Days of Knowledge: highlights of a new Dynamics 365 BC Conference
May 27, 2019
New must-visit event for Business Central professionals
We had been looking forward to Days of Knowledge 2019 (#DOK2019) with much anticipation. After all, it is always interesting to see how ‘first-ever’ events turn out. We have missed the previous spring event around Dynamics BC for Europe and this time wanted to test the water on some of our initiatives.
The event itself was fantastic; more than 500 people had turned up to this inaugural event hungry for knowledge and, as the experts’ panel discussion clearly showed, the atmosphere was great. There was a good mix of strategic input, technical deep-dive and commercial implications of the changes in the landscape.
Panel discussion with MVPs – Freddy Kristiansen, Arend-Jan Kauffmann, Kamil Sáček, Gunnar Gestsson, Erik P. Ernst, Luc van Vugt
Equally great was the opportunity to compare notes in the first half of the year. As an engineering house, we constantly need to make sure that we work on the latest solutions to bring our partners forward. In regard to Dynamics 365 BC, DOK2019 came as a fantastic opportunity to check that we are on the right track in our approach to building extensions and solutions around the application.
In the past year at Global Mediator we have trained our team on JavaScript and other relevant technologies in order to be better prepared for the day when the Windows client is no longer available. And this will happen with the next major release. It was great to see that our way of modifying the UI beyond the current limitations had snuck it way into a presentation about ‘learning from the trenches’.
“DOK2019 came as a fantastic opportunity to check that we are on the right track in our approach.”
– Nicolai Krarup, COO at Global Mediator
The session “Design and build features, not bugs” delivered a solid endorsement of testing, especially auto-testing. Based on our experience at Global Mediator, this is actually a critical missing element in the community. Without it, the customers cannot benefit from the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) opportunities in the cloud-based BC-world of the near future.
At DOK2019 we were looking for more input on automation. But it seems that with so much focus on getting people current on Dynamics 365 BC, there was no time to focus on this strategic element of the Microsoft offering. Currently we work with RPA and use Phyton for automation in several solutions ourselves: for us it wasn’t hard to feel that the Dynamics 365 BC community needs to drive deeper into PowerApps and Flow – unless we wish to leave this to other Microsoft partners.
Keeping up with Microsoft these days is a full-time job and while we may feel that we keep up in some areas, there is still plenty of areas to improve. In our case we will have to make an extra run at reducing the footprint of our extensions on BC and we will have to revisit our AppSource strategy but as IT engineers we are always looking forward and moving towards new goals ahead.
DOK2019 was a great way to spend two days. This is one event to add to the calendar for next year – we will be back!
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