A Shot of Business Central and A Beer - 1 Yr. Anniversary Special
Updated: Aug 16, 2021
A Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central podcast | S4E13 A Shot of Business Central and A Beer
Intro
Welcome to a Shot of Business Central and A Beer, our monthly podcast where Ken and Michael review a different beer and help you learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
This is the 1 year anniversary special episode of A Shot of Business Central and A Beer! In today's podcast Ken and Michael celebrate the anniversary with a couple of unique drinks, share some new and exciting business central news, chat about two of the more popular eCommerce apps for Business Central, and give an overview of what Adjust Cost is and why you need it.
Segments
Intro and Beer Reviews
A Shot of Business Central News
Featured App: eCommerce Apps for Business Central
Featured Segment: Adjust Cost - What is it and why you need it.
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A Shot of Business Central and A Beer Show Notes
Segment 1: Intro and Beer Review
Ken's Choice of drink:
Centennial IPA
Get ready to bask in the glory of the frothy head’s floral bouquet. Relish the citrus accents from the abundance of dry hopping. This one’s sweet, yet balanced. Malty undertones shake hands with the hop character for a finish that never turns too bitter.
Rating: 93
Beer Advocate:
A lot of “coppery”, “citrusy”, or “malty”…
4.16 average rating out of 5. 3.89 for All Day IPA. (All Day better in my opinion, but a lot of the comments seem to indicate “session beer prejudice”)
Overall well-done, and enjoyable. The kind of beer where the 2nd one is just as good as the first. (7.2% ,so don't lose track on #. ;) ) I would suggest letting it warm up a bit . Quite a noticeable difference in taste and feel between a cold one and a cool one. I much prefer the warmer version. Fresh out of the fridge, it was in the 3.6-3.7 range for me.
This is a heavy beer at 7.2%. A thicc body with at least 2 c's. Definitely not a slammer, unless you're looking to end up in one.
So disappointed that this beer looked and smelled so good only to turn out that it’s equivalent to the burnt toast of beer.
Michael's Choice:
Jack Daniels mixed with Coca Cola
Nothing more needs to be said other than Frank Sinatra was buried with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
My Rating: 98.
What’s Happened in the Past Year since we started podcasting
A Shot of Business Central on average saw a 37% increase in plays each month.
Our highest rated beer was the first beer we tried, Zombie Dust by Three Floyds Brewing with a rating of 96. Any changes looking back on the raitings?
Worst rated beers were the Leinenkugel’s Cherry Blonde Lager and Trader Joe’s Providential Golden Ale with ratings of 50
We saw the third president in history get impeached.
The first all-woman spacewalk was completed.
Wildfires ravaged through Brazil’s rain forest.
Tom Brady became a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.
On average 97.2% of organization’s are investing in Big Data and AI. See study here.
Facebook had to pay a record fine of 5 billion dollars to settle allegations that it mishandled user privacy practices.
Microsoft became a 1 trillion dollar company
Podcast listeners in the United States increased by 13 million to a total of 88 million.
Microsoft Resources to help you work from home
To help do our part in paying it forward during the COVID-19 pandemic we’ve partnered with Microsoft to give you the tools needed to work from home.
Microsoft 365 Business Basic (formerly Office 365 Business Essentials) free for 6 months
What is Microsoft 365 Business Basic?
The ultimate remote collaboration tool. Includes Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Email and Calendar capabilities with Outlook. Chat, online meetings, and calling with Microsoft Teams.
Let’s say you have already purchased the Office apps and Outlook but you don’t have the chat, online meetings, and calling options. What should you do?
Microsoft Teams – Free for 6 months
What is Microsoft Teams? A collaboration tool that allows you to share files, text chat, and video conference with anyone.
Working from home is great but you still need to go into the office to do manual backups of your data. Is there any way to avoid this?
Yes with Microsoft Azure Cloud Backup. You’ll have to pay the monthly free associated with storing your data but Solution Systems will handle the hard part of setting this all up for you for Free.
Segment 2: Productivity Tools to Help Work From Home
Office 365: Outlook, Word, Excel, SharePoint, Teams, PowerPoint
Segment 3: A Shot of Business Central News
Cloud Migration Tool improvements
See “What's new to the migration tools 2020 Wave 1 Release.pdf” document for details
ON-PREMISE VERSION LICENSING
On April 1, 2020, Microsoft released version 16 of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central On-Premises 2020 release wave 1 for online and on-premises customers.
