) or as simple one dialog processes (like asking for a line comment).
• The designer events are generally triggered either by actions taken by users (scanning barcodes, pressing menus, etc.) or by specific processes internal to the application framework (opening or closing an application, loading data, etc.).

The Nuts and Bolts of Application Designer:
Extending a NAV System to Meet Specific Needs via Drag-and-Drop Tools

Looking to build your own custom applications in a warehousing environment, such as for Assembly Orders? It’s super-simple using Application Designer in Warehouse Insight – the system will load up the application for you, and then you can go on to perform a myriad of actions like, for example, scanning a license plate and capturing a signature for that action. Perhaps best of all, this protocol integrates with NAV, so it’s a natural extension of the solution.

Here’s the functionality summary of Application Designer in a nutshell:

Application Designer provides a simple way to add new apps to the warehousing system, or to extend existing apps with new business logic. A simple drag-and-drop interface enables you to build and visualize complex applications and business logic with minimal effort on your behalf, while the system’s plug-in architecture also enables you to extend existing functionality devoid of any product code modification.

Insight Works: Changing the Warehousing Game Through Innovative Solutions

As leaders in operational productivity improvement through the efficient implementation of add-ons for Microsoft Dynamics, we here at Insight Works have focused our efforts on helping manufacturing, warehousing and distribution entities get the most out of Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central. Indeed, to say that our experience has made us experts in project execution and technology development is something of an understatement.

Here are the core benefits of using Warehouse Insight:

• Support for a wide range of hardware (including products from Datalogic, Zebra and Honeywell).
• Advanced features such as Application Designer, which we highlighted in this blog, enable you to extend your NAV system to handle your specific warehouse operation needs.
• Real-time access to inventory and production data to perform all inventory and management operations from handheld devices as well as capture lot and serial numbers for any transaction.
• Increased efficiency with everything you need at your fingertips by way of leveraging a consistent user interface on the handheld device regardless of NAV location configuration, as well as scanning directly to sales and purchase documents.
• Streamlined warehouse operations via palletizing or packaging items while easily configuring views and menus on handheld devices.

Learn more about Warehouse Insight by visiting http://WMSforDynamics.com/.

Your first reaction is probably – duh, I know! Well – I’m late, that’s true. At Directions North America, Microsoft announced the availability of the new version of Business Central – and I didn’t spend one single post on it. Until now. Reason is simple – I was quite busy at the conference, and I didn’t want to lose too much time on writing. I need to spend 14 hours in a plane anyway – which I’m doing at this point. Greetings from the sky!

Directions North America

This was by far the best Directions NA to date. Not only thanks to the content, but the organization and the location was magnificent. Not too far from the airport, nor the city. Great hotel, great venue, great food. On top of that, great speakers, great content in an abundance of interesting sessions.

I am so much looking forward to the next conference, which will this time be in May next year (Las Vegas) – when the next release of Business Central will be release (oh yes – we will have a 6-months cadence going forward – read on if you want to know more…). This means that from now on, Directions NA will be in spring, while Directions EMEA will be in fall. We will not be able to speak about “conference season” anymore – as that’s going to be all year :-).

Disclaimer

I was honored to do some sessions and workshops this year, as I already mentioned in a previous post. Usually, that means I spend a lot of time in the hotel room or speaker room to prepare.

This year, I wanted to catch as much content as at all possible. During most of them, just listening with one ear to the content, and the other was mostly unavailable, because I was preparing for my own sessions as well. This means: no notes whatsoever. So I’ll have to draft this blogpost from memory. Now – my family say that my memory doesn’t go further than 24 hours, so I can’t promise any valuable or truthful information going forward ….. how is that for a disclaimer ;-).

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Released: On Premise and in the Cloud

Starting October 1st, we have the official release of the new version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, which is now called Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Both On Premise as in the Cloud. So, yes, now we can download DVDs ;-). The pillars that Microsoft has been working on are

• Modern
• Unified
• Intelligent
• Adaptable

Let me go over the stuff that I have found very interesting during these days. Again: I didn’t catch it all, that was simply not possible, but I might write a follow-up post with resources on where you can catch it all! I might – but don’t wait for me – there always is google ;-).

