Dynamics Corner

Episode 346: In the Dynamics Corner Chair: Reporting in Business Central's 2024 Wave 2: Ready?

• Kennie Pontoppidan • Season 3 • Episode 346

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🌟 Straight from the source! Get ready for an exciting episode with Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft! 🌟
 
🏄‍♂️Join Kennie, Brad, and Kris as the sit down at Community Summit North America 2024 in beautiful #SanAntonio, #Texas, where they explore the fantastic new of features in #BusinessCentral 2024 Wave 2!
 
From enhanced reporting capabilities to #PowerBI integrations, this episode is packed with new features and insights you don't want to miss.
 
Learn:
✨Why Community Summit NA is the place to be for learning and connecting with like-minded folks.
✨How BC 2024 Wave 2 is brimming with new reporting tools.
✨How enhanced Word layouts will offer more customization and unique theming options.
✨Why RDLC reports are future-proof with evolving usage patterns.
✨The whopping 75 — yes, you read that correctly — 75 new PowerBI reports for Business Central!
✨The ability to make DIY reports and customize without a designer.
✨Improved UX in BC, focused on improving discoverability of existing reports.
✨And much more!
 
🎧 Tune in now and stay ahead of the BC curve (or wave)! 🚀💼
Click here to listen and elevate your Business Central game! 🎙️🔗

#MSDyn365BC #BusinessCentral #BC #DynamicsCorner

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#MSDyn365BC #BusinessCentral #BC #DynamicsCorner

Follow Kris and Brad for more content:
https://matalino.io/bio
https://bprendergast.bio.link/

Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner. In this episode it is a very special episode because we're right next to each other. I'm your co-host, chris.

Speaker 2:

And this is Brad. This episode was recorded on October 14th. Chris, chris, chris. We're right next to each other, but it doesn't look like we're right next to each other. Look look look, look See. Oh wait, your finger went into my screen.

Speaker 1:

I know it's warm.

Speaker 2:

Wait, wait, wait. How come I can't go into yours? Oh, there we go, okay, oh, no, great. Here we are, day one of a community summit North America here in San Antonio, texas. I want to go get some steak and a cowboy hat. See, I should have bought a cowboy hat. We have to do another recording with the cowboy hats which we're going to get, but in this episode we had the opportunity to just learn a lot about what's new in Business Central 2024, wave 2, for both reporting and Power BI, with what I call the year of reporting and data analytics With us. Today, we had the opportunity to speak in person with us in the same room. Kenny, I don't know what to do sometimes, kenny, thank you for joining us today. Here we are, day one of Community Summit North America in San Antonio, texas. How are you liking San Antonio?

Speaker 3:

Oh, I only had a fish taco at the hotel before my first session, so I arrived noon. I left Fargo, north Dakota 5 am this morning and I arrived here at noon and got a fish taco and directly to our first session. So that's the kind of San Antonio I've seen.

Speaker 2:

So it's the usual travel, where you show up when you see a room. Oh yeah, just like they put you in the basement to do work, they put you in a room here to not see anything. Well, hopefully you get to see more as you're here in San Antonio. And again, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Here we are at the Community Summit, which is a big event, but also we recently had the release of 2024 Wave 2, which is something that's also extremely important and has a lot of features and functionality with it. So a couple of things I wanted to speak with you about is what's new in 2024 wave 2, with business central for reporting wow, that's a.

Speaker 3:

That's. That's a lot of things and a lot of small things, so let me just start with the small things. So, for anyone working with the layouts, we did a like 10 small features just to make that easier, and we have a video on that for our Business Central launch event where you can kind of see all the small little tricks. I call it all the little things we did to make that easier. Then, for document reporting, so anything where you send your quotes or your sales invoice to a customer, we added a lot of things to the word layout feature, highlighting three things I would say.

Speaker 3:

The first one is freeing up the word feature called sections, and that's a huge thing. This means that there's a lot of things in Word that is bound to the section, so things like your margins, your paper orientation, your watermarks, your footers and headers, and by enabling this in your Word layout you can actually change all of these during your layout. So let's say that you have an invoice or something you sent to the customer, where page two would be nice to have a wide table. You can just change your margins and your orientation on that page two in the same layout. So that's number one.

