The 2nd edition of “Mastering Dynamics 365 Business Central” is here…
Mar18

The 2nd edition of “Mastering Dynamics 365 Business Central” is here…

More than one year of work, many updates and reviews, lots of energies spent. But now I’m proud to announce that the second edition of our best seller “Mastering Dynamics 365 Business Central” book is here: We wrote this second edition of the book with a clear goal: we want to create a great and practical guide for Dynamics 365 Business Central developers, a book that can stay near you… Continue Reading...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the Page Scripting tool
Mar13

Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the Page Scripting tool

If someone of you have ever worked with web applications development, probably you have earned about Playwright. Playwright is an open-source automation library for browser testing and web scraping developed by Microsoft and launched on 31 January 2020, which has since become popular among programmers and web developers. Playwright provides the ability to automate browser tasks in Chromium,… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Azure Spring Clean: Deploying Azure OpenAI in the enterprise world.
Mar06

Azure Spring Clean: Deploying Azure OpenAI in the enterprise world.

This post is my contribution to the Azure Spring Clean 2024 event, an initiative to promote well managed Azure tenants. Azure OpenAI Service provides REST API access to OpenAI’s powerful language models including the GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Embeddings model series. These models can be easily adapted to your specific task including but not limited to… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: support for multiple extensions to same target in the same app
Mar04

Dynamics 365 Business Central: support for multiple extensions to same target in the same app

I talked about this upcoming feature with some of you last week, but now that Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 release (v24) is in a public preview stage, I can talk about that more in detail. The new AL version coming with Dynamics 365 Business Central v24 add the support for multiple extensions to same target in the same application. In order to help achieve better separation… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Copilot for Finance and Dynamics 365 Business Central
Mar01

Copilot for Finance and Dynamics 365 Business Central

Yesterday Microsoft announced the public preview of Microsoft Copilot for Finance, the newest Copilot offering designed for business functions that extends Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and revolutionizes how finance teams approach their daily work. Copilot for Finance joins Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, now generally available, to provide AI-powered, role-based workflow… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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How we (probably) broke limits at the #BCAIHackathon
Feb27

How we (probably) broke limits at the #BCAIHackathon

Last week Microsoft organized the #BCAIHackathon initiative, a 3 days dedicated to create innovative solutions using generative AI in Dynamics 365 Business Central and (probably) to bring new ideas on how to apply AI in useful scenarios inside the ERP. In the previous days I had some discussions with my (not AI-generated) friend Dmitry Katson about this initiative and we decided to be part… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the new Table Key module
Feb20

Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the new Table Key module

One of the announced features for Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 release is the possibility to enable or disable indexes via AL code. For that scope (at the moment unfortunately only available for on-premises scenarios) Microsoft is introducing a new AlterKey method in the Database object that permits you to select a non -clustered index and enable or disable it. The new syntax… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Automate connector: deprecation of  V2 triggers and actions
Feb15

Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Automate connector: deprecation of V2 triggers and actions

If you have created in the past workflows with Power Automate using the Dynamics 365 Business Central connector, probably you have used some of the connector’s actions marked as V2: Starting from now, the V2 triggers and actions in the Power Automate connector will be hidden and they will be fully deprecated in a near future (probably next year). The change is rolling out gradually on… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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REST APIs and the importance of Versioning.
Feb07

REST APIs and the importance of Versioning.

A REST API (also known as RESTful API) is an application programming interface that conforms to the constraints of REST architecture and it’s one of the main building block for integration between applicartions running in the cloud (but not only). In a traditional Dynamics 365 Business Central project, it’s quite common to work with APIs for integrations and usually you can have the… Continue Reading...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: transfer environments between Microsoft Entra tenants
Feb01

Dynamics 365 Business Central: transfer environments between Microsoft Entra tenants

Starting from today, it’s possible to transfer a Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant to a different tenant without opening a support request to Microsoft. If you check the Admin Center, you will find a new Environment Transfer action: After clicking on this action, you can select the environment(s) to be transferred, specify the Entra tenant ID of the destination tenant, choose a… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Audit Dynamics 365 Business Central operations in Microsoft Purview: what is it?
Jan31

Audit Dynamics 365 Business Central operations in Microsoft Purview: what is it?

