This year’s going to be Extreme (365)

The annual Extreme365 event was this year held in the awesome city of Lisbon, Portugal. Annually, Dynamics partners and customers come together to celebrate all things Dynamics365, present solutions, discuss roadmaps, and generally get stuck into to some pretty deep discussions about the future of the platform and the quality of the local cuisine. A highly recommended adventure. 

So, what did we learn?

The Dynamics 365 ecosystem is receiving heavy investment from Microsoft

Significant technical changes to the underlying platform, UI enhancements, deeper integration with Azure, and a more closely coupled CRM/Operations landscape make it clear that Microsoft see Dynamics 365 as a key part of their strategy. The changes coming are broad, deep and accelerating, so prepare for some very cool stuff ahead in the coming months. 

Extensibility and openness makes things better

An important message from this year’s Extreme has been the extent to which the Dynamics 365 platform is open to integration (securely, of course). APIs are growing and becoming more user friendly; learning and support resources are improving; Out-of-the-box integration via Flow puts Dynamics 365 within easy reach of a broad range of 3rd Party apps – no code required. All great to hear.

Azure integration makes sense

It would be an understatement to say that the Azure stack covers a broad range of capabilities – just take a look here. Therefore, Microsoft’s strategy to integrate Dynamics 365 with Azure make sense. It allow each to focus on what it’s good at, and back-off to Azure the things that Azure already has capabilities in place to handle. This is, of course, already the case in a number of areas (e.g. authentication, machine learning), but much more is coming. The potential this opens up is simply incredible (think search, AI, compute… you name it).

Ui is a core part of forthcoming enhancements

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the mobile app for Dynamics 365 is of a different order of quality now than it was just a short time ago – and more is coming. At Extreme, Microsoft spoke about how the work done for the mobile platform will feed into a new underlying Ui framework for the web app. This should enhance performance, strengthen flexibility, and add capabilities that will make extending the interface via code easier. Watch this space!

As always, do get in contact with eBECS if you want to find out more.