Speaker 2:

Number one, yeah, number one of a lot so that's number one Number one yeah, number one of a lot. It's a, it's a, it's a. It's a lot to digest, but I'm happy to see the direction that we're moving with Business Central and the word layouts. Yeah, and we'll go with the other ones. I have a few comments on this, but I'm excited to hear yeah, number two, number three, number two is support.

Speaker 3:

This was kind of a POC. I wanted to see how I knew we could do it, but now it's also part of the standard layout and that's a themable layout. What this is is changing our standard layout in Word so that whenever you go to the layout option in Word and change the office theme, everything changes to the theme. So colors, fonts, everything. So what this means is and I'm actually going to do a demo here at the keynote tomorrow, but this will go out after, I guess- We'll try to put it out as quickly as possible.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but the demo tomorrow and the keynote is a marketing head of marketing wants to do something fun for Halloween. A marketing head of marketing wants to do something fun for Halloween. So what they want to do is they want to have Halloween themed quotes they send to customers. That would be fun. Now, halloween is also about scary, and maybe for some developers that seems like a scary thing, and then it's not. You just, they can actually just go and download the word layout for the quote. They can go and change the theme to something gothic, like a gray theme or maybe a halloween yellow one or orange one, and I even did a copilot in Paint and asked for a Gothic watermark and got that generated and then incorporate that as a watermark in Word, and that takes all in all five minutes. Upload back to Business Central and now your quote is Halloween-themed.

Speaker 2:

See, that is an excellent feature, because I know you're talking about doing that for fun, with Halloween as a demonstration, but I could see how a user of Business Central can incorporate that into their business where they may have something seasonal, where they may want to put a promotion.

Speaker 2:

I know a lot of partners or even other customers. If they even go into a conference such as this, they put a watermark on their email signatures or other documents. Visit us here and now they can easily change that. I really get excited and AJ and I had talked about this in our academy session this past weekend with the developers who are there to learn and move forward and grow. With AL development is we're really taking and separating the business logic or the data from the user interface in the report, giving more control and easier control for the appearance of their reports to the users of Business Central and it doesn't take a lot of effort for them to be able to change it, and that's why I really like the theming of it, because you can change it, as you had mentioned, for an event or you can change it just because we want to change the look of our report for.

Speaker 3:

Christmas for anything. Next thing is Christmas, and then the next thing is our I don't know our Easter sale, and then our summer sale, and and suddenly you have exactly the seasonality of your documents and you don't have to pay a designer for it, you don't have to pay a partner for it. It's just five minutes in word of things you already know in word. And, speaking of word, I think a lot of business central developers need to go back to school, because I I know I had this challenge last year where I challenged business central developers tell me what's not possible in Word. And then I did all of it, most of it, actually, probably a few things I couldn't do, but most of it was possible in Word and, to be honest, easier Because it's just in there, it's built-in functionality. Just do it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it makes it accessible for small, medium-sized businesses where they want to be able to make it more fun, especially for small moms and pops to be able to have that theme.

Speaker 2:

Well, with that word and I've had a number of conversations as well there's a lot of talk between RDLC, word, excel, the different layouts, one of the points that you had mentioned, where if you ask somebody something of what you would do with a report and the ability to be able to do that in Word or not in Word. Sometimes they even ask the question is it the right tool for what you're trying to do? Because there's often you know, I joke with everybody with Copilot it was like, well, copilot didn't do this, they didn't do that. But if you pause for a moment and say it did 80% of what you needed to do, it gets you started, it saves you some time.

Speaker 2:

So the same thing comes with reporting. If you're trying to do something in a report, is it really the proper tool for it? Is it something that should be done in the business logic or is it something that should be done in Power BI or another tool? And that's one of the challenges to portray when you're designing and architecting is make sure that you're using the right tool before you're saying, well, it can't do something for me. It's put it in perspective of let's analyze the proper tool. So that's one thing I try to keep in mind and to promote, that you know it's not intended to do everything right. It's intended to do, you know, certain functions and be able to present and create your documents and not necessarily be a big Power BI type reporting, because that's where a lot of hopefully we can talk about. Effort has also been made into Power BI reports to get more analytical data reporting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, if I just may say the final third thing we did.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, I was trying to get you to go, but I have comments on all of these. I get excited.

