How AI Rebuilt This Blog: Blogger to Hugo in One Sitting
This blog has been running on Blogger since 2005. That is not a typo. Twenty-one years of posts about BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts, Ubuntu upgrades, NAS backups, and eventually …
Posts
118 posts
2026
July
June
Graph API Email account types for D365 BC
Previous post in this series: Fixing Email for Guest Users in D365 Business Central Back in April I wrote about a long-standing gap in Business Central: guest users can't …
April
Mission Implementation - post go-live stabilisation
hashtagThis was fun - Mission Implementation - post go-live - be sure to check out the other videos from the series also.. Microsoft Dynamics 365 …
Fixing Email for Guest Users in D365 Business Central
If you manage any Dynamics 365 Business Central clients where users sign in as Entra B2B guests (aka M365 Guest Users) you've probably hit this issue: the built-in email …
Trying out GitHub Copilot Agent for a Functional Task?
I've been using GitHub for a while https://github.com/andywingate but had never touched its agentic features. Working on the Nubimancy project gave me a good excuse. This is a …
February
AI context is king - BC MCP for MCS Agents - London D365PPUG - Feb 2026
What if your AI tool understood your business data, would you get a better output from it? In short yes - context is king when dealing with AI. AI Context is King - …
2025
December
Brautag / Brew Day 2025/26 (Non-BC Holiday Post)
Non-BC Holiday Post... This Christmas saw my families biannual trip to Bavaria to visit the German side of the family. One of the highlights of these visits is spending a day …
Ask AI about Dynamics Licensing
What's New in Dynamics 365 Licensing: December 2025 Update A comprehensive guide to the latest changes in Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, with special focus on Business …
BC Community 2025 Wrapped - Blogs, Videos, etc
The Power of AI-Assisted Data Analysis How good is AI at helping with data analysis? Last year, I explored this question by analysing blog activity in our BC RSS WhatsApp …
November
Delivering BC in the Age of AI - Which Soft Skills Still Matter?
Some do matter more that others now with AI tools levelling the playing field - but what is the right balance for you (or your team?) .. Just dropping this placeholder here for …
October
South Coast Summit 2025 - AI-Driven Page Scripting: Practical Use Cases for Dynamics 365
At South Coast Summit 2025, José Miguel Azevedo and I had the opportunity to share something we've been working on since our last Page Scripting talk at Dynamics Minds. Using AI …
September
Looking for a BC MVP?
Did you ever wonder where all the BC MVP are? wonder no more when you check out this very cool Power BI map created/curated by AJ Ansari - AJ Ansari | LinkedIn Here it …
August
DynamicsMinds 2025 - Portorož, Slovenia
Back in May I presented two collaborative talks at Dynamics Minds; The 4 Pillars Of BC To PP Integration - together with Phil KermeenPage Scripting Tool for Acceptance …
May
Let’s setup the Sales Order Agent in Business Central - Experts Live UK User Group
This week I presented at Experts Live, big thanks to the team for having me along to this event. The session was mostly focused on a demo of the Sales Order Agent - which …
Business Central + Power Pages = TRUE - ColorCloud 2025
What an amazing conference ColorCloud was https://colorcloud.rocks/ I was thrilled to present a join session with Ulrikke …
April
Getting Started with Page Scripting - Days of Knowledge UK - 2025
I was very pleased to speak at the Days of Knowledge UK conference in recently. Here is a copy of the session details and slides for download.Getting Started with Page Scripting - …
March
Master Data Management Dynamics 365 Business Central - Just a few Setup Fields only
If you are managing multiple companies in a single BC environment you can use master data management (MDM) to sync your, as the name suggests, master data like Customers and …
Notifications for Approvals Made Easy
Here is a video to show the step-by-step process to check and modify the notifications that are sent at different stages of an native BC approval workflow. Inspired by …
February
Mastering Dynamics 365 BC Security - License Security Groups
This short video is the 2nd in this Mastering Security for BC mini-series. Here I'm looking at the use of Entra Security Groups to manage license assignment. Not something …
Mastering Dynamics 365 BC Security - Admin Center
This short video covers two important security settings in the Business Central Admin Center. Learn how to configure these settings to enhance security and protect your system! …
Get the Power BI apps for Multiple Companies in Dynamics 365 Business Central
In this short video I run through the steps for the basic setup for the new Power BI app for Dynamics 365 Business Central that were released last year, specifically looking the …
