What’s Next for Your Dynamics ERP | Dynamics GP (Video)

If you’re a Dynamics GP user, this recorded webinar will provide clarity around your ERP path forward. We discuss what your options are with Dynamics GP or with Dynamics 365 Business Central.

During this video, we discuss:

• Microsoft’s product roadmap for Dynamics GP
• The three options for your ERP going forward
• How Encore can support your organization

For more information about Dynamics GP options going forward, please see the links below:

• Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central | Options, Process, and Benefits (Video)
• Top 5 Questions about the Future of Dynamics GP
• Forks in Your Dynamics GP Roadmap: 4 Paths Forward
• Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central Infographic

Contact us if you’d like to discuss your ERP roadmap going forward.

TRANSCRIPT

Tracey: Good afternoon. I’m hoping that everyone can hear me. Melissa said, “Wait for the robot voice to stop,” and then I could start talking. So, hopefully, you all can hear me because you’re all muted. Good afternoon, everyone. I’m super excited to be presenting “What’s Next for Your Dynamics ERP,” specifically talking about our Dynamics GP clients and our ecosystem. We’re not gonna be having a Q&A at the end of this session.

If you have any questions, feel free to email myself or Melissa, or any of the team at Encore, and then we’ll collect all the questions. And then we’ll be basically doing an FAQ and giving you all the information, as well as this entire session is gonna be recorded and provided to you as well afterwards. So, again, you don’t have to worry about writing everything down. We’ll try and keep it as light as we possibly can. And we’re gonna go quite quickly. We’ve got lots of content that we want to show you today. So, I will go ahead, and we’ll get started.

Let me go ahead and minimize this presentation screen. There we go. Now, I can see my words. All right. Let’s get started. Digital disruption is forcing every company and industry to reimagine themselves. A huge part of this transition is about reinventing how businesses engage with their customers, their business processes, and how they take advantage of data and intelligence. Let’s begin by pointing out that digital transformation has become the number one priority for CEOs. And, if you look at the numbers, we are talking in the billions of people that are using social media, smart devices, and this is not going to slow down.

You know, everyone you see, like, you’re on the bus, or you’re going to work, or, you know, in a social setting, or at work, everyone has their mobile device. So, the statement that customer is king is older than most of us have been alive, except for maybe me. But in years past, we didn’t always know our customers and had to guess about what they want, and how they’ll react, and what they’ll buy. Today, we know things about our customers even before they do, and that means we, collectively, must transform our businesses to be more valuable to our business customers.

As we can see from the information on the screen here, we’ve got 2 billion active social media accounts, 3 billion active internet users, 2.4 billion smart devices, and that information just keeps expanding and expanding of how many phones, how many connections, 152,000 per minute versus 48,000 today within 10 years. It’s quite amazing. And I don’t think there’s really any…you know, we’re not gonna be stopping that process, that evolution, as time goes on. So, to disrupt and innovate, industries must take on a strategy that connects their customers, employees, products, and operations as effectively as possible, streamlining their business to respond to customer demands and pooling data across the organization so that analytics can hunt and find those opportunities.

A concrete connected business application strategy and implementation can support industries that are looking to disrupt. The framework we use to highlight how digital transformation is enabled is what we call digital feedback loop and at the center is data. Data is coming out of everything. You know, every morning, I get up and I look at my Fitbit and check out how was my sleep and how’s my heart rate. That information, that’s just my data. There is thousands, and thousands, and thousands of people using Fitbits, and all that data gets collected and analyzed. Every motor that’s manufactured at this point is emitting telemetry, so from Fitbits to, you know, your car. Your car’s got a computer, and it’s collecting all of that data. It’s all around us.

So, all of this data allows us to go and mine intelligence, and predict what customers may need, and understand what piece of equipment is on its way to a challenging spot or need, maybe, repair or it’s going to fail. So, taking all this information, these predictions, we gather all of that information from all of that telemetry, all that data. So, again, what are we going to do with it? So, Microsoft is leading the digital revolution through Microsoft Azure, which is the premier enterprise cloud offering. It’s a global trusted hybrid of secure platforms for business. Azure helps you gain unmatched security. Microsoft is investing more than a billion a year and employs more than 3,500 security experts to protect your information. Your data is more secure in the data center than in your company’s server room because, again, they’ve got those experts that are focusing on that and supporting you.