Speaker 3:

So that's interesting. Something we actually wanted to do for the product since we released Word Layout 10 years ago in NAV 2013, is a Word Add-in for the editing.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I'm excited for that one.

Speaker 3:

And I think 10 years ago that was not so easy to do. It would probably require some VBA coding and a lot of special skills. That maybe was only for the Office developers in a sense. Now, since then, the Office team have, or the Microsoft 365 team have released a JavaScript API for Office, which means that it's actually fairly easy to create a Word add-in now, and that's what we did. We created a Word add-in that can do new concepts for Word layouts and we started with the things that are most difficult in Word, which is conditional visibility, and that's the new layout controls, as we call them. So we try to say the content controls you have today, where you map data to the document. We then talk about layout controls instead for something that controls kind of conditional logic in the layouts.

Speaker 2:

So that's a great new feature too. Now there's a Word ad and I'm assuming there's a desire and intent to increase the functionality of that Word ad and its Word reports as time progresses, to facilitate the creation of Word reports. There's a lot of new features. I'm excited with this. And again it goes back to. I like to comment about going back to school. Sometimes, you know, with the changing of the technology, the changing of the language, the changing of the application, it's important to stay up to date with it and understand the usage of it and how you can use it. I'll ask you a question also with this that you talk about. We talk about the excitement of Word and I heard some comments in some of the sessions that I had attended today. Where does this leave the RDLC reports? Because this was a question from a specific customer during a session that we were talking about some tips and tricks for Business Central. Sure, a question from a specific customer during a session that we were talking about some tips and tricks for Business Central.

Speaker 3:

Sure. So I think the question is not so much RDL reports but more maybe. I think there are two questions. Will the capability of using RDL layouts go away in the Business Central platform? That's question number one. Yeah, to my knowledge, no, that will not go away. So RDL is a core part of Power BI patinated reports. It seems like that technology is there to stay and therefore I don't see that going away as a capability in Business Central, capability in Business Central. However, the second part of that question is how about the usage of RDL layout in the base application? And that will change. So what I see happening is that over the next years you will see less and less RDL layouts in the base app and we will modernize the report objects to be able to cater for a new world of Excel and Word where it makes sense. Some reports of that have been in the product for many years will go away because there would be modern at with either PowerPI data analysis or Excel.

Speaker 3:

You will see new features in reporting, like being able to deprecate a layout. You can't do that today. You will likely see new features in the report object to hide certain, or at least hide certain columns in data items that were from from for the past. So by doing this we'll be able to keep reports functioning well with RTL layouts. Add new layouts that don't exist, that don't use old columns that are not needed. There will likely be new features in word, in the word add-in, so that maybe we can have system and just like in Excel today, in Excel layout you have this system metadata worksheet where we stamp in metadata about the report, metadata about the request and so on. So in the Excel layout you can easily have company name, which user it was, what date and so on things like that. The same concepts will likely surface in the word add-in as well as system or even in the data set, so that when you in the future create a word report with a word layout, you don't have to build all this company and all of that into the data set.

Speaker 3:

It's just there. That into the data set. It's just there. And that will also simplify a lot of the data sets, because why do you need to code the company name into the data set? That's stupid.

Speaker 3:

Yes, let's do that in the platform and just once for all. That also means that the person doing the layout will have the same look and feel of that data set, no matter which report they are in when they lay out. And all of this is a UX for a different type of user. If it's a developer, maybe it doesn't matter so much the usability of the data set, but for an end user it matters a lot that the data set is understandable, which also means we will likely have two tips on report data set. I columns because we can surface them in the layout tool and in the Word add-in so that you can see oh, this field is about blah and this field is about blah. So a lot of the features that we will build into the reporting platform will just make it easier for a different type of user to lay out reports.