2024
December
Give me Dynamics 365 Business Central Capacity in a Power BI mini-chart
This is another BC Admin API with Power Automate guide. Actually the first one I did but didn’t blog about it. Here are all the steps!RequirementI would like to see the …
Give me a fresh sandbox copy of my D365 BC production environment each night
Me: "What features do you really not want to lose from your current system" Them: "We really like the copy of production that gets generated each night. We can test & train in …
November
Improve your Dynamics 365 Business Central security: Just-in-Time access for partners
Microsoft have an ongoing mission around security, check out the Secure Future Initiative | Microsoft & the recent newsletter SFI_November_2024_update.pdf But …
Give me Dynamics 365 BC approvals with auto-delegation driven by Outlook Out-of-Office
This is something I'm asked on most projects when we get to the topic of approvals. Client: "WOW these BC approval workflows look good, and I expect the approval will be …
Identifying and Bridging your Skill Gaps for Dynamics 365 Business Central
Transitioning from an end user role to a consulting role in D365 Business Central is an exciting and challenging career move. As a consultant you need to develop a …
October
Dynamics 365 Business Central - Safety Stock Report with Power Automate
Recently on the D365BC WhatsApp community BC chat there was a question about getting alerts for items if their inventory was below the safety stock quantity. Dynamics 365 …
Dynamics 365 Business Central - Page Part Terms - Updated for 2024 Q4
Something that I am always keen to engage with on projects is the business language. It's very important to understand the industry specific terms an organisation uses, one of the …
From End-User to Partner-Side Consultant: Continuous Learning
Introduction This post is part of my series on the journey from being an End-User to becoming a Microsoft Partner-Side consultant (see Tag: End User to Consultant). …
September
Dynamics 365 Business Central - Reimagine your future with Reskill
IntroductionThis post is part of my series on the journey from being an End-User to becoming a Microsoft Partner-Side consultant (see Tag: End User to Consultant). Moving from …
From End-User to Partner-Side Consultant: What are Your End-User Superpowers?
Introduction This post is part of my series on the journey from being an End-User to becoming a Microsoft Partner-Side Consultant. Moving from being a business applications …
Simple Guide on Docker Containers for Dynamics 365 Business Central Consultants
Docker Containers Guide for BC ConsultantsThis post is a super simple step-by-step guide on how to run BC in a Docker contanier on your local machine. One reason to do this …
The Power of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Community
Introduction This post is part of my series on the journey from being an End-User to becoming Microsoft Partner-Side Consultant. Here I’m reflecting at the Microsoft D365 …
What really counts when you are a Consultant?
Introduction This post is the next in my series on End User to Microsoft Partner-Side Consultant. I will look into the pivotal aspects of this career move, explore the challenges …
August
Make the most of joining a Microsoft Partner
Introduction Joining a Microsoft Partner as a Dynamics 365 Business Central Consultant can be a game-changer for your career. Microsoft provide partners with a wealth of resources …
From Dynamics End User to Partner-Side Consultant
Is it time to jump ship, change tack, or chart a new course? (Non-nautical analogies are also available...) If you love continuous learning, the challenge of solving interesting …
July
Dynamics 365 Business Central - OAuth 2.0 APIs with Insomnia
Postman has been a staple of API testing, but there are alternatives. Here is a very short basic guide on setting up Insomnia to use OAuth 2.0 for Business Central API testing. …
June
Mastering D365BC approval workflows, part 2
Last week I posted about multi-approvals (i.e. how to send different types of approval from within one workflow entry Multi-Approvals inside 1 Workflow). This post is …
Multi-Approvals inside 1 Workflow - How to master Dynamics 365 Business Central Workflows
Approvals are a vital business control process, the most common area being around the approval for purchases and expenditure. Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365BC) has a built-in …
May
Call for speakers - Cambridge UK Dynamics 365 & Power Platform User Group
Calling all Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Copilot, AI and Microsoft tech community partners and end users. The next Cambridge Home - UK Dynamics 365 & Power Platform User …
Dynamics 365 Business Central collected RSS feeds - Blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, GitHub...