Some days ago Microsoft announced the upcoming new features for the new products wave and also Dynamics 365 Business Central is on the list and you can read more about the upcoming planned features for 2024 Wave 1 release here. One of the announced features that has generated quite a lot of confusion is the following: In 2024 release wave 1, auditable events occurring in Dynamics 365… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...

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List all Azure Functions with older runtime with Powershell
Jan30

List all Azure Functions with older runtime with Powershell

When you create an Azure Function app, the runtime is responsible for executing function code on the underlying WebJobs SDK host. Azure Functions currently supports two versions of the runtime host: 4.x: Recommended runtime version for functions in all languages.  1.x: Supported only for C# apps that must use .NET Framework. This version is in maintenance mode, with enhancements… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: how can I disable Copilot for everyone?
Jan25

Dynamics 365 Business Central: how can I disable Copilot for everyone?

Dynamics 365 Business Central now has embedded generative AI features powered by Azure OpenAI and this is something cool that I encourage everyone to try. When individual Copilot capabilities are released in Dynamics 365 Business Central during minor updates, these capabilities are optional until the next major update. To turn on or off these features (like for example bank reconciliation… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Azure Basic Load Balancer: it’s time to plan the update to Standard.
Jan24

Azure Basic Load Balancer: it’s time to plan the update to Standard.

Azure Load Balancer is a high-performance, ultra-low-latency Layer 4 load-balancing service (inbound and outbound) for all UDP and TCP protocols. It’s built to handle millions of requests per second while ensuring your solution is highly available.  With Azure Load Balancer, you can scale your applications and create highly available services. Load balancer supports both inbound and… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the Azure File Share module
Jan19

Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the Azure File Share module

I wrote in the past some articles about how it’s important to use Azure Storage for storing files in a Dynamics 365 Business Central project (avoid using blobs and media as much as possible) and I’ve talked about the differences between Azure Blob Storage and Azure File Share, also providing a solution for mapping an Azure File Share as a local drive for data exchange with Dynamics 365… Continue Reading...

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Monitoring your Azure OpenAI usage (part 2)
Jan15

Monitoring your Azure OpenAI usage (part 2)

In a previous post I wrote about how you can monitor your Azure OpenAI usage with Azure Monitor and Application Insights. Monitoring Azure OpenAI usage is an important practice to adopt and if you plan to start using generative AI features with Dynamics 365 Business Central, please also activate AI monitoring. In this post I want to talk about another interesting (and very easy to setup)… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Azure Functions and Data Parallelism: things to know.
Jan10

Azure Functions and Data Parallelism: things to know.

When working with code on some complex data operations, sometimes to improve performances it’s possible to use code techniques like parallel programming and/or data parallelism. Data parallelism refers to scenarios in which the same operation is performed concurrently (in parallel) on elements in a source collection or array. In data parallel operations, the source collection is… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...

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Power Automate: retrieving the first item of a recordset avoiding a loop.
Jan05

Power Automate: retrieving the first item of a recordset avoiding a loop.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central it’s quite common to do operations in AL code for filtering a set of records and then retrieving a value of the first record of the filtered recordset. Something like in the following code, where we filter the Item table for retrieving the first item with Unit Price greater than 1000: Let’s imagine now to use Power Automate to do the same thing. We can… Continue Reading...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: how the BCApps repo is moving?
Jan04

Dynamics 365 Business Central: how the BCApps repo is moving?

Can you see the image on top of this post? They’re not fireworks of the new year 2024 but instead something different… I think that you already know that Microsoft embraced the open source initiative also for Dynamics 365 Business Central. Everyone can collaborate on it and the BCApps repo in GitHub is the place to go. This repository contains the source code for several Business… Continue Reading...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: Isolated Storage and SecretText support.
Jan02

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Isolated Storage and SecretText support.

With Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release (version 23) Microsoft introduced a new data type called SecretText. This new data type is useful to protect secrets in AL code from being revealed through debugging (a SecretText variable is always displayed as <HiddenValue> during a debugging session) and I’ve talked about it in this post. The SecretText data type is in my opinion an… Continue Reading...

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Azure Functions: .NET 7 and .NET 8 local debugging bug on Visual Studio Code.
Dec29

Azure Functions: .NET 7 and .NET 8 local debugging bug on Visual Studio Code.

