Microsoft’s new Publisher Program for Dynamics 365 Business Central
At the Directions North America conference this past week, Microsoft announced a new Publisher program that is designed to overhaul the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) strategy for Dynamics 365 Business Central. The Directions conference is an event for Dynamics Partners to come together and collaborate to better service the small- and mid-sized business market.
This program will be replacing the Registered Solution Program (RSP) and the Certified for Microsoft Dynamics (CfMD) program. This new strategy will aim to push ISVs to a cloud-first approach. So how will this affect Business Central users? To put it plainly, this should largely benefit users, if even just for the easier integration process. The ISVs will be able to focus much more on their specific application and ensuring it works properly without needing to jump into BC’s code. Before publishing, the solutions will first need to be ran though Microsoft AppSource which runs a checker to verify it functions properly in Business Central.
What does this mean?
ISVs are external entities from Microsoft that develop and sell some sort of solution for use in Microsoft ERP solutions, Dynamics 365 Business Central in this case. Microsoft wants to push ISVs to develops their solutions with the idea of cloud-first in mind. This means building the apps with Software as a Service (SaaS) users in mind as the driving force. This does not mean that the apps will be unusable for non-SaaS users.
The point of having ISVs focus on cloud-first is that they will not need to wrestle with any of the Business Central base application code. They can focus solely on the code for their own application. This is similar to how Business Central online ISVs work right now. They are essentially just extensions of Business Central and require no modification of the code in the base app.
What is the impact?
Many ISVs have made the switch to this focus and have been finding much success. While the task of switching the development strategy was daunting at first, most found the transition to be much faster and easier than expected, and enjoy being able to more easily improve upon their solution. In addition, the apps can generally be much deeper, vertical solutions and will function much better.
These Business Central extensions are found through AppSource. AppSource is an online store with thousands of business solutions, both applications and services, from Microsoft Partners. These are built for a variety of Microsoft products like Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, or Microsoft 365. Business Central, example, has around 1500 solutions available on AppSource. Filters based on categories like supply planning or specific industries can be applied to narrow down results for the perfect solution.
The full details of the program have not yet been released, but it is set to launch later this year.
Learn more
If you’re interested in learning a bit more about what this program is and how you can customize Business Central to better fit within your organizations processes, let us know! We can discuss how AppSource works and walk through custom modification options.