Directions4Partners Conference 2022 Recap
If you follow us on LinkedIn you may have seen that our team has recently been in Hamburg Germany, attending the Directions4Partners conference – where all the best and brightest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partners gather to share their knowledge and experience.
We’ve had a great time, but what does our attendance at the conference mean for our customers? Well, this year there have been some really exciting announcements about what’s coming up over the next year in Business Central. We’ve also come away with some great ideas about how to improve our offerings and processes, and the Dynamics community as a whole has made strides in becoming a more inclusive and diverse part of the tech sector. Read on to find out more…
The Business Central Roadmap
Microsoft gave us a sneak peek of what’s planned for the Business Central Roadmap in 2023:
- Security, privacy and compliance will receive increased investment to ensure Business Central continues to protect your data to the highest standards and the system fundamentals remain best in class.
- More Power Platform. Power Automate is being added directly into Business Central, meaning that BC will be able to handle more approval scenarios. Nothing announced in detail yet but this could include improved functionality around delegation, dynamic approvals and departmental approvals. New Power Apps samples and templates will also help people get started using Power Apps in BC.
- Free Access to BC data in Teams with a M365 License. This one is a gamechanger and will help increase collaboration and empower departments without BC licenses. It will also help increase security by reducing any need to copy and paste data out of the system, while you are still able to fully manage use access and permissions.
- Better Reporting and more data via Power BI connector.
- More Localisations. Over 20 new countries to be added to Business Central.
Do More With Less
The main message of this year’s conference was ‘do more with less’. This means an increased focus on optimisation, making the most of the standard product, increasing automation and taking advantage of the many extensions available to Business Central. Did you know that there are more apps in Microsoft AppSource for Business Central than any other Microsoft product? Business Central out of the box is already awesome, but the potential for maximum efficiencies and growth is found in connecting Business Central to ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and other Microsoft apps such as Teams, Outlook and Excel.
At the conference we met with some great new ISVs. ISVs help us connect Business Central into other systems and enables us to offer expansions to the standard product we implement. To learn more about the ISVs we already work with, check out our webinar series here.
We also came away from the conference with some new ideas about how to better use Power BI and Power Platform with Business Central. We can’t wait to apply this new knowledge to our offerings.
Building an Inclusive and Diverse Community
At last year’s conference in Milan, Bam Boom Cloud’s CEO Vicky Critchley helped launch the Women in Dynamics community, created to encourage more women into the sector and to support those women already working in the Microsoft Dynamics channel. The difference this initiative has made was already clear to see in Hamburg: 32% of this year’s conference speakers were female compared with just 4% last year. Bam Boom Cloud also helped spread the message for new companies to sign the pledge to support Women in Dynamics, as you can see from the team’s t-shirts.
A new initiative for 2022 was also launched in Hamburg to encourage more young people to get involved in Dynamics, with subsidised tickets for under 30s available to help open up the conference to a more age-diverse audience. Supporting early years careers is something Bam Boom Cloud is fully committed to. We were able to send three of our younger team members to the conference, one of whom even presented a session.
Our team have come back to the office super energised and committed to using their new knowledge to make a real difference to our customers. Watch out for exciting new developments over the next few months!
