Are you a Power Automate user? Are you using workflows to Automate your tasks in Dynamics 365 Business Central? If so, there are good news for you in the air…

The next 2022 Wave 1 version (or version 20) gives you an interesting new feature: the ability to trigger a Power Automate flow directly from Business Central.

What does that means?

This new feature will permit you to create and connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central your instant flows from Power Automate and execute a selected flow in the context of the selected single record (using actions launched from any card page).

Every card and document page that runs in the context of a data table now features a newAutomategroup in the action bar. From that group, users can run manual flows defined for Business Central.

How does it work?

This feature is not switched on by default…

Yesterday Microsoft has officially presented the Business Central Universal Code initiative (http://aka.ms/BCUniversalcode). For more details about this initiative, I suggest to read Waldo’s post here or my old post on Simplanova’s blog here.

In summary, with this new offering, selling what is called “non-universal code” (alias extensions not targeted to work online) to new Business Central on-premise customers might require to license two additional modules from 2022 onwards (names of these modules are subject to change):

• Module “Implemented code is not in extensions”: if implemented partner code includes base application modifications, this module must be licensed.
• Module “Implemented code is not cloud-optimized”: if the implemented extensions have target = OnPrem, this module must be licensed.

The non-universal code fees have a per full user (Premium or Essential) price with a per-year fee starting from 2023.

The announced timeline is the following:

Power BI dataflows (PBI dataflows) is a powerful data prep tool for you to transform data and reuse them in other places downstream. At the same time, while Excel is very popular among business users, there is still, at the time of writing this post, no out-of-the-box connector to import PBI dataflows to Excel. This post aims to solve that pain point.

This post also proposes an alternative to the existing PBI dataflows connector to Power BI Desktop to push the users‘ access control to the table level, instead of workspace level like the current connector.

I’ve written lot of time ago a post on how to save a file from Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS to an FTP server. The solution can be found here.

After this post I’ve received lots of requests about how to do the opposite: if someone sends me a file on an FTP server, how can I retrieve the file, parse it and then save the data into Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS?

There are certainly different ways for doing that, but (as promised in the past days to some of you) in this post I want to describe what I think it’s one of the best solution in terms of performances, scalability and reliability. The schema of the solution is the following:

Here, we’re using an Azure Logic App for connecting to an FTP server (via the FTP connector). The Logic App retrieves the content of the uploaded…