ModernUI

One of the most noticeable new features it the new UI for the Web Client: you can basically now work with the Web Client as if it was a newspaper. I personally very much like the web client as it is now. It is much more efficient and certainly has a very modern taste to it.

This Modern UI is now all over: Phone, Web, Tablet and the Universal client. Not the Windows Client, though… But you all know what that means (later more about that…).

New features were introduced, like:

• Headlines– a way to have rotating text on the role center, with interesting information, and links to details to this interesting information.
• More intuitive buttons on the different page-types, like the “back” button, Next/Previous record, Toggle Read/Write, … .
• They used even telemetry to introduce a better order of the actions.
• Lots of keyboarding shortcuts have been introduced. Just to name a few:
  • F8 – oh yes, it’s back! (and there was even an applause when they showed it :-))
  • Shift+Down/Up to selects records
  • CTRL+C to copy rows
  • ALT+Q to end up in the heavily enhanced “search” feature
  • ALT+F3 – Filter

  And quite a lot more. Here is a complete overview: https://aka.ms/bckeys

• Ability to paste content as records. As said, you can copy rows, and you can paste them as new rows, you can even paste records from excel.
• Filter Records: As you might remember, we were not able to decently filter records. Now we can! The full Monty! Filter on many fields, and even with a shortcut ALT+F3, which
  • Opens the filter pane
  • And already filters the field and value of the active field. Love it!

  And of course – yes – now we can use flowfilters again!

• A heavily enhanced search. You all know the “search page”. Well, this now finds so much more, and it is going to show the results somewhat more intelligent. It’s called now “Tell me“.. and I love it!
  • You can open de search with ALT+Q, and when performed a search, you can simply press “Down” and execute the requested action.
  • First of all, they introduced a “fuzzy search”: if it sounds “kind of” the same, it might still find what you are looking for.
  • Second, it is also going to look for any interesting documentation on Microsoft Docs
  • It is also going to search Actions on a page. You know some pages have quite some actions. Starting to keyboard through them might take time. I’m using this myself from the minute I know it exists now – love it! Just ALT+Q, keyboard the action, down, enter: done! No mouse needed!
• Also somewhat related to “Modern UI” is the new PowerBI reports that are being made available. For Business Central in the cloud, Microsoft even auto-deploys PowerBI. We all have been struggling with it – so I appreciate this very much ;-).

Intelligent

Microsoft made it very clear: the power of the future is going to be in the data.

For this release, Microsoft already added some more features in getting more out of the data, by introducing machine learning in different areas. From what I remember: a prediction in overdue invoices, with actions for you to be able to block the customer, or ask for a prepayment. The functionality takes all your payment information and puts it in an AI model, where it predicts future payments.. .

This was an example of what Microsoft is doing, and will continue doing going forward. In the upcoming release, you may expect more “intelligence” on your data.

Now, does this mean that all these services are only going to be available for the cloud-version? No! Microsoft is working towards something that is called“The intelligent cloud for On Premise (Intelligent Edge)”

Here is an intro video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJA4PQogM0Q

And the description on Microsoft Docs:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/about-intelligent-edge

In the demo, they showed GP, which had this connector set up, and which was actually going to fill a Business Central (read only) tenant with the data from GP, resulting with all the goodies Business Central has:

• The role center
• The different clients (like the phone client)
• PowerBI reports
• Predictions
• …

It actually used Business Central as a kind of data warehouse. I unfortunately didn’t have time to attend a breakout session on that, but I will sure do that during Directions EMEA to get more information about this.

Admin Center

Microsoft is improving the world of (CSP) partners as well, by building an “Admin Center” for them: a portal (which is already available) to control certain things about their customers, like:

• Setting up an upgrade-window that Microsoft will respect when pushing upgrades
• Providing telemetry for a lot of things
  • Which extension are they using
  • Which objects within the extension are used
  • Failure messages

  And yes – all this is available through an API!

• The ability to set up a sandbox environment WITH production data, to be able to debug with relevant data.

The question I have on this is how the partners of apps are going to get this telemetry – I think it would be very useful for them as well! From what I’ve seen – very interesting!