Speaker 2:

I like where the direction of that's going. So to go back to the answer to the question, just to put back to you brought up the two points to do questions. The technology of the RDLC or the RD reports is not going away, it's the usage of the RD reports may change. So if somebody has an existing implementation with a lot of reports they use to run their business, they don't have to worry about having to redo all of their reports through the upgrades. So that's an important point because there's a lot of rumors now, because some individuals see a lot of effort being made to enhance the Word and the Excel reporting, that the RDLC reports are going away. But it's a two-part question. As, gennie, you had mentioned, you may have less RDLC reports I call them RDLC reports within Business Central for the base application but the technology is there. So anything that you have invested in that's running your business, that's important to you, you still would be able to use.

Speaker 3:

I mean we are in the business of ERP. That's important to you you still would be able to use. I mean we are in the business of ERP and we, as Microsoft, can't simply go and break thousands of customers' document reporting or any reporting. We can't do that. I know we did it with the classic client, the classic report, things right. We're not going to do that again. That would not be fair.

Speaker 2:

No, that's a good point. Thank you for clarifying that because, again, it's how the rumors are and everybody hears bits and pieces of information and shares it. And hearing a conversation today and also hearing some conversations before, I knew we were going to speak. I wanted to clarify that which is important.

Speaker 3:

But if you listen to this 20 years from now, it might be that that technology is going away. Right? You can never promise anything that will never change, right?

Speaker 2:

No, I understand.

Speaker 3:

yes, but I have no secret plan and no secret roadmap. I'm not showing to anyone that the capability of RDLC is going away in Business Central.

Speaker 2:

Well, I'm hoping in 20 years I'm retired or not working so that's okay.

Speaker 2:

No, that's a good point. That has to be inferred that as technology and time evolve or passes, there may be a point where word may not even be in there anymore because a new technology comes out. But I'm more talking of the near future, because there's a lot of attention in the current wave and in future waves on reporting and just to clarify that. So it is a good statement to say that we can't never. We can't ever say never, but at least for the short term, in some years everyone can plan to use what they have.

Speaker 3:

And there's no secret plan. There's no devious secret plan hidden in the Microsoft basements somewhere.

Speaker 2:

It's funny Not about that.

Speaker 2:

We have other secret plans, which is great. I say that too. You make me think of something I say with a lot of people. They say something to me and I tell them no, I sit up all night long figuring out how to make your life difficult, and that's what we're doing. We have some secret plan to purposely make your life difficult, which is not the intent. There's some great features coming in for the Word reporting. I'm excited. I've been using it. I've been working with it. As I mentioned, we had gone through it this past weekend when we were going through some development training to have some developers again go to school to work with now using Word layouts instead of RDLC reports, just to show how easy you can create an invoice or even an item list or something and have some nice formatting it. In addition to the reports, I see a lot with Power BI.

Speaker 3:

Correct.

Speaker 2:

That's exciting. I get excited about the whole thing. I tell everyone. This is like the release of reports, right? Or data analytics. Can you share with us some of the Power BI features that were released and if you have any insights into the future of that too?

Speaker 3:

I know there's a lot of questions about that as well, Anything you can say from the basement. So, first of all, we are adding 75 Power BI reports to the product come November. Wow, that's a lot, 25.1. Seven different Power BI apps across finance, sales, purchase, invoice sorry, inventory twice. Two of them one for projects and one for manufacturing and they come fully embedded inside Business Central with so tell me, works, bookmarking works. They are embedded on the role centers with the so tell me, works, bookmarking works. They are embedded on the role centers. They are embedded on the report explorer as part of these departmental role centers. They are multi-language, so if you switch to French, the labels will change to French, because we need that.

Speaker 3:

What else? See, those are all exciting features because everybody loves dashboards.

Speaker 2:

Everybody wants the appearance of dashboards Again. So much energy and effort goes into putting data into Business Central to be able to pull that information out now easily. It increases the power of it. It's already a great application and now for you to be able to easily.

Speaker 1:

In many cases, it's already a great application and now for you to be able to easily in many cases it's like a selling point, right, like just having a dashboard built in. I mean, kenny and I were talking about you know a competitor and that's that was the deciding factor do you have this dashboard built in? Now we can say, yes, it's right, right here, all the options.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm not a salesman, so I don't look at it as a selling point, but I do see it as enhancing the power of the application for those using it and those looking to use it, and it's the ease of being able to have access to your data, and in a dynamic manner. Right, that's the important thing. I remember when I first started working, you created with the classic reports. I wanted a report. Okay, give me this report. Oh, I want to be able to sort it this way. Oh, I want to be able to do it this way. And you required someone to make a modification.