This is a very quick post signaling a bug that makes me spending hours of troubleshooting. If you’re developing Azure Functions with Visual Studio Code and .NET 7 or .NET 8, when you create a new Azure Function Isolated app project the assembly Microsoft.Azure.Functions.Worker.Sdk version 1.16.x is automatically referenced in your .csproj file: If you try to debug the Azure Function… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Happy New Year 2024!
Dec29

Happy New Year 2024!

And also another year it’s coming to an end. To everyone reading this blog, to everyone of you I met in person and online during this year, to everyone I had the pleasure to work with, to all those who simply read this post just because it appears in front of their eyes… I wish you a great start to the new year , full of energy and desire to grow. See you in 2024, more energized than… Continue Reading...

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Azure Logic Apps: securing HTTP Triggers with Microsoft Entra ID authentication
Dec28

Azure Logic Apps: securing HTTP Triggers with Microsoft Entra ID authentication

Lots of time ago I wrote a post about securing the HTTP triggered workflows created with Power Automate. You can read this post here. When you create a workflow with Power Automate or Azure Logic Apps and you use the “When an HTTP request is received” trigger, a public url to invoke the workflow via an HTTP request is automatically generated when saving the flow. The url has the… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: new additions in Excel Layouts reporting.
Dec27

Dynamics 365 Business Central: new additions in Excel Layouts reporting.

One of the reporting features I like the most in Dynamics 365 Business Central is the possibility to create Excel Layout reports. Excel Layout reports are essentially reports based on Excel workbooks, with all the fancy stuffs of Microsoft excel available. With Excel Layouts, when you create a new report first you define the report dataset in code (dataitems, fields etc.) Then you design a… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: remember to delete the Media orphans.
Dec20

Dynamics 365 Business Central: remember to delete the Media orphans.

In all my trainings and sessions I always say that when you have a blob file to import in Dynamics 365 Business Central (image, pdf, etc), you need to stop for a minute and think if you can store it outside of the database. For this scope, Dynamics 365 Business Central has a nice Azure Blob Storage module that permits you to store your files in a blob container on Azure Storage. In this… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Monitoring your Azure OpenAI usage
Dec19

Monitoring your Azure OpenAI usage

I want to continue the saga of “using Azure OpenAI in a professional way” by talking a bit about a practice that you should always act: monitoring the AI usage. As said in previous posts, using Azure OpenAI in a real world is not just sending prompts to a model, but you need to carefully handle requests and monitor the underlying deployments. Azure OpenAI uses Azure Monitor under the hood… Continue Reading...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: Microsoft standard AI features and prompts.
Dec13

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Microsoft standard AI features and prompts.

The new Dynamics 365 Business Central 23.2 release unlocks the new Copilot Developer Toolkit (more info here) for creating generative-AI experiences inside the ERP on online sandboxes. The advantages of using this toolkit include: Designing solutions that adhere to Responsible AI principles. Creating a unified Copilot experience. Accelerating time to market. You can now spin… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: Power BI and the “You do not have a Power BI account” error.
Dec11

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Power BI and the “You do not have a Power BI account” error.

Power BI embedded is one of the greatest feature in Dynamics 365 Business Central because enables users to create Power BI reports, scorecards, and dashboards based on Business Central data. Users can view these from their Power BI workspaces, but also from the Business Central client. After the upgrade to Dynamics 365 Business Central version 23 I saw some customers start receiving this… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Starting my first year as an MCT Regional Lead for Italy
Dec06

Starting my first year as an MCT Regional Lead for Italy

There’s no better way to finish the year than receiving a great news… Yesterday (after a busy day at work) I’ve received a communication from Microsoft saying that I will be awarded as an MCT Regional Lead for Italy starting from January 01, 2024. MCT Regional Leads are a selected group of MCTs worldwide that provide connections inside the community and support to local MCTs. This… Continue Reading...

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Azure Logic Apps Standard: introducing the Workflow Assistant (AI)
Dec01

Azure Logic Apps Standard: introducing the Workflow Assistant (AI)

Yes… AI is coming also in Azure Logic Apps Designer! If you’re developing an Azure Logic Apps Standard workflow, in the designer editor you will start seeing a new Assistant action: The workflow assistant (actually in public preview) is a chat interface to answer any questions about Azure Logic Apps, from directly within designer. You can also use it to describe existing workflow or… Continue Reading...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: Copilot, Azure OpenAI and real-world enterprise usage.
Nov29

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Copilot, Azure OpenAI and real-world enterprise usage.