This WhatsApp community collects D365 BC related RSS feeds and other news sources from across the web! Want to join the WhatsApp community or add your blog to the news feed?Please …
April
Exploring the Middle Ground: Simple Dev for Dynamics 365 Business Central
Microsoft’s low-code solutions, particularly in the realm of business applications and Dynamics 365 (D365), offer several compelling advantages: Faster Development: Low-code …
March
Power up D365BC Power Automate Flows with API Pages
The opportunity to extend functionality in Dynamics 365 BC with Power Automate is huge. One of the most critical concepts for me is the general ability to trigger flows, based on …
Dynamics 365 Business Central Mobile App - Add item pictures
A simple request from a recent launch. 'We want to add images of the items from the Lab, can we easily do this from the BC app on our phones?' Yes you can! Here is how …
February
Dynamics 365 BC - Reduce risk when applying the latest release wave update
Since 2018 we have seen 2 major updates for Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) each year History of Dynamics 365 Business Central/NAV | Dynamics 365 Lab (yzhums.com). BC …
Dynamics 365 BC - Transfer Environment - Tested & Timed
A new button on the top level BC admin portal menu is a rare event, on this post I run through the steps to test & time the transfer process. Transfer an environment to …
2023
December
Dynamics 365 BC - Architecture and Compliance
I am often asked to about the architecture and compliance for Business Central SaaS. There is a huge amount of info to be found on this topic across multiple Microsoft docs pages. …
Easily search your all of your company data in Dynamics 365 BC
Here is a very nice feature that's been in Preview for some time, but is now even more accessible. Of course I'm talking about the Search Company Data tool. This allows you …
October
Dynamics 365 Business Central and Large Data Sets
How Big is Big? The Challenge of Handling Over 5 Million Records When it comes to data migration, especially for large datasets, how big is too big? What if you're dealing with …
September
Exploring Power Automate and Business Central: Tell me if...
Do you want to keep on top of things in Business Central? In this short post I'll be looking at the Find Records (V3) action and using it to meet the following business …
August
Exploring Business Events for Business Central: Customer Credit Limit
Do you want to easily automate responses to common events in your ERP? With Business Events & Power Automate you can do just that in Business Central and other Dynamics …
July
Access Dynamics 365 Business Central in Teams with only an M365 License
Do you want to give view (read only) access to all colleagues for your ERP system without needing to buy additional licenses? When an organisation has both a Dynamics 365 Business …
June
Simplify your user onboarding process with Dynamics 365 Business Central & Azure Security Groups
If you are involved with onboarding new users this post is for you. Until recently, when provisioning a new user to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you needed to do all the usual …
Business Central License Guide - Recent Changes Comparrison
Microsoft have released an updated Dynamics 365 License guide. Microsoft Business Applications MVP Erik Hougaard posted a great video summarising the changes related to …
Emailing from Dynamics 365 Business Central - All Your Important Business Emails in One Place!
Reflect for a moment on just how fundamental email is for business. Safe to say in a world of Teams, Slack, WhatsApp etc email is still essential part of running a business. Also …
May
Show Me the Money! or Check Who Approved the Document You Are About to Pay in Dynamics 365 Business Central
Power BI and Dynamics 365 Business Central work great together. In a previous blog post, we looked at publishing a custom dataset from the wizard in BC. In this blog post, we will …
April
How to filter the current user with measures in your Dynamics 365 Business Central embedded Power BI report.