Speaker 2:

Now, here we are, all these years later, and now, with Power BI, today, I want to look at my report this way, or I want to look at my sales this way. I can easily make that change without having to. It's not necessary to say have a developer do it. You don't have to wait for the time for somebody else to do it, and that, to me, is the important thing, because it's a time saver, because how I want to look at my business today may not be the same tomorrow, or the data or the analytics. So these are all applications that I try to push with some of these features, that it's not necessarily the cost or how it's how long you have to wait to get it back Because, like I said, time changes rapidly, things change rapidly and day to day you may need something different, which is important.

Speaker 3:

And I think this also unlocks. So we do have a lot of things already on docs for Business Central on how to track your KPIs. With Power BI metrics, for instance, which is an amazing feature in Power BI the new reports will require a Power BI Pro license. So for you to use them I joke that they cost between $0 and $10 a month, meaning that if you're a customer that already have Power BI Pro, the new reports are free. If you don't have Power BI Pro licenses, you need to pay for the capability and now the reports work.

Speaker 3:

Right Now, with Power BI Pro, you also have this metric tracker. It's no code Any user can set up. I want to point to this number in this report and I want to track it over time and build a dashboard on that. Think about this for a moment. I am. This is just. You get this for free quote unquote for free because you have it in your PowerBear Pro license.

Speaker 3:

Now we have, we give you I don't know how many let's say 50 KPIs that you can track your business out of the box and with metrics. If these are not tracked because they are computed by whenever you refresh, you can set up tracking over time on them your own, create a dashboard like that. It's called a scorecard. You can even embed that scorecard back in Business Central. You can have any KPI with these trackings and you can set up rules for when you want to be alerted in Teams. So things like, if you want to be alerted on a certain financial KPI is crossing a threshold, you can get an alert in Teams. You can start collaborating on that directly in your scorecard with your colleagues and you can ask questions and things like that. And because we now have Power BI content built in, all of these features light up automatically and just give so much more value.

Speaker 2:

That is the key, it's the value and the time. I'm getting excited, I'm getting the chills thinking about it because, as you had mentioned, the ability to interact with the changing number, to put it simply, is amazing and to say, like you said, it's the cost, it's free if you have Power BI Pro today, if it's a license cost, if you need it in the future, but it's what are you getting for that? Some people focus on it, whereas, again, what are your options? You can either have somebody develop that for you, which will take time and cost money, and is it cheaper over time? And also, what's the carrying cost of that modification? Also, what does it cost you to not react to a number and see, those are a lot of the hidden costs, or the hidden portions of it that I think some, if you look at it differently right, maybe look at it from a different perspective. It's not $10 a month, but it's actually saving me in the future to make better business decisions.

Speaker 1:

It's like your unrealized gains that you typically don't think about.

Speaker 3:

Yes, and think about one employee not being able to track important KPIs for what they do. I think that's worth ten dollars a month. Like being able to do that is is worth a lot more than ten dollars a month. I believe so, and the amount of hours developer hours we've we put into this is is a lot like if you wanted to build these reports from scratch. It's probably take you thousands of hours to get to what we just give away for free.

Speaker 2:

And if there are changes or updates, you don't have to make them. Yeah, that's the other part of this which is important is it comes with the application. You no longer have to maintain those yourself because there is a carrying cost to a modification in any implementation, not just business central, which is important.

Speaker 3:

You can. Even so, since these are embedded as AL pages, you can use permissions to turn off the things you don't want, and similarly, in Power BI apps, the reports behind the scene you can turn off, like visibility on the things you don't want, and that means you can. You can also mix, mix and match. Let's say that you want to take page two, five and seven for the finance app and you keep that because they're nice, but your implementation of your liquidity KPIs are different, so you actually want to do your own for those. Fine, no, problem.