So, with Microsoft Azure, there’s also Microsoft 365, which is Office 365 with that security layer. They add extensive productivity tools like Excel, Outlook, and SharePoint that customers use across the globe to work smarter, faster, and more effectively and connecting the data and users of these products to Dynamics 365. And that’s what we’re going to be talking a little bit about today. So, if you’ve attended any of our Office 365 sessions, where we’ve been showing off all the apps and how they work together again, those apps are completely embedded within Microsoft D365 Business Central.

Dynamics 365 Business Central is Microsoft’s next generation of intelligent business applications in the cloud. It not only includes accounting and financial management capabilities, but also sales and service, project management, supply chain inventory, and operations management. What makes Dynamics 365 Business Central unique is that it harnesses the power of the one Microsoft. That’s something we, at Encore, we’re doing a lot of these, one Microsoft presentations to show you how all those applications are interconnected. It brings together two worlds of business process and personal productivity. We surface familiar tools like Excel and Word within the context of business processes, significantly increasing productivity and decreasing context switching.

Lots of times, we heard from clients, “We don’t want to be going in and out of so many different applications. We just want to be in one application.” And for clients who have been with us for many years, if you can remember back, I can’t remember what year it was, but at one of the Convergences, there was a presentation by Bill Gates. And he actually said, “You know…” and this is going back, gosh, it must be 15, it might be, something, 13, 15 years ago, and he got up on stage, and he stood there, and he said, “You know,” he goes, “In my world,” he goes, “I look in the future. And I think the accounting system should be run out of Outlook.”

And we’re all like, “What?” But, you know, now we have that ability. So, for example, when we’re in Outlook, and we’ve sent an order off to someone, and they send an email back saying, “Well, I want three widgets, not two widgets,” you can actually change it right from the email. And they’ll go and update that information in the accounting system in Dynamics 365. So, it’s quite incredible that he had that foresight back then and made that come to life.

The power behind Cortana Intelligence are natively embedded in Dynamics 365 Business Central business applications for predictive insight, prescriptive advice, and actionable next steps. Additionally, Azure IoT brings device data to enable preemptive action in business functions like field service. Businesses can adapt and innovate in real-time with a common data model and extensible business application platform, including PowerApps, Flow, and Power BI.

I gotta catch up with my clicking and stop talking. There we go. We’ve introduced Microsoft App Store so business users can easily find and evaluate lines of business, SAS applications from Microsoft and our partners across Dynamics 365, Office 365, Cortana Intelligence, and the Azure platform. There’s lots and lots of great apps out there that can extend the capability of the ERP solutions that we work with. Dynamics 365 Business Central is built on NAV‘s codebase.

So, those of you might have been familiar with NAV, that’s one of our other offerings that we have, it leverages NAV’s deep functionality built over the years of being used in the real world by thousands of companies. So Dynamics 365 Business Central is available as both a cloud-based SAS solution, or perpetual-hosted solution, or really on-premise. So, again, that deployment can be on-prem or in the SAS model. So, there’s kind of that evolution. So, again, you might have colleagues that are using Dynamics NAV, and that last release was 2018. And it was renamed D 365 Business Central.

So, let’s get back to talking about you. So, what solution is right for you? Let me take a few minutes to talk about the three options in front of you. Option number one, a transition to Dynamics 365 Business Central in the cloud. You’ll be able to increase your return you’re getting from your Microsoft investment, control your costs and complexity, and improve your IT team’s productivity, along with a whole host of other benefits.

I want to help make this transition as smooth as possible for you. We have resources and tools available to help you, and I’ll be here with you through that entire process. We’re having today’s session to kind of introduce you to kind of your options. And we’ll be having a subsequent webinar kind of saying, “Okay, what are the next steps,” so, what happens or what are your choices regarding your options, as we couldn’t fit everything in today. So, it will be a shorter follow-up webinar to take you through the kind of the next steps. So that was option number one.

Option number two, upgrading to Dynamics Business Central on-premise keeps you current while allowing you the option of getting some limited benefits of the cloud. So, again, you can do that cloud sync. Option number three, you can stay on-premise, stay exactly where you are. So, for example, the latest release of Dynamics GP 2018 R2, you might decide to go to that version and remain on that version. So, again, you’ve got some options there. You can go fully into D365 Business Central. You can do something called the cloud sync, which is intelligent cloud, and we’re going to talk about that a little bit more. I better go to my next slide because I’m talking ahead instead of going off of my slides.

