I am just over half way through my working life (24 years post university and 22 years until I reach the state retirement age) and after doing some serious thinking earlier this year, I decided that it was time to reassess what I was doing now and what I wanted/needed to be doing in future.
The result, as the title says, is that I am changing jobs and will, from today onwards, be working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and will no longer be working with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
This is a big change for me as I have been working with Dynamics GP for 19 years now, but it feels like the right time to make the change. It also means that I will no longer be the expert in the room and will need to get some serious learning done to get up to speed with Dynamics BC, which I have only lightly used so far.
Why the change? Well, as I say, I am half way through my working life and, while I still think that Dynamics GP is a great product, the future of SME ERP from Microsoft is Dynamics BC. While new features are introduced to Dynamics GP with the Fall release each year, these are now always minor functionality and I have concerns that as technology moves on that GP will get left behind. With 22 years of working life ahead of me, I don’t want to get stuck working only with older software applications.
I did consider moving outside of the Microsoft sphere, but ultimately decided that pretty much all of the software I use professionally is Microsoft. So it made sense to look for a Microsoft ERP in the SME market; Dynamics BC is that product from Microsoft which is actively maintained and integrated with new technologies and therefore provides me with the brightest future.
So having decided that I need to look at moving across to and cross-training into Dynamics BC, I decided that the best way of doing this was to move on from ISC Software. The company I am joining, as of today, is a triple Gold Microsoft Partner (Enterprise Resource Planning, Cloud Platform (Azure) and Application Development) and multiple-award winning company with 20 years experience with both Dynamics BC/NAV and in their sectors of operation. That company is 4PS UK which specialises in Dynamics BC for construction, civil engineering and related sectors.
In terms of this site, posts on Dynamics GP will pretty much stop in the coming weeks and I have already started posting about Dynamics 365 BC and have those posts syndicated to the Microsoft Dynamics Community; existing posts will continue to be available and will not be changed or redirected. I do have a small backlog of posts which I will work through over the next few weeks, so you will see some posts still appearing for a time on Dynamics GP; I am also going to go through my library of SQL scripts and see what I have which hasn’t been posted previously and which I think people may find useful.
The Microsoft Dynamics GP Table Reference site has recently been updated to the Fall 2021 Release and like the blog posts will continue to be available. I will not be taking the site down, but am unlikely to do any further updates to it as new versions are released; however, tables don’t change much in Dynamics GP any more so I’d expect the site to remain relevant for quite some time to come. As always, if you need table information for your specific version of Dynamics GP this is available in the GP Power Tools module available from, and actively maintained by, Winthrop DC.
As I leave the Dynamics GP Community, hopefully I will find a welcome and a place in the Dynamics BC community.
I leave you with a song, “Farewell”, from one of my favourite Irish folk-punk bands, The O’Reilly’s & the Paddyhats.