I just finished reading through the MS statement that officially announces that all of NAV's functionality will be exposed in "Dynamics 365 Business Central" starting 4/2/18. I'm glad to see it's finally here.
At this point, the 400-lb. gorilla in the room is single-tenant customization. I've been using VS-Code (with the AL language extension) to do this in the sandbox for several months. It works quite well. The statement from Microsoft didn't make any mention of this functionality becoming a reality in production environments, however.
Was this simply overlooked in the statement? Sometimes I wonder if you Microsofter's truly grasp the importance of this capability. So far this year, I've had one client return to QuickBooks, one client decide to stay with NetSuite for another year (against their wishes), and one client put their D365 BC implementation on hold. In each instance, they simply need relatively minor customization (e.g. custom tables, table extensions, etc.) in order to do business in an efficient manner. Without it, they aren't willing to use Dynamics 365 BC.
Additional NAV functionality is great. It makes D365 BC far more attractive to larger prospects. Unfortunately, the larger the prospect, the greater their need to customize the solution to meet their specific requirements.
Pretty much any company larger than a "Mom & Pop" needs to be able to customize. Attempting to channel single-tenant customizations through the cumbersome AppSource approval process isn't the answer, either.
Until you make it possible to tailor D365 BC implementations in the production environment, D365 BC is still not a viable solution for most companies in the SMB marketplace. Once you make this functionality available, you will have the best solution in the marketplace.