Embedding Power BI reports directly in Dynamics 365 Business Central is one of the many synergies of the Microsoft 365 platform. Giving users context relevant analysis right on the …
March
Making the most of your ERP - Business Central for Operations
Check out the blog post I wrote with the amazing Incremental marketing team: Making the most out of your ERP system Incremental Group which I have re-produced below for posterity! …
Business Central & Power Automate - Post to teams / Post invoices
To make the most of Dynamics 365 Business Central you should invest some time to understand how Power Automate works. In this example I'll start off by simply connecting BC to …
To Validate or Not to Validate: Line validation in Dynamics 365 Business Central Documents
This is a short note on how to add further validation to the sales or purchase document lines in Dynamics 365 Business Central with a small AL code extension. There are a …
February
Yellow Excel or: How I Learned to stop worrying and Love PowerBI for Dynamics 365 BC with help from ChatGPT
This is a short note of how to add PowerBI reports to the Role Center page on Business Central On most of the BC role centers you have this page part: So lets get started; clicking …
2021
December
Foundry Hosting on AWS Free Tier
This short guide shows how to host a Foundry instance on AWS for free (for 1 year). Get FoundryThis bit is not free, you need to own foundry to run your games in it. Head on …
2018
February
Connect to Windows 2016 HyperV Core with delegated credentials / CredSSP
CredSSP authentication is currently disabled on the local client. You must be running with administrator privileges in order to enable CredSSP On Win2016 desktop CLIENT Powershell: …
Migrate Mediawiki installation
Old server backup existing database - mysql dump copy files folder frp, public_html New Server create new database, with same name/username restore into new database - mysql -u …
New disk for existing VM
"Disk offline with error – the disk is offline because of a policy set by an administrator" After adding a new hard drive to an existing VM, it will show as offline, this can be …
2016
April
VLC Streaming
Here is my setup to use VLC running on a laptop with a webcam as a simple CCTV system that can stream to your mobile. VLC was installed on a laptop running Ubuntu 14.4. The webcam …
January
Brau Tag / Brewing Day / Drinking Day
I was very glad to join Schlicki and Michi for some home brewing over the Christmas period, here is a rough summary of the process. Brew Day The batch was to be an IPA style beer, …
2015
May
SSRS Index was out of range!
This was a real pain, in the end possibly solved by having no page breaks in the sub-reports. It would also appear to be best practice having each table in separate sub-report
April
TLS/SSL for Web Services
TLS protection should be a standard security policy these days. It’s common place for servers hosting web pages and web services. Certificates are inexpensive and relatively …
January
Simple ISO mounting
This is the easiest way to mount ISO images in Windows, that is all. http://wincdemu.sysprogs.org/
2014
July
phpmyadmin mcrypt issue / Ubuntu Server 14.04 / Fixed
myphpadmin says: “The mcrypt extension is missing. Please check your PHP configuration” apt-get purge libapache2-mod-php5 php5 apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5 …
April
SSRS 2008 R2 Report parameters for MySQL datasources
If you are using MySQL databases in SSRS you have to manually add the parameters. For a date range Manually add two parameters @start (date/time) @end (date/time) Go into dataset …
RS-232 temp/rh logging
Setup RS-232 connection between a Rotronic temp sensor and a Rasberry Pi. Next step is to write an integration script to import the data into a MySQL database..