We are entering a new era of AI, one that is fundamentally changing how we relate to and benefit from technology. With the convergence of chat interfaces and large language models (LLM) you can now ask for what you want in natural language and the technology is smart enough to answer, create or take action.  In the last months Microsoft introduced the concept of Copilot (your everyday AI… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: SQL Server and Read Committed Snapshot Isolation impact.
Nov23

Dynamics 365 Business Central: SQL Server and Read Committed Snapshot Isolation impact.

One of the greatest thing introduced in the latest Dynamics 365 Business Central release if cerainly the TRI STATE LOCKING feature and the new READ COMMITTED transaction isolation level. I wrote in the past about this new transaction isolation level and how it helps a lot on reducing locks. You can find my old post here explaining what happens on SQL level. And today my friend Duilio… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...

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“Decoupling”: the misterious word for many Dynamics 365 Business Central partners.
Nov22

“Decoupling”: the misterious word for many Dynamics 365 Business Central partners.

In the last year I’m seeing lots of existing Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises customers deciding to move their ERP to the cloud. What I’m observing is that the trend of existing on-premises customers choosing the cloud is growing a lot compared to the previous 2 years for example, and this is the sign that finally the new generation of ERP customers is trusting the cloud and is… Continue Reading...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: automate the telemetry setup.
Nov20

Dynamics 365 Business Central: automate the telemetry setup.

Some days ago I was reading a summary made by Kennie about the Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on data-driven implementations session at last Directions EMEA. The session abstract was the following: Let’s get together and discuss how we can use telemetry pro-actively in our project implementation lifecycle – from prospect meetings, during implementation, and before/after go-live. I was… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Azure Functions and Blob Triggers: be careful on the binding type.
Nov13

Azure Functions and Blob Triggers: be careful on the binding type.

This post is borned to signal a problem that I’ve recently found in a customer and I think that sharing it to everyone could help. Azure Functions support the Blob storage trigger, that permits you to automatically start a function when a new or updated blob is detected into a blob container in a storage account. When you create a blob-triggered Azure Functions, you can have different… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: is my on-premises customer ready for SaaS?
Nov07

Dynamics 365 Business Central: is my on-premises customer ready for SaaS?

“Is my Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises customer ready to be moved on SaaS?“. “Will the SaaS platform able to handle the transactions of my Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises customer?“. “Will I have performance problems on moving my existing Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises customer to the SaaS platform?“. These are common questions that quite every… Continue Reading...

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If you want to meet me @ Directions EMEA…
Oct29

If you want to meet me @ Directions EMEA…

… the best place is probably where there’s a beer Not sure if there’s a good beer in France but I’m sure that at Directions we’ll have it! Despite that, here is where you can meet me for sure: November 1 at 11:15 am in SALON PASTEUR: Creating high performance low-code workflows for Business Central: what’s new in Azure Logic Apps: in this session I’ll show you exciting new things about…...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the App Update Cadence setting.
Oct27

Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the App Update Cadence setting.

With Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS, until now AppSource apps are automatically updated to the latest available release when a mayor update is aplied to the tenant. Now things finally change… Starting from now, a new setting a new Apps Update Cadence setting is introduced in Admin Center: By default, the Apps Update Cadence setting is set to Default value on all… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their blog...

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The history of a Dynamics 365 Business Central data processing workflow…
Oct26

The history of a Dynamics 365 Business Central data processing workflow…

Once upon a time there was a workflow named SpongeFlow created with the intention of processing complex data coming from different data sources, merging informations between sources and, based on the result of the heavy processing, performing CRUD operations in Dynamics 365 Business Central. Our workflow wandered around the cloud scared and lost for days, looking for someone to show it… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...

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Dataverse Connector and cross-environment actions and triggers
Oct25

Dataverse Connector and cross-environment actions and triggers

If you’re creating solutions with the Microsoft Dataverse connector, I think that you will be happy to know that starting form yesterday you can automate apps, data, and processes across Power Platform environments through new supported actions and triggers in the Microsoft Dataverse connector (actually in public preview). Previously, the Microsoft Dataverse connector supported executing… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central and Retention Policies: please KISS!
Oct24

Dynamics 365 Business Central and Retention Policies: please KISS!