Based on your valued feedback, Microsoft has changed the availability of registration license keys. We understand that your customers may not be ready to upgrade as frequently as we are releasing new versions. Customers will now have access to the registration license keys for the two previous versions from their ‘purchased’ version.
If a customer purchases Dynamics 365 Business Central, version 16: they have access to version 16, 15, and 14 registration keys in PartnerSource Business Center.
If a customer purchases Dynamics 365 Business Central, version 15: they have access to version 15, 14, and 13 registration keys in PartnerSource Business Center.
Extend Data Storage for Dynamics 365 Business Central
New SKU Introduced to add more Data:
$40 per month
Offer Display Description: Additional database capacity for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Each unit increases available tenant wide shared capacity by 1 GB.
Currently each session comes with 80gb of data storage and Microsoft wants to have most customers operate without the need for any additional storage
Steps they are taking to give you more storage:
SQL Compression - Simple technique used to reduce database size and improve performance. Will begin rolling out before the 2020 release wave 2
o Automated Log File Management - Microsoft will configure and manage a maximum size for log tables and provide automatic purging of older entries to improve performance and reduce storage.
Alerting on rapid database growth - “When we examined the largest Business Central databases, we observed cases where the growth was due to an error condition and not normal usage.” Functionality that will alert tenant administrators to unexpected database growth and tools to identify the involved tables.
Attachments in File Storage - For right now Microsoft will exclude binary file storage from the calculation of database storage usage. In the future, Microsoft plan’s to move binary attachments to lower priced file storage.
Archiving - Microsoft plans to allow the archiving of historical data out of the primary database while still maintaining access to required information.
Segment 4: Featured App - eCommerce
Alright, because of all the digital transactions going on with how we obtain products lately, for this month’s featured app segment we’re going to be taking a look at two of the more popular eCommerce apps around for Business Central. Those being Sana Commerce and eShop for Dynamics.
Why eCommerce this month you ask? Well, because of all the digital transactions going on with how we obtain products lately, it just seemed right to look at some eCommerce apps. Especially once I read that overall eCommerce sales are up 25% due to COVID-19, and certain industries, such as exercise equipment, are seeing an increase in eCommerce sales up to 55%. This is according to Adobe’s Digital Economy Index
So, let’s jump right in and take a look at Sana Commerce.
Sana Commerce was founded in 2008 and is a subsidiary of ISM eCompany, which was founded by Jan Kees de Jager and Karel van der Woude in 1992. This means the Commerce portion has been around roughly 12 years.
So, what is the “claim to fame” so to speak of Sana’s Business Central e-Commerce app? There are really 4 things that Sana likes to boast about.
The first is, it makes it easy for customers to find, order, reorder, pay for and return products online at their convenience. In my opinion the keyword here being convenience because that’s really what e-Commerce is all about.
The second is, simplified web store setup and ongoing maintenance by using Business Central to power your web store – which is designed to be implemented in just weeks without requiring heavy customizations. Ok, a full e-Commerce platform up and running within weeks? This sounds like something every Business Central user can get behind.
Next is, providing a better buying experience that’s consistent across all devices – online and offline. Now I don’t know the numbers but having consistency across all devices is a must in today’s digital world. If I had to guess I would say more than half of online purchases are done through cell phones.
The last is providing the tools to allow you to Improve sales results by reaching a larger global market, opening a new sales channel and creating sales touchpoints with e-Commerce.
Ok, so these were the selling points of Sana Commerce. But what does Sana claim set’s this app apart from others? Well...
It was the first officially recognized e-commerce app in AppSource
It Has a very simple and sleek layout
It connects directly into (and is partially built on top of) your Business Central environment.
It has Front- and back-office systems integration (and a unified business environment that is easily scalable, customizable, and extensible).
It has Time-saving automation functionality (thanks to the real-time synchronization of your ERP data).
So For Example: Once an order is placed the Sales Order is written to your Business Central Database in real-time.
It has A unified view of your customers, and simplified inventory management across channels.
And it has Expedited order fulfillment (and in turn, more satisfied customers).
Alright, that’s the quick rundown on Sana Commerce let’s take a look at eShop for Dynamics.