Migrating to Dynamics 365 Business Central cloud gives you the full functionality of Microsoft services, enabling your company’s digital transformation with Dynamics 365 Business Central. You can grow beyond the limits of your basic accounting software. Dynamics 365 is an all-in-one business management solution that’s easy to use, and adapt, helping you connect your business and make smarter decisions. This all-in-one business management solution meets the need of growing businesses, automatically pull systems and processes together to manage financials, sales, service, and operations, connect with third-party applications like payroll, banking, CRM, or industry-specific systems, managed access to confidential data, keeps your information secure, customize, extend and build all the apps that you need.

So, now, we’re going to go into actually looking at what the interface is all about. And, I’m gonna just click on there to hide that screen. So, I’m not actually in the application. I’ve got some PowerPoint slides that are going to walk you through, just so you can see what the user interface is like. And, right now, the role I’m going through to show you is the accountant. And the accountant role has a tailored homepage, offers metrics, queues, and shortcuts to key areas within application relevant to the role owner, so much like what you’re using in GP today and that role-type tailored client. So when you log in, it knows what kind of role you’re in the organization and surfaces up on your home screen the things that you want to see most. So, this is very similar to that experience. [inaudible 00:13:06].

All the information provides details with a single click such as key accounts, customers, or metrics. So, again, I can see all that information there. And I can see that I’ve got some outstanding receivables that are longer than 4 weeks and also 10 weeks. So, I want to be able to drill into the 10 W on the aged accounts receivable to find out what’s going on. Now, this one’s 10 weeks past due. We need to call the customer ASAP and collect. So, again, despite clicking on those screens, and why I’ve put this up here is just to show you how that navigation is going to happen, so that you’re able to see what information…that navigation is very intuitive and simple. So, again, now we’re going to go look at the chart of accounts to look at the balances of the accounts. So, I’m going to go ahead and select the chart of accounts. And I can go ahead and return to the homepage. Ctrl + A was going to take me back to the homepage. So, I was able to see…here is a really easy…I’m looking at the balance sheet and the accounts, and I can see the net change and the balance very easily.

And I’m going to actually do…I’m doing a Ctrl + C to copy. I’m copying 30 rows, and now I’m going to go back to the homepage. And I’m going to go ahead and do Ctrl + V, and I can go ahead and just copy it. So, simply from going into that trial balance, those GL accounts, I was able to go into Excel and quickly share that out into Excel, like we do in SmartList in GP. While most key tasks are serviced on the role-tailored homepage, the accountant is interested in a specific report. It’s immediately on display. To quickly and easily access report, open the trial balance. So, again, like we have on our homepage in GP.

So, I’m going to go ahead and select the trial balance summary. So, again, I’ve got these trial balance reports, but I’ve got a variety of choices there. So, I’m going to go ahead and select that detail one. And then, that is presented/ The report is presented. And I can close out of there. Also, my basic financial reports that I can go into as well. So, I can go and click on reports, and then I’ve got financial statements, as well as Excel reports. And now, I’ve gone into my Excel reports, and I see my Excel reports. I’ve got a variety of financial reports to look at. So, I’m going to go ahead and look at the balance sheet. So, I go ahead and open that up, and in here, I’ve got my balance sheet, leveraging Excel. Again, so you can see that ease of use if you can imagine. I mean, my brain, I’m thinking in the back of my head, “Oh, great. I can make up, you know, lots and lots of different financial reports and then have that ability to surface them up in Excel.”

Now, we’re going to go on to what it would look like. I’m showing you this kind of overview just to get an understanding of how the navigation is and how similar it will be. So, again, when you are ready to make that transition, you don’t know your users, so it’s not like, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to a brand new system, and they don’t feel that their productivity is going to be at the level that it was before,” so that you can kind of have a preview of that. So, we’re going to go on and we’re going to add a new account where you’ve got…as our business is growing, we need to get a new account for travel expenses. And there isn’t an account number for that. So, we’re going to go ahead and add a new account.

So, I’m going to go into open chart of accounts. And, then I’m going to select from the list of the chart of accounts. I’m gonna search for travel expenses. So, I’m gonna select F3 for my shortcut, and up comes that searching capability. And I’m going to go ahead and enter travel, and then say, “New” because when I did my search, there was an account there, so I’m going to go ahead and say, “Create new,” and out comes the window where I can go ahead and create that new G/L number, and the name, and what category it is. And it’s going to be an expense and the subcategory. And there. That’s how simple it is to go ahead and create a new chart of accounts, an account for our chart of accounts. So, adding an account is simple and easy in this experience. It empowers the users, our accountants, to control the information they want and need for reporting.