AL Only

One of the biggest things that was shown for me as a developer, was the very fact that Microsoft was able to completely convert their C/AL code to AL. In fact, the night before the second keynote, after two years of hard labor, the developers at Microsoft were able to do a successful conversion – and they were able to run a service with only AL objects, no C/AL whatsoever.

Make no mistake: This.Is.Huge!

But– don’t over-think it either, please. One might think that the move to extensions is not necessary anymore. Wrong!

Yes, in theory, we would be able to do the same in AL as in C/AL: totally f.. up the database by customizing existing objects. Let’s not do that.

Extensions solve your upgrade-problem. Move to extension, and make sure you are able to catch up with all these releases going forward.

The general feeling that many people have regarding the evolution of Business Central is: it’s moving FAST. Well, that’s all the reason you need to make your product, and your customers as upgradable as at all possible. It’s more than time to move away from the old development and customization model. The ability to migrate C/AL to AL isn’t changing that paradigm at all!

The only thing you need to get out of the “AL Only” model is the good news that in the very near future, we will actually be working with the awesome development environment we have been craving for years!

And – if you would wonder how long it took to compile 5800 objects – 2 minutes :-). Are you still afraid of having so many objects in your app?

Miscellaneous

I’d like to end the “real” content with a few miscellaneous topics:

• Microsoft is going to heavily work on testability. They request testability for all our apps, and now they promised decent tools for us to execute it. Finally ;-).
• On top of that, Freddy is also very much working on improving the Docker experience, like:
  • set up scripts for an easy CI/CD implementation
  • Making the images smaller so they can be used on ACI (also to facilitate CI/CD scenarios)
• The version of the AL Language VSIX was always very dependable on the version you were developing for. Not anymore. The version online (on the marketplace) will be very regularly updated with the newest features, while it’s backwards compatible to the old versions.

There was more to it – but this is what I remember

The Ready To Go program

Don’t worry, I’m not going too deep into the “Ready To Go Program”, because I already did. But do know that this program is still very active, and a great way for you to get going on all the new stuff.

One thing that has changed recently is that the learning material has been made publicly available on youtube!

6-month release-cycle

Yes, you read the title well: from now on, it’s not going to be a yearly-release, but every 6 months, Microsoft will work towards a new (major) release. This is also the reason why Directions US has be moved to the Spring, so we will have Directions US around the spring release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and we will have Directions EMEA for the fall release.

Roadmap

Wow, you made it to the end ;-). Well, at least after this:

As already said, Microsoft will invest in getting as much as possible out of the data that you have, so you can run your business as “intelligent” as possible.

Going forward, in 12 to 24 months, we will only work with the Web Client as Microsoft will continue work on making the Web Client as efficient as at all possible. Last but not least, as already mentioned, Microsoft is already able to convert their app to AL, well – in 12 to 24 months, they will only ship AL (and do know, there is no conversion-tool planned from AL to C/AL ;-)). I can hardly wait ;-).

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central On-premise, What’s New Part II

Now I’m introducing some new features regarding Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central On-premise October’ Release.

Several new pages have been added, some features of various types, some codeunit; I will talk in this Part II of What’s New only about some functional changes, not technicals.

New Pages Added

New Pages Type: Headline

These pages are displayed in the Web Client, you can configure and extend them.

EXAMPLE of Headline Pages

Headline RC Business Manager

HEADLINE IN WEB CLIENT

Role Center Overview Page

A nice page to show topics for each Role Center

Intelligence Cloud Insight

Great RoleCenter-page to show aggregated data and KPI with Insight information, you can activate Cortana Intelligence to integrate forecast calculation

NEW PAGES

A list of some new pages added

Finance Pages

Customer Address Format

Extensions Management Pages

Automation Pages

Power BI Pages

Blanket Order Archiving Pages

Permission Set

CODEUNITS

Codeunit 1 > removed

Triggers Codeunits > Added

SOME NEW FUNCTIONALITIES

Items blocked are not visible in Sales, Purchase Orders etc., good feature.

Example: In Sales Orders, blocked item is not showed in item list.

Catalog Item (ex. Non-stock items)

These pages have been renamed from Non-stock item to Catalog Items

Sales Quotes: Archive Document

The functionality of archiving documents has been put in different places

Send to email feature improved

Preview always embedded in document, nice layout, improved feature.

