What future for Microsoft products? What next with Business Central? Participants of Directions EMEA conference gave answers for those and other questions.
Two thousand people from all over the world met in Vienna to talk about the future of Microsoft solutions for companies. Among the participants were also representatives of IT Vision
Microsoft products – what future?
At annual meeting latest changes and future directions of development were discussed. Microsoft dedicated last year to refine its products. What is changed, is the philosophy of cooperation with partners. Microsoft want to focus on drawn of partners experience, who implement the product at the clients. Technical team want to listen to partners voice and consider their comments and opinions gained during implementations. They want to base on those experiences using them to create and develop their solutions. What is more is establishing a special council, the Directions Advisory Coucil, which is an intermediary between Microsoft and partners. To develop easy and quick exchange of information Microsoft created special platform of partners opinions.
” This year we
can see a significant market change: we speak less about the changes in
technology. In some extent they’ve already happened (or have been happening in
the background). We now put the stress on profits coming from new cloud
architecture – faster, cheaper implementation, easier adoption of new
technologies. It’s the end of the world of large systems – being hard to
implement and even harder to upgrade.”
Paweł Prymakowski, CEO IT Vision
Localization
Refining Microsoft products and changing the philosophy are not all changes at Microsoft. They also changed the approach to localization. It shouldn’t be separate product, but localization is supposed to be an extension. There was also factorization of the code to improve the performance of the solutions offered. Security, code quality and testing standards have also been improved.
Approach to customers
What is also changing is approach to the client. He should decide which solution he wants to use. Change of approach is connected with change in architecture. Microsoft introduced application modularity. They want to resign from standard Windows client panel – right now we are mainly using apps trough web client. Current comfort of work in browsers is equal to Windows apps but in addition we receive higher protection for unstable internet connections and simpler implementation – we don’t need to install anything.
“The fact is that Dynamics is a multi-billion dollar cloud company that is growing at a rate of 45 percent year-on-year. We approach this enterprise, but the driving force behind this business is still space for small and medium-sized businesses, we are still observing an incredible increase of over one hundred percentage in CSP. “ Toby Bowers, General Manager, Product Marketing at Microsoft
Easier and faster implementation
Microsoft shows that they want to shorten the time and reduce the difficulty of implementation of their products. They also strive to deliver as simple application as they can be. The company want to aim those goals through could solution, which is already prepared. Microsoft localizations are also prepared and ready to share with clients. All of this leads to lower cost of entrance and keeping the client.
Taking into account planned direction of changes strengthening relationships of partners implementing the main ERP product for small and medium enterprises, Business Central, is necessary. Applications created by partners should be generally available – compliant with standards and written in the extended known and used language. These changes seek to standardize products and unification of applications will allow to exchange them between partners.
Cooperation of partners
Because of implemented cloud model client’s panel will be available through browser. Main tools which will cooperate together will be: Business Central, Microsoft Flow (external solution to control workflows) and PowerApps (programs, tools and apps displayed in the store, created by partners).
One of very interesting topics at conference was a panel discussion about the future of product and partner network. During the debate, with the help of meeting participants, efforts were made to identify the main problems and ideas for product development. Directions Advisory Council discussed about topics which were chosen by Microsoft partners.