So let’s look at how to enter a journal entry. Now that the travel expense has been added to the general ledger, I need to create or record a transaction. So, I’m going to enter a payment. And one of the requirements is to track or record the expense for a specific department, the sales department. So, I’m going to go ahead and select journals, general journal, and I’ve got a batch. And I’m going to go ahead and put in my account number. It was was a travel expense and my amount. At this specific point, we could post the transaction without any additional steps. However, the company is needing to track expense by department. And I’ve got the ability to use Dimensions to go ahead and assign that. So, much like you would say in GP, we have those segment, a segmented chart of accounts, Business Central is a dimensional chart of accounts. And, for those of you that we’ve had conversations about this, how powerful a dimensional chart of accounts can be and add value. And they’re very, very important. It allows us to analyze our data a lot more efficiently and then a segmented chart of accounts.

So, in here, I can go ahead and select the dimension, which is going to be department and list the admin, or sorry, sales, not admin, the sales. And I can go ahead and post that transaction. And it’s letting me know that it was posted. I’m going to go ahead now and open the detailed trial balance. And I can go ahead and see my transaction there. And, next, we’re going to go on to entering a journal entry via Excel import. So, again, much like you would do in GP. So, we’re going to go ahead and do journals, selecting my batch, edit in Excel, highlight the posting date, select the posting date, enter the data, go ahead and publish, and then it brings it into my journal. And we’re manually keying that in the previous example, and here is our import.

Now, we’re going to go ahead and look at how would I analyze an account. As controls are essential to accounting, I want to ensure I keep track of miscellaneous expense account. Occasionally, someone will accidentally code an expense to miscellaneous. So, I’m going to go ahead and I’m at my homepage. And favorite or key accounts can be added to display on the role-based homepage. So, again, I could pick certain accounts that I always want to keep an eye on, and it’s right there surfaced on my homepage. And I’m going to go ahead and look at that account. And I want to go look at, okay, what are the entries that make this up? And, now, I’ve drilled into that, and I can have a quick look at all of those supporting entries.

I’m going to go ahead and select the G/L account balance ribbon on there, G/L accounts ribbon, and then I can see the supporting information for that. So, again, it was very easy to pick out an account and analyze that information. So, some of the things we just went over in that scenario, you’ve got quick access, you can quickly add a G/L account, we quickly did a journal, whether we’re going to import it or keyed it in manually, and then analyzing all quickly and easily navigatable from my homepage. So, that was just kind of giving you a look at what the interface is like, should you decide to go to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you know, whether it be a transition that you’re interested in doing today or you’re going to plan that out over time.

But that’s always getting people to go, “Oh, we go to a new system. What is it going to be like?” So, again, that familiarity is there because much of what we have, the construct in Dynamics GP, that user interface is going to be very similar for your team members. All right, so option number two. This is where I can continue using my Dynamics GP. So, you have to be on GP 2018 R2 to be able to do this cloud sync. And it will allow you…it will take your data and then put that up in the environment that I was just demoing, and allow you to do, in a read-only fashion, to explore and use that environment. So, we’re going to go ahead, and I’ve got a quick video. So I’m just going to go and unplug. And we’re going to escape out of here just for a second. And we’re gonna go, and play the video.

Man: Hi/ Welcome to Intelligent Cloud Insights powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This video highlights the value provided by connecting intelligent edge data from your on-premises solution to intelligent cloud insights through Business Central. Replicating your data through Intelligent Cloud Insights gives you access to powerful machine learning and business intelligence capabilities that provide insights and suggest actions for your business. The intelligent cloud insights page displays business data from your on-premises application with new KPIs for cash available, sales and net income, and inventory value. The insights sections provides valuable information about things like customers who are behind on their payments or invoices that are due to be paid.

It’s easy to drill down to more detail on the transactions. New Power BI reports provide a chart of accounts analysis, a customer dashboard, mini-trial balance, a general ledger entries report, and list reports for customers and vendors. Select “next report” to explore your business. The cash flow forecast uses machine learning to help predict your cash position for upcoming periods. Use the chart options to switch from months to quarters or years. One more big advantage is the ability to view these intelligent cloud insights anytime and from any device and from the source application, so anyone in your organization can get the information they need. Thanks for watching this introduction to Intelligent Cloud Insights.

