Join Kristen Hosman and me as we digest our impressions of last week’s Directions NA conference.
Erik and Kristen recap their experiences at Directions NA 2023 in Orlando, Florida — covering everything from travel mishaps and keynote highlights to AI announcements, GP end-of-life timelines, the Women in Dynamics movement, accessibility, partner program changes, and the value of face-to-face networking with Microsoft.
Travel Adventures (and Misadventures)
Both Erik and Kristen have developed something of a tradition of travel difficulties getting to Directions NA. Kristen, having learned from the prior year when she got stuck in Atlanta and had to drive overnight, flew into Tampa early — even catching a Taylor Swift concert with Mary Myers before the conference kicked off.
Erik wasn’t so lucky. After missing Directions entirely the previous year due to being stranded in Dallas, he sat down on his plane in Vancouver, drink in hand, only to receive a text that his flight had been canceled — due to volcanic ash. After being shuffled off the plane, going back through Canadian immigration (since US-bound flights from Canada clear US immigration before departure), and reclaiming his luggage, he was rescheduled through Toronto. He finally arrived Sunday night, missing the opening keynote entirely.
Keynote Highlights
Attached Licensing
One notable announcement was around attached licensing for Dynamics products. If you purchase more than one Dynamics product, you can save money by identifying the most expensive license and attaching a cheaper one to it at a reduced price. Two new options were added:
- Business Central Premium can be attached to Sales Enterprise
- Sales Enterprise can be attached to Business Central Essential
While the slides said “coming soon,” Kristen confirmed she was able to get this applied to her tenant as early as the Friday after the conference — suggesting it may already be available for partners to take advantage of.
AI and Copilot
AI dominated the conference. Microsoft demonstrated Copilot in action during multiple keynotes, including a demo showing AI-generated marketing text for items — particularly useful for companies utilizing e-commerce or Shopify integrations. There’s also the ability to write emails using Copilot.
Erik explained the branding: whenever Microsoft embeds ChatGPT-based AI (built on OpenAI technology, in which Microsoft holds a significant stake) into a specific product like Dynamics 365, they brand it as “Copilot.” It’s the same underlying technology, just purpose-built and placed within a specific application context.
Both agreed that what we’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg, and Erik expressed excitement about eventually using Copilot capabilities within his own apps.
Statistical Accounts
Statistical accounts — long available out of the box in Dynamics GP — have now been added to Business Central as of version 22. Kristen noted that a partner had previously offered this functionality on AppSource, but having it natively in BC is significant for GP customers evaluating a migration.
Intercompany Capabilities
Erik expressed frustration with the enhanced intercompany capabilities, calling them “too little.” The fundamental design still assumes two separate users: one sending a transaction from Company A and another receiving it in Company B. In practice, it’s often the same accountant handling both sides, and the process involves too many steps — outbox, inbox, review, post. Erik wants the option for intercompany transactions to post automatically on the receiving end.
Additionally, Microsoft has added a hard limit of 300 companies per database. For organizations exceeding that, the official guidance is to use multiple production environments — but intercompany transactions between environments are still file-based, which Erik found baffling.
The Analyze Tool
Kristen highlighted the new analyze tool, which allows users to create pivot-table-like analyses directly within Business Central. She used it in her own production environment to analyze year-over-year expenses for attending Directions NA.
However, she found a bug: the tool was including closing income statement entries in its totals, resulting in zero balances. She reported this to Microsoft. Erik described it as “a light Power BI with live data” and predicted that some pages will need additional fields for optimal filtering and reporting. Both agreed the tool is promising but will take time for users to retrain their habits away from the “Open in Excel” workflow.
Onboarding and Implementation Speed
Microsoft continues to push for faster implementations — “measured in weeks, not years.” Erik noted that in his experience, delays are typically on the client side rather than the partner side. Microsoft has created various onboarding tools, though their practical impact is debatable.
Kristen raised a critical concern: with thousands of companies still on GP and NAV on-premises, and those companies needing to migrate in the coming years, there simply aren’t enough consultants and implementers to handle the volume. Partners may end up putting prospects on three-to-six-month waiting lists, driving potential customers to competitors.
Dynamics GP Announcement
Mike Morton delivered significant news for the GP community at Directions NA:
- Effective April 1, 2025: Purchases by new GP customers will be limited to subscription licensing only
- Effective April 1, 2026: Subscription licensing will be limited to existing customers only — meaning no new customers can get on GP after that date
Erik offered his personal opinion that going on GP today is not a wise decision, given that the technology stack is very old and the product has effectively been treated as end-of-life for years. While there may be specific industry solutions or add-ons that only exist for GP, the AppSource ecosystem for Business Central has grown significantly, with many former GP vendors now offering BC solutions.
Kristen noted some remaining gaps — drop shipments work differently in GP versus BC (she lost a deal over this), and multiple prepayments on sales orders remain problematic in BC. But she acknowledged Microsoft is listening and working to close these gaps.
NAV to BC vs. GP to BC: Different Beasts
Erik drew an important distinction between the two migration paths. NAV to BC can be a true upgrade since it’s fundamentally the same software lineage. GP to BC involves a migration tool that moves some tables and data, but it’s a very different process.