March
Fix vTiger "SMTP Connect() failed" Error
Just need to update a setting in vtigercrm/modules/Emails/class.phpmailer.php from function IsSMTP() { $this->Mailer = "smtp"; to function IsSMTP() { $this->Mailer = …
Life Keeper Install Notes
Install SQL SQL install on C:<br /> Data on E:<br /> Logs on F:<br /> Restore db, add logins IIS, export the metabase to other nodes, don’t use shared …
SSRS Access Logs - Big Brother is Watching
T-SQL is Use ReportServer select * from ExecutionLog3 order by TimeStart DESC Source here
Fix Blogger 'Seatch this site' bug
Fix with a simple HTML gadget on the layout using this code: Thanks David J. Schmidt
February
SSH Handy Shortcuts
File/Disk Browsing Lists summary size (-s) in Gb/Mb/Kb (-h) units for all sub-directories of the current path (./*) # du -sh ./* Show everything, human readable file sizes, in a …
2013
November
Photo Station QNAP
If after trying the in-built photo web service for a bit you give up on it. Which is inevitable as its terribly slow, using normal home broadband in any case. It can be a pain to …
Mount SMB in QNAP
# mount.cifs //Server/Share /mnt/win7/test -o username=xxx,password=xxx This command will mount the folder ‘Share’ hosted on ‘Server’ into the nix folder …
October
IP PBX / 3CX / VoIP Phone System
Just finished a few days training on 3CX systems, and a very interesting two days it was. The trainer William has a distinctive style and great dry sense of humour that kept …
July
SVN / Subversion / Source Control
Quick ‘what I did’ to setup Subversion this week to deal with SSRS projects and reports. Installed the standard edition of VisualSVN Server …
June
SSRS 2008 R2 'My Subscriptions' page blank - Fix
Really annoying bug this one, fixed the same way as Ant describes at… original post at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12157528/ssrs-my-subscriptions-is-empty The …
SMTP test from telnet
Need to test out access to a mail server? From GNU/linux is easiest, fire up the terminal You will need your username and password as base64, to get these use perl perl …
Storm: Great free app to test SOAP/REST WSDL feeds
Been working on a project that uses WSDL / Web Service feeds. This is a handy tool to quickly test out feeds, check access and contents of the envelope. http://storm.codeplex.com/
Mobi SSRS
Pretty decent mobile access to SSRS reports on iOS devices. Handy to produce dash board type info. Be sure to set the correct localisation if you want to use date parameters. …
April
QNAP Online RAID 5 Migration
Recently added two new physical drives into a QNAP NAS (TS-419P II) and performed online migration of the existing single drive to a 3 drive RAID 5 setup, here is how I got on. I …
March
Cloud Backup on QNAP NAS
After finding Symform a bit too slow for my needs I decided to move to Amazon S3 to give them a go and also to try out some more simple scripting. QNAP does have a web interface …
TLDP - The Linux Documentation Project
As the name suggests this is a fantastic resource for Linux info, guides and howto’s. http://www.tldp.org/ The ‘Single File HTML’ is probably the simplest & …
2012
December
Home and Cloud Storage
With the recent death of an HHD in my space PC I decided it was time to sort out my home storage of irreplaceable data (photos and documents) and my home media setup. Old Setup …
April
Download Video from the BBC iPlayer
There is no quick answer to this from Google for Windows, but in Ubuntu it’s dead easy $ sudo apt-get install get-iplayer With the package is installed run $ get-iplayer …
March
Simple expression to Hide things in SSRS
=iif(logical expression, true, false) Using the if function to colour text the same as background for quick fix on divide by 0 errors in the middle of a report.
2011
November
SSRS - Aggregate of an Aggregate
So here is how to subtotal a column that is itself a sum function. SSRS 2005 wont allow you to aggregate an aggregate function. For example, the total of a column showing a Running …
September
Thunderbird Re-Index to fix Global Search
Using Thunderbird on more than one machine can lead to messages missing from the index and reducing the usefulness of the global search. Two easy options to re-index your IMAP …
MS-SQL / Excel Data Connectors
Data Connectors are a very handy way to give office staff access to the data they need from an MS-SQL database without any knowledge of SQL. Where central data is held in MS-SQL …
May
Grub customiser / Ubuntu
Beats trying to find the right file to edit.. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install grub-customizer Dead easy to …
February
Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Management Studio Express
A very handy bit of free software from MS for connecting SQL servers and executing SQL commands. For those just learning SQL it has a built in graphical SQL query builder that …
2010
September
Windows Live ate my SMB share...