Speaker 2:

Just do that With the Power BI reports and again, a lot of this. I bring some of these questions just from conversations that I have with customers or individuals implementing Now that Power BI reports are in Business Central within the same application, so you can see these dashboards. There's some questions with customers either migrating to Business Central from a previous version or moving over from a new application. They may have some legacy data that they need to still have for analysis Years ago. Some would say well, you still have access to your old system. Or we may bring some of the data over With Power BI and the way that you have it embedded within business central today. Is it possible to see some of that data correct in in in line with the business central data, so you don't have to put everything business central? That's a good. Can you read it from an external source?

Speaker 3:

sure. So we actually so, since we've. So we actually so since we like. We try to be smart about engineering with the new apps and we didn't want AL developers to code anything. So what we did was we wrote a code generator. So let's say that you are the owner of this Power BI app report that runs on some SQL servers or something right. These reports are deployed to the Power BI service, but they're not like that's it. So you have a report with some pages and you would like to embed them in Business Central. Here's what you do you type in your report names, your teaching tips because, because, of course, we want teaching tips. You are, you put in information about the report IDs and the report pages in an Excel workbook, configure all of this in Excel. Then you run a command line script that reads that and that script spits out an extension with all the generated AL code for all the pages, for all of that, and you take that and you deploy that as a PTE and that's it.

Speaker 2:

Wow, I'm kind of speechless now, because that simplifies the data management in the analysis within Business Central using Power BI reports with external sources. So it's not only historical data. But there are cases where Business Central is a great application. But I've worked with implementations where they need another system to do something else.

Speaker 2:

I've worked with implementations where they need another system to do something else, because Business Central is a tool. You use the tool to do the job, but now, if they can take that data, they don't need to go to another system that can look at them. Together they can do it all within Business.

Speaker 3:

Central. I forgot to say one thing though that Excel workbook you also configure, your permission sets for all of this, and it generates all of that for you as well. Wow, Because the thing is we needed this for seven apps for 75 pages. We didn't want to write all that boilerplate code, so we just made a code generator, and that's available on BCTech, so you can just go download it and use it in your project.

Speaker 2:

So on the GitHub repo, BCTech it's the Microsoft repositories. Bctech has a lot of great business, central technologies, as I call it, it's under akams forward slash bc power pi samples and that's where you find it.

Speaker 3:

That's also our code sample for how to script the multi-language, which is a similar thing. You have a resx file for each of your language and you just do a command line tool and we'll inject that into your Power BI, because we needed that and the tools we built for this project we're giving to the community for free.

Speaker 2:

So I'm kind of speechless now. I almost wanted to start writing Power BI reports. It becomes much easier.

Speaker 1:

You're going to the other side now. You're going to do some BI stuff.

Speaker 2:

I might have to start doing analytics in BI because I'm just impressed with where this has moved. If you just think of the evolution over time where we started, it's difficult to keep up to be, honest with you. Are there any other tips and tricks or future tidbits or bites that you can share with us.

Speaker 3:

All the tooling I mentioned here is explained by Enrico, one of our developers, in the BCLE session on what's new in Power BI. He's demoing all of it.

Speaker 2:

And those are all available on the BC YouTube. I believe it's akms forward slash BC YouTube all of the recordings from the Business Central launch event with what's new in Business Central 2024, wave two, and it's publicly available. So you could sign up for the launch event to register to watch the live Q&A, to watch the live sessions. But the recorded sessions, if you weren't able to see them, are now available and all of the sessions are available.

Speaker 3:

But we're not done Because in 25.2, so the December, January is release we're coming out with a Power BI app on the new subscription billing module. That's right, it will come with its own Power BI reports. We are also cooking up on better dimension support for all the Power BI apps so they support your dimension setup.

Speaker 2:

Again, it's the year of reporting and analysis. I put again reporting and analysis a Power BI user's analysis. That's great. With the subscription billing, I see a lot happening with subscription billing.

Speaker 1:

That's like a full feature, like everything you need right. Like reporting is a big component of that, Wow.

Speaker 2:

Oh, it's excellent.