Tracey: Just one sec. I’m gonna change back to my headset. Change back to my headset. There we go. And, we will go ahead and put this back up so you can see it. There we go. That’s better. All right. So, we understand that not all companies are ready to migrate to the cloud. So Microsoft is offering options to stay on-prem while getting limited benefits of cloud. When you upgrade to Dynamics 365 Business Central on-prem or go to Dynamics GP 2018 R2, you can replicate some data from GP into dynamics 365 Business Central and take advantage of analytics thru Power BI, PowerApps, and artificial intelligence. This is a really nice entry point if you want to get the flavor for what the cloud has to offer. You get access to a portal-contained KPIs that have been created using the replicated data. They are the same KPIs that exists for companies that are running their businesses on Dynamics 365 Business Central.

But, obviously, KPIs are meaningful and relevant as the data that’s being replicated. To get the full advantage of these KPIs, you would have to move fully over because it’s not going to bring everything from Dynamics GP up into that intelligent cloud sync. Customers can deploy the service locally to their own choice of hardware, while also having a replicated tenant in the cloud to enable cloud-powered solutions such as Power BI, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and machine-learning capabilities. So, all of these things are available to you in that kind of mid-term or interim solution. And, there’s a really quick video. We can send you the link, that kind of shows you what happens when you go ahead and do that. So, something to keep in mind, that when you are on that cloud sync or option two, it’s not going to change GP itself. So, your on-premise GP stays on that version that it’s on, and you would schedule that data sync.

So, for example, it could happen once a week. It could happen every day. It would be entirely up to you. Sorry, I was just having a drink of water. And some of that functionality is not available. So, for example, some sales and inventory forecasting, if you’re using the forecasting, late payment predictor are not available. So the majority of it is available up in that. And that way, you get to try it out, see how you like it with your own data.

And, basically, how that works is you keep running live in GP on-premise, and you would get these other licenses. And if you had 10 GP users, it doesn’t mean you have to have 10 licenses for this intelligent cloud. You could buy one or two, and they’re per user per month. So, the first one’s about $25 and then the subsequent users are $2. So, again, for three months, you’d spend..you know, if you only want one person to go in and try it out or three people, if it is three people, it would be $29 per month, and you get to use that.

So, when you are looking at…and your account manager would discuss this with you. When you’re thinking about upgrading GP, if you’re not already on GP 2018 R2 and you’d like to go to that version, they can certainly walk you through what it would look like, and we do set up the sync complimentary for you to try it out. But you would have to have those licensing SKUs to be able to access Business Central in the cloud with your data. But it would be very interesting. At least, you’d be able to see, “Okay, what would this look like in the end state for me, making that decision?”

Let’s just go ahead here. Remaining on-premise. Absolutely. It is definitely an option as well. We support all of our clients, whatever stage they’re in. Microsoft is not saying that you absolutely have to do this. There is the ability to stay on-premise and continue on your BREP, and that’s your annual maintenance. And so, finally, you know, we want you all to know that it’s okay, you’re not ready to make this transition, and you’ll still have all of those benefits, so your continued benefits that you’ve had all through the life cycle of being on Dynamics GP. And that’s totally fine, and that’s what we’re here to help guide you and provide those options for you as well. So, again, staying on-premise is totally fine.

So, let’s talk about the GP Roadmap. You may have seen this already in other presentations that we’ve got. And our investment in Dynamics GP continues, and there will be a new release for October. We’re not sure what that’s going to be, whether that’s just going to be a service pack with some of these new features, or what it’s going to be. But, again, that whole team at Microsoft continues to lay out a roadmap for Dynamics GP. And, again, you can see there that obviously in those next releases that Intelligent Cloud Insights enhancements, they want to make that transition that much easier for you going forward. And we can see what the roadmap here for Business Central. Again, they’re coming out with improvements. If you’re using Office 365, you know that stuff gets pushed out all the time, new improvements to that, and that’s the same that thing happens with Business Central.

And Microsoft is very committed to making significant investments in the cloud to help customers maintain their leadership in the era of digital transformation. So, again, we’re looking forward to say, “Okay, what does technology…where is it going to? What does it need?” You know, in my presentations I’ve done in the past, I compare it to, you know, the Beta and VHS days, and, you know, nobody looks around a VCR anymore and all their movies. We stream everything. You know, we all use Netflix, or we all use Crave, or other types of subscription services that you use, whether it be your cell phone, etc.

