During the intense days of Microsoft Directions 2018 EMEA conference, which were filled to the brim with inspiring product, business, technical and licensing sessions, I was able to join one that I was exceptionally waiting for – it was a review of Continia products for Dynamics 365 Business Central. Products that company provide. They are, in my opinion, revolutionizing the market.

Document Capture is undoubtedly the leader of current SMB segment in Poland and Europe in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), input of paper documents and processing in enterprises.

Along with release of the new Dynamics NAV version and its rebranding to Dynamics 365 Business Central, Continia decided to refresh the current (sometimes intricate) sales model of its own ISV solutions. The biggest novelty in licensing for the end customer is a fixed monthly basis, which in practice means, that user gains ability to change level of use of solution dynamically and thus – different amounts of payments over a number of months, depending on the actual use. Another change is complete resignation from segmentation of solutions based on different parameters that make up the final valuation. Only one criterion has been introduced – number of documents per month scanned using this solution. The total number of users and number of companies serviced within one database are no longer relevant.

A complete novelty is introduction of a 30-day trial period, which is available to all customers who decide to use Continia solutions in cloud model, i.e. the SaaS (Software as a Service) version. In practice, this means a whole free month of using and testing a functional add-on, if the solution is selected for this version of Dynamics 365 Business Central.

What is important, certified solutions extending basic functionalities of Dynamics Business Central (so called Add-ons) in the cloud version are made available within the MS App Store platform and do not require additional development workings on the part of the MS Partner for a given enterprise. The end customer may extend the existing version of the system with desired functionalities, and if they do not meet their expectations, they may be resigned from further paid use before expiration of the trial version. Such a usage model of partner solutions has not been available in the Dynamics community so far.

Extensions – a new way to customize Dynamics 365 Business Central system

Due to introduction of Extensions solutions, which are available in both On-Premise and Cloud versions, Microsoft Partners decided to change approach to solutions available within their portfolio.

Document Capture has been divided into four Extensions solutions with the following names:

• Essential
• Advanced Capture
• Enhanced Approval
• Order & Receipt Matching

Each of them provides a different range of functionalities, co-creating full package. The purpose of this division was to provide as many selected parts of the solution as possible, in order to meet different requirements of customers.

Very often, functional extension was used only to process (OCR) cost invoices, while functionality of searching and combining purchase invoices for warehouse materials with booked purchase receipts was never used.

In case of Dynamics 365 Business Central, only the package that covers and fulfills real expectations may be selected and its price depends on actual monthly use.