Dynamics eShop has over 20 years of experience in developing and implementing fully integrated commerce solutions. These solutions have a focus on leveraging technology to simplify and automate business processes and provide a robust digital platform that makes selling easy by uniting the right products with their customers. So roughly 8 more years of experience with commerce solutions than Sana had. I’m not sure how much weight that holds in today’s world but it’s good to take a mental note of it.
What are eShop for Dynamics “claims to fame”? Well, there are 5 things they like to boast about and the first one is Displaying Customer specific pricing, payment terms and discounts by leveraging existing business logic from Dynamics 365 Business Central. So, just like with Sana Commerce, eShop for Dynamics is integrating with your Business Central environment to improve the customer experience.
The second is, the ability to display real-time inventory on the website. In my opinion, real-time functionality is a must for any eCommerce platform. Imagine if you bought something only to find out later that the company was actually out of whatever it is you purchased, and it won’t be restocked for two more weeks. I don’t know about you but that would drive me absolutely crazy!
The third is, the ability to create orders instantly into Dynamics 365 Business Central….Another must for any eCommerce platform.
The fourth is, displaying orders, invoices, credit memo and payment history online and allowing payments on existing invoices. I really like this because it’s creating a better customer experience and a happy customer is a returning customer.
The last claim to fame of eShop for Dynamics is the ability to create and maintain data in Dynamics 365 Business Central and share that data across multiple platforms. To some, this is a big deal. To others, maybe not. To me it’s one of those things that’s not a big deal until it is a big deal. Better to be prepared than not prepared.
Ok, Those were eShop for Dynamics “claims to fame”, now let’s take a look at what they believe sets their app apart from others:
It’s a Responsive solution that makes it readily available to access on all devices.
It has Ready integration to majority of the Shipping Carriers and Payment Gateways.
It has Affordable & Faster implementation with pre-built templates that's highly flexible to customize or in-house resources ready to help design a custom solution
It has a Built-in Content Management System with a Microsoft Word-like application interface that allows you to create dynamic pages without the need to code
It has Amazon and eBay Integrations
It can Connect to social networking sites & Marketplaces
It has Readily available plugins, themes and extensions for site enhancements
It has Multi-store/Multi-Currency/Multi-language capable
It has built-in Marketing capabilities like discounts, coupons, newsletters, gift card, up-selling and cross-selling
It’s SEO Optimized.
And it Works with your existing Magento Site too.
Ok, so we’ve got two feature rich eCommerce apps that seem to have a lot of similarities. What about price though? Let’s go over some basics.
Dynamics eShop Pricing
Less than 300 orders a month
$499 per month
One time install cost of $7,500
Less than 600 orders a month
$799 per month
One time install cost of $12,500
Unlimited Orders per month
$999 per month
One time setup cost of $15,000
Options Available for Purchase
eShop Sales Portal
B2C Module allows a customer who is not necessarily a customer in the NAV can browse product catalog, register online, place orders and pay online using credit card or any specified payment method.
eShop Vendor Portal
Vendor Portal allows your suppliers/vendors to login and check thier catalog, Purchase Orders, Invoices or any reports from NAV including inventory reports.
Packages available for discounted pricing
Both B2B or B2C and Sales Portal or Vendor Portal - This package includes both B2B(or C ) and Sales or Vendor Portal module
B2B and B2C Package – Includes both modules
B2B, B2C & Sales Portal Package - This package includes B2B, B2C and Sales Portal Module
B2B, B2C,Sales & Vendor Portal Package - This package includes B2B, B2C, Sales & Vendor Portal Module
Marketing Site - Marketing Site allows to build web pags and catalog pages without display of prices and cart features
Standalone eshop – No integration to Business Central
Amazon Integration
Ebay Integration
Mobile / Point of Sale Commerce - Mobile eshop site adjusts to any mobile or tablet screens making it a friendly mobile site or POS in Store.
Sana Commerce Prices
Limited number of ERP Users (price sheet did not say amount)
$1,800 per month
One-time setup cost of $20,000
Unlimited number of ERP user supported
$2,750 per month
One-time setup cost of $20,000
Both are very good products. The major discrepancy in price is Sana comes out of the box with every feature included where as Dynamics eShop takes more of an a la carte approach.
Segment 5 - Featured Spotlight: Inventory Adjust Cost - What is it and why you need it.
Closing
Thanks everyone for listening.
Please subscribe to the podcast, share it, or tell a friend about it.
See you next month!