They’re seeing two types of projects:
- GP customers who want to migrate but whose current partner isn’t gaining traction on getting the project moving
- Customers who have already migrated to BC but whose partner lacked sufficient BC knowledge, resulting in significant post-migration cleanup
On the NAV upgrade path specifically, Erik clarified that partners with a partner license can run any version — there’s no technical limitation preventing upgrades from even very old versions. The upgrade tools work through key version groups: you upgrade to the latest version within your group, then jump to the next group, and so on. It’s not a single shot to BC, but it’s technically feasible from any starting point.
The real challenge is heavily customized NAV installations where base tables and base reports have been modified with no regard for upgradability. In most cases, though, Erik suggested these can be downgraded to their core version, upgraded carrying data forward, and then changes can be re-implemented — with the caveat that some customizations that relied on “breaking” NAV should probably be redesigned anyway.
Women in Dynamics
Kristen discussed the Women in Dynamics movement, started by Vicky from Bamboo Cloud in the UK, which launched at Directions EMEA 2021 in Milan. Despite the name, the initiative focuses broadly on diversity and inclusion in the Dynamics community.
Approximately 75 to 100 partners worldwide have signed up for the partner pledge, sharing their organizational data through annual questionnaires covering metrics like the percentage of women in their organization, women in leadership, and dropout rates.
This year’s luncheon theme was “THIS” — an acronym where each letter represented a focus area:
- T — Track
- H — Hire diverse talent
- I — Immerse inclusivity
- S — Stop the dropout
The tagline was “This is an us thing, not a they thing.” Each letter had a dedicated speaker sharing both personal experiences and organizational practices.
Erik attended the luncheon and noted the room was impressively full — hundreds of attendees. Kristen observed that this year had noticeably more women at the conference overall, and the networking felt different from the typical “high school reunion” vibe. She went home with no voice from all the conversations.
Notable Sessions
Analyze Tool Deep Dive
Kenny and Brian from Microsoft held a session on the analyze tool that was so popular partners kept interrupting with questions, barely letting them get through the presentation. At one point Kenny said “hold your horses” and hinted — with the disclaimer “don’t quote me on this” — that more enhancements are on the way.
Accessibility
Taylor Dorward presented on accessibility, and Kristen was disappointed that only about 12 people attended and no Microsoft representatives were in the room. Taylor, who is visually impaired, shared his perspective on how he’s perceived and treated differently within the community, and what companies can do to improve accessibility.
Kristen noted that Microsoft actually does extensive accessibility work on BC — down to color schemes and interaction patterns — but the broader partner and ISV community hasn’t caught up. When she asked one ISV what they were doing for accessibility, the answer was “honestly nothing.” She called this a huge missed opportunity that needs more attention.
Partner Program Changes
A Tuesday evening session on the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program (which replaced the MPN program as announced March 17, 2022) was packed, ran over time, and addressed widespread partner confusion. Topics included:
- Solution Partner designations replacing Gold and Silver competencies
- How points are calculated in Partner Center
- The new Commerce experience and CSP subscription data fixes
- Practical scenarios for achieving partner competency levels
The Value of Face-to-Face with Microsoft
Erik shared a significant win from the conference: after years of reporting an intermittent Visual Studio Code re-authentication bug when working against cloud tenants — which Microsoft could never replicate — he happened to be sitting next to someone from the compiler team when the error occurred. They spent a couple of hours together and finally replicated the bug on Microsoft’s own machine. The issue relates to running multiple VS Code instances authenticated against different tenants, causing access tokens to get mixed up. Erik called this alone worth the trip.
Kristen shared her own story of cornering Kenny about her production environment failing to update, showing him the error message. He told her to open a case — and that night, the update went through successfully. “I don’t know if he pushed the magic button for me,” she joked.
Looking Ahead
Directions NA 2024 was announced for San Diego — a welcome choice for Erik given the direct flights from Vancouver. The next BC Talk episode will likely cover DynamicsCon in Scottsdale, coming up in about a month.
Key Takeaways
- AI/Copilot is being embedded across Dynamics 365 and is only going to expand — ISVs and partners should start thinking about how to leverage it
- GP’s end-of-life timeline is now official: no new customers after April 2026, creating urgency for migration planning
- The analyze tool in BC is powerful but still maturing — watch for improvements in coming releases
- Women in Dynamics is growing and driving meaningful conversations about diversity and inclusion across the partner ecosystem
- Accessibility deserves far more attention from ISVs and partners than it’s currently getting
- The partner channel needs significant training and education to handle the coming wave of GP and NAV migrations
- Face-to-face time with Microsoft at events like Directions remains incredibly valuable — they are listening, and real problems get solved in these interactions
As Erik put it: “We are in this together. It takes a village — and the village is Microsoft, partners, MVPs, customers, and ISVs.” The shift to cloud has made Microsoft far more directly involved with customers than they were a decade ago, and that closer relationship is changing behavior and mindset on all sides for the better.
