Thursday, June 1, 2023

Business Central Simple Tip #5: Comment Lines, Standard Text Codes, and Extended Text

by Steve Endow

(Thanks to Kristen Hosman for showing me this feature!)


Business Central has a very cool feature that allows you to add text Comments to transaction lines.  I'm excited about it because I don't believe we had an equivalent feature in the Dynamics GP world.

The feature appears to be well designed and implemented in Business Central, but the official MS documentation on the elements of the features are limited, so I don't think the docs to the feature justice.

There are 3 elements to the overall "feature" in Business Central:

1. Comment Line Type

2. Standard Text Codes

3. Extended Text


Comment Lines

When entering a transaction in Business Central, such as a Sales Invoice, the Line "Type" field can be set to "Comment".  You can then manually enter comment text in the line Description field.  This is the simplest option for ad-hoc comment lines, but the Description field is limited to 100 characters, so if you need more than 100 characters, you would need to add multiple Comment lines.

Sunday, March 5, 2023

Documentation. Documentation? Documentation!

by Steve Endow

How do you create your documentation?  

When do you create your documentation?

Who in your organization creates your documentation?  Who doesn't?

Does anybody actually read your documentation?  How do you know?

Do you specifically budget for documentation in your projects?  How much?

Are your customers reluctant to pay for documentation?

Can your documentation keep up with your software releases?  Do you maintain detailed release notes?

Do you methodically and consistently update your documentation over time?  


Update:  (based on a response from Erik Hougaard on Twitter)

Do you create instructional videos or video tutorials as part of your documentation?  If so, how do you consistently record, edit, store, publish, and index such videos?  Do you have public and private (e.g. customer specific) videos?  If so, how do you handle publishing videos for those different audiences?

By now I'm sure you are excited beyond belief, as there are few topics more glamorous than "documentation".  


Is it read?

Over the last 20 years, I've worked with over 700 customers.  I've documented business processes, business procedures, ERP training guides, user manuals, customization specifications, integration designs, data mappings, installation guides, and software user manuals.

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Business Central Simple Tip #4: Exporting Leading Zeroes to Excel and then CSV- It works fine!

by Steve Endow

This may seem obvious to some, but I've learned through many painful lessons that unless I actually test a scenario and see for myself that it works exactly as desired, it can be dangerous to make assumptions about software functionality and offer promises to customers...


ERP users regularly need to export data to CSV files, and then send or use those CSV files somewhere else. 

A common problem with working with CSV files is that leading zeroes can sometimes be removed by Excel.  This typically occurs when a user opens an existing CSV file, makes a change, and then saves the CSV file.  During that CSV editing process, Excel will typically remove all leading zeroes from field values.

A customer recently asked us to create a custom file export to send to their bank.  They need a list of payments created in Business Central, as well as all of the purchasing invoices that were paid by that payment--essentially a remittance file.

To keep things simple at first, we're looking to create a custom Business Central List Page that has all of the fields the customer needs for their bank.  A user can then just click on the Open in Excel action from the list page to save the data to a file.

Open in Excel from a List Page

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Business Central Simple Tip #3: Those Role Center "Square Things" - Cues and Action Tiles

by Steve Endow

I was recently researching those "square things" that are displayed on the Business Central Role Center "home" page.

You know, the square things:

"Square Things"

After searching my memory, I recalled they were called "Cues".  As in they provide a visual "cue" with information.

But when I started to research them and how I could create a custom Cue, found an article that mentioned both "Cues" and "Action Tiles".

What?

Thursday, December 29, 2022

Business Central Simple Tip #2: Update AppSource Apps

by Steve Endow

(There is some technical background involved in this Simple Tip, so if I got any details wrong or missed something that is important, please let me know).


Today's Business Central Simple Tip comes from the book Administrating Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Online by Andrey Baludin.

It relates to "AppSource Apps" that are installed in your Business Central Online Environment.  If you have Andrey's book, turn to page 46, and look for the heading "Apps and sessions".

He provides instructions on how to navigate in the Business Central Admin Center to the "Manage Apps" page.  The Manage Apps page lets you see a list of apps that are installed in that particular Environment.

Business Central Admin Center - Manage Apps Page

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Business Central Simple Tip #1: List Page Search

by Steve Endow

This morning I opened Jeremy Vyska's Your First 20 Hours with Business Central book to see what I could learn.

As I was scrolling through the PDF with my signature Short Attention Span (tm), glancing at the pages, I happened to notice a note.

I don't know why my pre-coffee brain happened to notice this particular note, but I saw that it used the interesting combination of words like "Search", "magic", and "more slowly".

Wait, what is this about?  What Search? 

A Note About Search Performance

So I scroll up to see what he's talking about there, and I see that it's referring to the Search function on the List page.

List Page Search Field

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

My New Criteria for a Password Manager

December 27, 2022

by Steve Endow


On December 22, 2022, LastPass disclosed that they had discovered that an attacker had copied a backup of customer "vault data" following a cyberattack and data breach that occurred in August 2022.

Aside from the obvious bad news, I initially learned of two interesting things about LastPass that I never would have thought to consider when evaluating password managers.

1. While web site username and password values are encrypted, the URL for the web site entry is not encrypted by LastPass.  I believe this poses a security risk for LastPass users.

2. Prior to 2018, LastPass used 5,000 iterations in the key derivation process. In 2018, they increased that to 100,100 iterations.  Even if you don't know what key derivation iterations are, just make note of that significant change.  From what I've read, older vaults were not automatically upgraded to the more secure configuration.  In theory, this means that vaults created prior to the 2018 upgrade are potentially more vulnerable to brute force password cracking.

How many digits can a Business Central Amount field actually support?

 by Steve Endow (If anyone has a technical explanation for the discrepancy between the Docs and the BC behavior, let me know!) On Sunday nig...