So, I mean, that is a way of becoming more productive. Collaboration is super important. You know, we have got a multi-generational workforce. People are coming to work, and they’re saying, “Great. I’ve brought my own device,” or, “I want to be able to see all this information on my tablet.” You know, those types of scenarios weren’t available to us in the GP community in years gone by, whereas now we’re looking at okay, great. We need tools that encourage collaboration, encourage productivity, and is available everywhere. Any device is device-agnostic.

So, again, Microsoft is really laying that roadmap and saying, “Great. We’re going to help our customers make that digital transformation.” Again, we can connect your businesses for driving productivity and make smarter decisions using analytics and AI. So, again, Power BI, great example. You can connect messages and services up to your Power BI that when a KPI or metric goes up or down or hits a threshold that, you know, you get a text message on your phone, tool, or each of that that you don’t have to constantly being reviewing or analyzing reports. So, you want the information to surface up to you the actionable items. And, again, you can start and grow easily with your business needs. So, again, this is the ability to scale up and scale down. That’s one thing I look at when I say, “Okay, great. If we’re going to go to D 365 Business Central and the SAS model, very easy to scale up and down.”

Maybe you have a cyclical workforce, and, you know, you get 20 or 30 additional people at different times of the year/ Well, you can add those users and then take them back off again, which in our traditional sense of Dynamics GP we’re not able to do. And, again, that investment Microsoft is making in their stocks, absolutely. So, again, they’re making sure that they’ve got everything covered. And that’s something that, you know, we’ve grown as a partner/ And I’m sure, you know, you’ve had conversations with our team members about, you know, we don’t just do accounting systems anymore. You know, we do everything that Microsoft carries, whether it be business intelligence, leveraging Power BI, whether it be any of the Office 365 apps, whether it be CRM, or D365, client engagement as it’s called now, or service, all of those applications working together and providing you value.

We look back at the history of Microsoft and ourselves as a partner, and you as clients, and how you’ve grown through all these different applications and productivity tools, and the things that you’re asking for. So, again, we’ve come a long way together. And, again, it looks fantastic looking forward for what’s going to be coming down for Dynamics GP, whether you stay on Dynamics GP or decide to transition or go to that interim stage. Again, you’ve got that at your fingertips and available to you. One question that always comes up about going for the SAS model is security. So, again, if we’re in the cloud, what happens then?

There are so many whitepapers, and studies, and information available. Microsoft has a whole site just on their security and what they offer. And, we’ve done presentations about security, and always Microsoft is there. Whatever the minimum acceptable requirements are globally from a security perspective, Microsoft is always above that. And, again, as we were talking earlier, they invest $1 billion a year and 3,500 security experts. So, again, that’s really, really important to them because they’re earning your trust and saying, “You know, you can put your data up.” And you might have the question, “Well, you know, I don’t just want my data anywhere,” there are two data centers in Canada, one in Ottawa, and one in Quebec. So, again, you can still keep that sovereignty of your data.

So, again, talking about the cloud, the first component is that secure foundation of Azure. This is all the security we provide in the physical data centers, from structural security to biometric security. So, again, who can actually get into those physical locations where your data is being stored to prevent attacks outside and internally because who gets in there would have to pass a lot of security to be able to actually get into that physical building. Azure also includes built-in security control across a breadth of services, across identity network, compute data and apps that enable comprehensive threat protection and security management.

So, those of you that are using Microsoft 365 and enhanced ability, you can go up and get your security score, and you can see exactly where you need to focus more secure protocols. And, sorry, that is called threat protection, which is informed by literally trillions of diverse signals that are received every day from a variety of sources, like more than 1.2 billion devices scanned, or more than 750 million Azure users account authentications. So, again, this volume, they’re prepared for that volume, and they’re looking forward to how do they continue to evolve because we did a session a couple of months ago in Burnaby, a Microsoft store, talking about security and all of the scams that happen to everyone. I’m sure everyone’s had those phishing emails, and how do we mitigate those threats.

