Directions EMEA 2022 Summary

Meet the Theta team who attended:

Stephen Gichure | Dynamics 365 Senior Consultant

Tharanga Chandrasekara | Microsoft MVP for 6 years & Dynamics 365Lead Consultant

Joerg Rau | Head of Dynamics 365 & frequent Directions EMEA attendee

Craig Barberini | Dynamics 365 Practice Lead

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Below, Joerg gives us the inside scoop, including the latest initiatives and announcements in the areas we think you’ll benefit most.

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Licensing

• The biggest announcement from Microsoft is that users with a Microsoft 365 license can access Business Central via Microsoft Teams. No extra Business Central license is required, and this covers read-only access.
• Microsoft will reduce the cost of additional environments by 40% starting from 1st December 2022.
• Microsoft continues the successful Bridge-to-Cloud campaign, which benefits Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central customers on-premises to move to the cloud with a big discount for up to four years.

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AppSource and Business Central success story

• There are more apps in AppSource for Business Central than any other product at Microsoft.
• Microsoft have seen triple-digit growth in revenue for Business Central.
• There are 60% more customers in the cloud than last year.

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Partners

Directions is a conference from partners, for partners. It was great to meet with so many of our own who were either our vendors or our customers, and we’re adding more partners and their solutions to our portfolio. This means better strategies and outcomes for you - watch the space!

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Microsoft

I had the privilege to attend an invite-only roundtable with Ryan Cunningham, Vice President of Microsoft Power Apps, and eight other D365 specialists. We discussed better license models for Power Pages, a genuine Dynamics 365 Team Member license across the D365 products and a Dataverse storage allowance which should come with Business Central to enable the use of the Power Platform more easily for our customers.

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Continia

Good news for all our Continia Expense Management customers. A new app is now available with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities to read data from a picture taken of receipts. Go and download the latest app now!

Continia have also added Purchase Contract capabilities to their Document Capture solution, making it easier to track and maintain information about recurring purchase invoices like subscriptions.

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In conclusion, there’s good movement forward in the realm of all things Dynamics 365 Business Central and plenty of benefits for new and existing customers.

Let us know if you have any specific questions about these updates or what’s to come, and we’ll get back to you.