No… you don’t have to spread kisses all over the world, but probably the opposite… I think that many of you know that starting from Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 2 (v17) release, administrators can define retention policies to specify how frequently they want Business Central to delete outdated data in tables that contain log entries and archived records. I’ve talked in the past… Continue...

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Azure Functions with VNET integration: remember to enable Runtime Scale Monitoring
Oct20

Azure Functions with VNET integration: remember to enable Runtime Scale Monitoring

When working with Azure Functions, in real-world projects could happen that you need to connect to resources in an Azure virtual network (VNET) from your function app. The easy way to do that is hosting an Azure function on a Premium plan. Premium plan hosting provides the following benefits to your functions: Avoid cold starts with warm instances. Virtual network… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their blog Azure...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central and the AllowInCustomization field property: some clarifications.
Oct19

Dynamics 365 Business Central and the AllowInCustomization field property: some clarifications.

If someone of you remember, in August I wrote this post introducing the new AllowInCustomization field property that Microsoft planned to introduce starting from Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release. Just as a quick recap, this new table field property specifies whether the field can be used as source expression for new page fields in page customizations. Possible values are… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Collect Microsoft Graph Activity Logs in Azure Monitor
Oct17

Collect Microsoft Graph Activity Logs in Azure Monitor

Few days ago Microsoft announced the public preview of a very interesting feature: Microsoft Graph Activity Logs in Azure Monitor. You already know that for me (but I hope for everyone of you) monitoring a SaaS environment is a must for better governance and for proactively react to possibile problems. In this blog I talked a lot in the past about different types of monitoring activities… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: the Dynamics 365 Business Central Administrator role for granular administration
Oct11

Dynamics 365 Business Central: the Dynamics 365 Business Central Administrator role for granular administration

One of the planned feature for Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release (v23) is an interesting change on the granular delegated administrator roles. Until today, when a customer accepts a partner’s request for granular delegated administration privileges, the relevant members of the specified security group in the partner’s Microsoft Entra tenant get access as indicated in the… Continue Reading...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central and large data export to Excel via Power Automate: use Graph API.
Oct09

Dynamics 365 Business Central and large data export to Excel via Power Automate: use Graph API.

One of the quite common scenarios that I often see in many Dynamics 365 Business Central projects is something like the following: A business process inside the ERP generates a data table with the result of a data processing or a statistical calculation. The result of the business process must be exported in an Excel file saved into Onedrive or Sharepoint for the current user. Doing… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: remember to check the M365 Service Health Dashboard
Oct05

Dynamics 365 Business Central: remember to check the M365 Service Health Dashboard

In May 2022 I wrote this post explaining the upcoming changes on the way Microsoft will start sending notifications about service incidents on Dynamics 365 Business Central. These are very rare events but it could happen that Dynamics 365 Business Central service will be unavailable for a bit of time due to service incidents (and related activities to fix the problem). These types of… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central: Cloud Migration and permission sets.
Sep29

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Cloud Migration and permission sets.

When moving Dynamics 365 Business Central customers from the on-premises platform to the online platform, the absolutely recommneded way to do that process is by using the Cloud Migration toolset provided by Microsoft. With this set of tools, you can manage cloud migration from Dynamics 365 Business Central online through a connection to the on-premises database and various components that… Continue Reading demiliani’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central connector and Managed Identity with Azure Logic Apps.
Sep26

Dynamics 365 Business Central connector and Managed Identity with Azure Logic Apps.

I’ve received two time the same request from partners this week about the same topic, so probably this is something that should be cleared to everyone. In Azure Logic Apps workflows, some triggers and actions support using a managed identity for authenticating access to resources protected by Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). When you use a managed identity to authenticate your connection,… Continue Reading...

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Power Automate: changes in the HTTP Connector
Sep22

Power Automate: changes in the HTTP Connector

Have you ever used the HTTP connector with Power Automate? I think the naswer is YES because it’s (at least in my opinion) one of the most used in every real-world projects. The HTTP Connector has a trigger called When an HTTP request is received that permits you to trigger a Power Automate flow from external applications. In the past I wrote a post about this trigger where I’ve talked… Continue Reading...

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