Have just spend way too long trying to work out why xbmc could no longer connect to a win7 smb share. The solution after much head scratching, simply uninstall Windows Live Login …
Share that screen...
Remote desktop has never been easier, useful for IT support for family members. www.teamviewer.com The most recent versions also include a chat function which is handy, although …
August
Trillian for Blackberry
Out in beta now, Trillian for blackberry brings all your IM networks into one tidy and slick application. My home screen is now much less cluttered with only one IM app icon. While …
February
How to: Replace Win7 RC with Win7 'Upgrade'
I wanted to replace Win7 RC with a full version, the RC was set to expire on 01 March 2010 and it had started to nag me to update. Looking on the web it appeared it was possible to …
2009
December
Remove Blogger Navbar
Add this code just above the ‘/* Variable definitions’ to the page HTML to remove the Blogger Navbar.. */ #navbar-iframe { display: none !important; }
NimBuzz for Blackberry
Finally a decent and free IM chat client for the BlackBerry that supports messaging for MSN (Windows Live), Skype (Chat only), Gmail (Google Talk), Yahoo! Chat and Facebook chat …
Custom Keyboard Shortcuts and Smart Tag Lists for Word 2007
Here is the macro code swap “Final” and “Final Showing Markup” view. Once saved as a macro it’s a simple task to assign this to a keyboard short-cut.. …
October
Fix Firefox Keyword Search for New PubMed
PubMed updated their main page the otherday, which is nice. However there was a bug or problem with my Firefox keyword searches as they no longer worked. After a bit of digging I …
More Google WAVE
So here is a wave about Guild Wars 2.. Although still no details about game play… Anyway I though I would have a go at embedding it.. From what I hear you have to be logged …
Google WAVE
Just checking out the features of Google Wave, its in its early days. But plenty of things to try out. Some neat display options for the folders/contacts list etc. However, at the …
Help Desk...
Helping friends and family with IT support just got a whole lot easer with the use of Skype’s share screen feature..
August
NTFS partitions and ntfs-config
Using windows partitions in Ubuntu is no problem, however if you need to rely on a stable mount point you will want to add ntfs-config. $ sudo apt-get install ntft-config …
May
Mounting ISO images and creating shell scrips
Problem: Mount an ISO image file Good old terminal To make a mount point “iso” and mount the CD image “image.iso” $ sudo mkdir /media/iso && sudo …
Wrap <pre> text on blogger
handy to know if you ever use <pre> formatting Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML Find /* Postsand paste this in on the next line down .post pre { white-space: pre-wrap; …
Essential Ubuntu Apps
This is the distilled version of Lifehacker’s recent Top 10 Ubuntu apps. Yakuake yakuake.kde.orgA handy console app, just hit F12 (or what ever key you configure the shortcut …
Geocaching on a Blackberry 8900
Had some visitors this bank holiday weekend and got an introduction into Geocaching. This is a great combination of computer geekary and getting outside for fresh air and seeing …
April
Upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04... Initial issues
Used the ‘Update Manager’ to get the new distro, 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope (Must be a relative of the Wolpertinger) Initial thoughts Xserver crashed on re-boot, fixed this …
January
Blackberry keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts are always good to know. Here is a list of the handy ones for a Blackberry 8900. General functions Any text fields Shift+roll ball: highlight text Shift+Del: cut …
What are the best Blackberry apps?
There are plenty of berry apps out there, some good some bad. After installing a pile on a brand new 8900 curve (and bricking the handset in the process - App Error 200 - there was …
2005
February
Just forget about Doom2
It is a dark day, after trying long and hard to fix my flatmates laptop I have to admit defeat. Trying to install an OS on a computer with no working floppy drive or CD drive is …
T.F.I.F.T.
a dusty evening view of cars and trees Thank f*ck its Friday tomorrow and then onto the weekend. Check out this amazing review of Firefox at Computerworld best of all are the …