So, what happens next? Well, you want to be prepared, right? You’re going to be having conversations with your colleagues, with your boss, with your coworkers about what does this look like, what does this mean to me. So, again, we’ve got lots and lots of information. And, again, you could say, “Yeah. This makes sense.” We actually have a…this is something I’ll show in the next session is a calculator, a total cost calculator, total cost of ownership calculator, for making those decisions. So, for example, staying on-premise, on GP 20, whatever you’re on, as opposed to going to this, and it’s a calculator in Excel.

And we put in variables to kind of show you, “Okay, this is what it would mean. You know, all these costs go away if you engage in this SAS model of D365 Business Central,” or you might want to try out the Intelligent Edge. And maybe you’re on GP 2013 or 2015. You know, we can help you upgrade to 2018 R2, and then turn on that Intelligent Edge syncing so that you can…that doesn’t sound very good, does it, syncing, replication of that information, so that you can try out those tools and see how your data would look in that environment.

There’s also a free trial for Business Central. So there’s a 30-day free trial. Yeah, it’s not your data, it’s just, you know, a demo data. But you can go in there and be able to read and write and, and look at that, whereas the cloud Intelligent Edge is only a read-only. For those of you, I don’t know, if you’ve tried out playing with PowerApps, so, again, there’s a free trial for that, and Flow. So these are part of our… power pack is PowerAps, Power BI, and Flow. So, we can sit down, you can reach out to your account manager, and they’ll be happy to sit down and go through what does it look like, what are your options, what information do you need to be better informed about laying out that roadmap, you know, what does it look like for you for the next year or the next three years, and make sure that you’re informed, so. And, again, the subsequent webinar will have a lot more details as well as what does it look like now. I’ve made that decision, and I do want to move forward.

So, I just wanted to go over our support. I’m kind of changing tactics, just tying this in at the end here, about our Encore Care. So, those of you that are on, we have different plans. This one’s Encore Care Unlimited. And we have different packages, depending on your support requirements or your needs. And, again, please reach out. You can email care or you can reach out to your account manager to get more information also on our website. That’s fully comprehensive.

This is something that we’re super passionate about is how do we make sure that people are getting the most out of these applications because, oftentimes, the original people that were perhaps the knowledge experts or that did the original implementation, they’re no longer with your organization. And so, what they’ve passed on to someone else might be not the full breadth of what is available, you know, your applications that you have. Dynamics GP is super, super feature-rich, and, oftentimes, we don’t leverage all of the power on there. So, again, lots of great things there.

I think we’re going to come to a close. And I wanted to say thank you very, very much. I really appreciate the fact that you’ve taken some time out of your day to participate in this. The recording will be available for you as well. If you have any questions, if you have my email, please just…it’s there on the screen. You can email me any questions that you have, and Melissa and I will collect all those questions and make sure everyone in the group has all that information for any questions. Probably one question that’s gonna come up for sure is how much does it cost in the SAS, and it’s a per user per license, sorry, per user per month cost. And because you are a Dynamics customer already, you would get a 40% discount on that until June 30th of 2021. So, that’s just about two years of a discount on that. And, again, if you are interested, reach out to your account manager, and they can run the numbers with you, what that looks like to go to that.

There is another change, and this will be sent out to you, is that it goes from a concurrent licensing model to a named licensing model when you do transition. And, again, you can…I said three options. You can stay where you are, you can go to this intelligent cloud sync, or you could transition to the SAS model of D365 Business Central. There is another option. It is transitioning to D365 Business Central on-premise. So you can do that. And that means you wouldn’t be paying per user per month per license. You would just stay on your perpetual licensing model and pay your annual maintenance. And that is still an option. But, again, any questions, we’ll gather all the questions. We’ll send out the recording. We’ll send out the FAQ.

And I’ve got one more thing to remind you about. We have changed our communication policies. That’s why I sent out this blind email to you the other day because if you have not updated your preferences, you are not getting any communications from us because we’re trying to follow to the T the letter for Castle and GDPR. So, that’s probably why you have not been getting any emails from us from an event perspective, or any training, or newsletters. You must go and update that, and if you had an email from me in the last three or four weeks, I have a link on my email signature where you can go and update those preferences. And, if you’ve had a lovely young man, Patrick, leaving messages for you to please go and update your preferences, that’s why because we’ve cut them all off unless you’ve opted in. We have a strict policy now. You must opt into our communication.

Thank you very, very much. You’ve been a wonderful audience today. And I’m looking forward to getting all of the questions and working with you to look forward, whatever your choices may be. And I hope everyone’s gonna have a wonderful day. And I’ll talk to you soon.