Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Overview

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is one of the best-in-class pieces of cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application software that's targeted at the small and medium business (SMB) market. The application is based on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, and it is sold through Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners.

Potential customers can spin up a trial tenant at any time and/or contact a CSP partner to purchase and assign a per-user license.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Customer perspective: What Dynamics 365 Business Central is, what functional areas it covers, and licensing
• Partner perspective: An overview of Business Central Admin Center and its use
• Microsoft perspective: A deep dive under the technological skin of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
• A future perspective...

Understanding the customer perspective

Targeted at SMBs, the core design of Dynamics 365 Business Central relies on Microsoft Azure and the Office 365 platforms. The application's core code and business processes come from the evolution of 30+ years of feature enhancements of Microsoft Dynamics NAV (mostly known as Navision): one of the most solid pieces of on-premise ERP software in the SMB domain.

Potential customers – or those who simply want to give the application a spin—can subscribe for fast setup with a trial version through https://trials.dynamics.com/Dynamics365/Signup/BusinessCentral by providing an email address that's bound to an Office 365 subscription and a phone number. After 30 days, when the trial period ends, the product needs to be purchased.

Official licensing is assigned exclusively through Microsoft Partners that are credited...

Understanding the partner's perspective

CSP enables partners to access a portfolio of Microsoft cloud services to be sold. Within this program, there are tools for managing and supporting these cloud services. One of these online services is Dynamics 365 Business Central.

You can find out more about the Partner Center at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/csp-overview.

In the SaaS proposition, it is only through the CSP partners or their resellers that a potential customer could purchase licenses for Dynamics 365 Business Central and convert the trial license into a pay-per-use license or start by directly paying the monthly fee for the users.

In every CSP, a partner or reseller is technically represented by a unique tenant record in the Azure Active Directory (AAD). AAD is a multi-tenant authentication service that offers identity and access capabilities...

Under the skin of Dynamics 365 Business Central

Microsoft invested a lot in the last year and continues to invest in a modernized and streamlined Dynamics 365 Business Central architecture in order to have an ERP cloud service solution that is easy to deploy and upgrade.

At the time of writing, statistics are very encouraging and even exceed expectations.

Basically, a new Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant is created every 180 seconds. 400,000 metrics are emitted per minute, with approximately 8 TB of logs generated per day. These logs are then pre-processed, aggregated, and approximately 4 TB data is uploaded to Cosmos DB for big data analysis via the Azure Data Lake service.

These are just some of the numbers that Dynamics 365 Business Central is producing, and just a few of the Microsoft cloud services that are used to provide the best online ERP experience...

Understanding the future perspective

Azure and Office 365 are now considered solid and mature and have a considerable Returns On Investment (ROI) for customers.

They are among the best sources of revenue for Microsoft and where the most investment and capital is redirected. All Microsoft services are requested to align with Microsoft's strategy of increasing the consumption of these two flagship services.

Dynamics 365 Business Central perfectly fits into Microsoft's strategy: it brings new potential SMB ERP customers into this offering to accelerate the best-in-class Microsoft cloud service consumption. 

In other words, potential Dynamics NAV and Dynamics GP customers are strongly encouraged to subscribe to Dynamics 365 Business Central's Essential or Premium tier instead of receiving a typical offering for an on-premise deployment.

A huge product transformation...

Summary

This introductory chapter provided an overview of what is now available in – and what will be in the future of – Dynamics 365 Business Central.

First, we focused on Dynamics 365 Business Central by considering the partner and customer perspective. This will be beneficial for you when it comes to understanding what the product is capable of offering in terms of localizations, features, and the SMB market segment you would like to target. 

Next, we covered the Partner Center and Dynamics 365 Business Central Admin Center portals and how to use them. Then, we covered Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central's main technological characteristics and had an overview of the architectural elements. We finished this chapter with a short overview of what might happen in the future, how to contribute toward making this happen, and how to be part of the...