Item Sales Blocked

You can have multi options to block an item; in this case, you can block “Sales”

Non-Inventory Items

Finally.. you can manage the NOT inventory items directly from Item Type option

Copy Account Schedule

Nice feature to copy Account Schedules.

More manual setups added

Finance Charge Interest Rates Changed

Stay tuned!

Sourcehttps://robertostefanettinavblog.com/2018/10/04/microsoft-dynamics-365-business-central-on-premise-whats-new-part-ii/

Power BI “Ready-to-use Apps” for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Microsoft has published and updated the following Power BI content packs composed by “Ready-to-use Apps” for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and is creating new ones in order to enhance the product offer.

Currently they are available “Ready-to-use Apps” reports for some topics:

• Finance
• Sales
• Item List
• Jobs List
• Purchase List
• Customer List
• Vendor List
• Item List

Apps (Content packs) “Ready to use” for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

“How-to” get the Power BI Apps

To search and get Apps you need to go in Power BI: Workspace > Get Apps > My Organization > Apps for Power BI > Search

Example of “Customer Sales Dashboard” in Action

Example of “Sales List” in Action

Example of “Sales Line Items & Quantity”

STAY TUNED!

Sourcehttps://robertostefanettinavblog.com/2018/10/07/power-bi-ready-to-use-apps-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-business-central/

Let me ask you something. What do you do on November 22 and 23, 2018? Well, let me not ask you what you do, let me tell you what you do: You attend NAV TechDays 2018.

In the very unlikely case you just landed on this planet from outer space, and don’t really know what NAV TechDays is, then let me know that it is the #1 technical conference about NAV, that has been running for 8 years now, since 2011. It’s cram-packed with cutting-edge technical content about NAV (and BC), delivered by the top people in the NAV world, including Microsoft’s team that’s building the technology, MVPs, and other renowned technical experts in the field. If you are serious about Microsoft Dynamics NAV (or Dynamics 365 Business Central) and you consider yourself a techie, then there can be absolutely no excuse for not attending NAV TechDays.

TechDays is so much different than other NAV conferences, and here’s why:

• It’s 100% technical content. You won’t find level 100 or 200 sessions here, it’s all deep dive, highly technical content. You won’t find any marketing content here.
• It’s 100% kick-ass content. NAV TechDays has far more content submissions than the number of sessions they can accommodate, and this makes only the top of the top of the top content to be selected. Not everyone can be a TechDays speaker!
• It’s 100% passion, distilled. You’ll hear people share their experience, their tips and tricks, you’ll hear them spread their love for the product. You’ll see passion on stage, you’ll see passion in the audience.
• It’s 100% original format, no other conference does it. It’s only 2 parallel tracks at any given point in time, and it’s 90 minutes per session. At TechDays, when you want to learn something, you really get to learn about it.
• It’s 100% about NAV. No AX, no CRM, no nonsense.

If you are still not sure if you need to be there, then this is why you absolutely need to attend:

• You get to meet your colleagues and peers. It’s 100% technical conference, targeting developers, so you won’t get to meet marketers, salespeople, or generally non-technical folks.
• You get to talk to Microsoft people, the folks that define the architecture of NAV, the folks that write its code, the folks who know it inside out.
• You get to see some amazing products built on NAV and for NAV in the expo area. Even there, you won’t talk to your regular salespeople – these are also mostly technical folks, eager to show off their product and discuss it.
• You get thousands of new ideas, and you expand your horizons. Some sessions will really blow your socks off.
• You get gallons and gallons of free beer! Come on, this is Belgium, the place where the finest beer is brewed. And you get all of it for free. Honestly, can you beat this?

And if you are still not convinced, consider this: every year, for past seven years, NAV TechDays was the only NAV conference that was publishing all of its content, online, for free, very soon after the conference. And yet, they still full up, and they still grow in attendance numbers year over year.

To wrap it up, if you consider yourself an NAV developer, and you have never attended NAV TechDays, you haven’t lived. Be there. So, go, grab your ticket before it’s too late, and…

… see you in Antwerp!

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