Speaker 3:

And then we're sanitizing all our existing reports. We're documenting all of them, putting teaching tips, so in client help, we are making them available. I want to talk about that secret, so you will hear of that in six months. We're documenting, trying to document all the analytical reports in our docs with articles for each of them. So we're trying to make discoverability of existing reports easier.

Speaker 3:

And some people say why do you want to invest in writing documentation for reports that are 30 years old? Why don't you just grab them? You just grab them and I think, well, it probably took a developer and a program manager a week or two to come up with why this was a good idea to have. So some of them might not, but there might be a lot of old gold there that needs maybe just need some polish and still be valuable for the next 10 years. So that's why I think it's still worth it to invest in like making sure that people know okay, this report can do this for me and they can choose to say, no, it's fine, I don't want it, I want to use Power BI, but maybe for some scenarios this is fine and we'll document it so people will know. Okay, these are the use cases, and it seems like this is a good report for me use cases and it seems like this is a good report for me.

Speaker 2:

And yeah, I'd like that because it gives microsoft the opportunity to review the reports to see if they still applicable for what they were created for, but also now users can see reports they may not know existed, exactly where it's. I can't tell you how many times I've seen requests for a report that was already there yeah because it wasn't easy to find. So the discoverability of it, with being able to easily see what it is, is helpful. They're really not letting you out of the basement with all of these things coming in.

Speaker 2:

This is the year of.

Speaker 3:

I mean we had just had a session with 200 customers here at UT Summit and our moderator asked how many of people you know about the report Explorer and the client. The report Explorer is this link you can click where you like. It's the top of the of the, the role center, where that shows you your reports and you have these stuff departmental role centers. Probably 5% of people knew that existed, which means our main discoverability feature, except for search and chat, the main one that shows you what are my sales reports 5% people know that. That's insane, right. Then I'm not surprised that your customers don't know what reports exist if they don't even know where the report overview is Right and we need to tell them. We need to explore, like tell them what's available.

Speaker 2:

No, that's important. See, it's a lot of these features. Again, it's discoverability which is important. There's a lot there and it comes out. Yeah, that's….

Speaker 1:

And functional consultants. They would benefit from that too, because sometimes they don't realize that there's.

Speaker 2:

Some of these reports See Kenny said AL developers need to go back to school. I think functional consultants need to go back to school now too, with the application it does. It shows why it is important to keep up with the launch event and other areas, because years ago, back with the vision, the up the back way, back, the way back machine, the updates weren't as rapid. So if you learn the application, you had a year to master it. It was gold because they weren't having another update for another couple of years and you could survive on that because there was a slow progression of change. Now, with that rapid progression of change, it's important to stay acclimated Correct, I use the word acclimated but to stay in touch with the changes of the software, which makes it more useful.

Speaker 3:

But I think also as a functional consultant. This is also what makes you the gold consultant or platinum. This is the one where you already know. You know what to tell a customer like, oh, did you know this or did you see this? That's the kind of consultant that a customer would like to have on on their team, instead of the consultant that quote unquote just do what they are told and and maybe they're missing out the customer is missing out on smarter ways. So it's also a way to keep your value as a consultant by keeping up and I know it's hard because there's so many things that are happening, but I also know that because I've been a consultant myself. Part of the job as consultant is non-billable.

Speaker 2:

You also need to sharpen your saw, it's true because it's the same thing as using Power BI and the licensing to use it to analyze your business.

Speaker 2:

The time that you spend to learn the application makes you much more of a valuable teacher, user or consultant of business central. So your ability with that no bill time is returned in the future correct with the implementation of customers, and even internal I mean internal customers, it's you know, I don't know how the structure would be, but also spending some time each week, and I try to say spend a couple hours each week looking through what's new, looking through the notes you I know myself I have. When I launch up my computer in the morning with a browser, I have a number of tabs with just a number of different websites that I can see so I can keep up with things. Then at that point, like with the Yammer group for Business Central, for partners and such, I can keep up with things easily in just a couple minutes a day versus trying to cram, I think, just being aware of it as well, makes it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you may not need it then, but you're aware that when it comes, it's like oh yeah, I remember reading into this and dive deep into it and I think the key here is not expecting people to spend a couple of hours a week because that might be a daunting task yes, but maybe just like when you want to lose weight or get in shape. Maybe it's just that five minutes every morning, consistently five minutes of learning, and just say okay. And many of the new videos on BCLE are bite-sized, so they're five to ten minutes.

Speaker 2:

I like that strategy of the bite sizes you call it. I'll keep using that because I'll always go back to what you said to us every day. You know, many years ago, when you spoke, with us.

Speaker 2:

How do you eat an elephant? Yeah, one bite at a time, and it's the same thing with ingesting data. You don't have to have the daunting task and having those bite-sized uh nuggets. If you have 10 minutes, you have a nugget. If you have 10 minutes, you have a nugget. If you have 20, you can see two nuggets. And again it's those small increments.

Speaker 2:

That's what I found. That's why I said in the morning with me, I now have a habit of checking on a few resources online that I can keep up with the things that I would like to keep up with. I mean, obviously, there's another aspect of it too. You can't keep up with everything, because there's just a lot of information. It's just a matter of focusing on what, which area, your area and your specialty, and I now know who to call if I come into another area that I'm not familiar with. Yeah, but you're aware. Exactly that's. The key is, I'm aware that this exists and I send everybody to Kenny.

Speaker 2:

You have to have a Power BI question On this episode. We'll have to put Kenny's cell phone number, so if anybody has any questions, feel free to call him, preferably at 2 in the morning, central Time, of course. No, that's great. Well, kenny, I'm getting hungry. Nobody likes me when I'm hungry, but thank you for taking the time to speak with us today to share your insights and information on 2024 Wave 2. We appreciate your support. We appreciate you spending time with us, because I truly mean it when I say time is the currency of life. Once you spend it, you can't give it back, because any minute you spend with someone or doing something you will never get back. So anyone who spends any time with us you know we're grateful and appreciative for, because you could be doing many other things, uh, but you're here sitting with us, so we really appreciate it yeah, we never even got to think.

Speaker 2:

Talk about what's coming next oh, we can do that, we'll forget it no, we can do that in another video maybe, maybe tomorrow.

Speaker 3:

Well, we have to reconnect, so I want to hear it.

Speaker 2:

No, I'll just, as a teaser, say that we have some, I think, some mind-blowing things coming up for April. Oh okay, We'll definitely have to schedule this. If you have time this week, we'll do it this week, if not, we'll do it. Something very, very Can you give us a hint, a tip or a hint or a little teaser? Nah?

Speaker 3:

I mean, that's the idea with the teaser right A cliffhanger.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes, we've got to get scheduled right away.

Speaker 2:

We'll schedule it after this comes. Now I wish, now I really you ever say something and you wish you could take it back. I want to go back a minute or two and take back the sentence where I said I'm getting hungry. Just say can you tell us what's next? But we will, we'll schedule that up and we'll have another episode where we talk about what's next coming in April, just for some other mind blowing. Because if you say something's mind blowing, my mind was already blown with what you told us today.

Speaker 3:

I just think we have more let's say more things coming up in all these areas that will just make it easier, prettier, more compelling, more self-service, more customer-facing, and I think for developers, it's not going to be something that takes your job away. It's probably something that will give you more interesting things to do with your customers.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I definitely want to hear that We've got to get it scheduled after this. No, we'll definitely schedule it. No again, but thank you again for your time. You're welcome and I look forward to seeing the keynote tomorrow and I look forward to connecting with you while we're here to talk about other reporting aspects, and now we can go get something to eat, all right, thank you, all right, ciao, ciao. Thank you, chris, for your time for another episode of In the Dynamics Corner Chair and thank you to our guests for participating.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, brad, for your time. It is a wonderful episode of Dynamics Corner Chair. I would also like to thank our guests for joining us. Thank you for all of our listeners tuning in as well. You can find Brad at developerlifecom, that is D-V-L-P-R-L-I-F-E dot com, and you can interact with them via Twitter D-V-L-P-R-L-I-F-E. You can also find me at matalinoio, m-a-t-a-l-i-n-o dot I-O, and my Twitter handle is Mattelino16. And see, you can see those links down below in their show notes. Again, thank you everyone. Thank you and take care you.

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Kris

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Brad

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