Business Central Mastery with Inge Magne Bruvik

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Norway. He works as an advisor solution architect on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. He was first awarded as MVP in 2023. He loves to talk about Microsoft Dynamics 365, bc or Business Central In his spare time. He spends his time out on his boat fishing, so I want to know all about that. I love catching fish. You can find links to his bio and social media, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Inge.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 1:36
Thank you very much for having me, Mark.

Mark Smith: 1:40
Good to have you on the show. Tell me a bit about where you're located in the world. What do you do for fun? Tell us about family and what's the best things to eat in Norway.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 1:55
I am located in Bergen. Bergen is the second largest city in Norway, located on the west coast, and we usually call Bergen the gateway to the fjords, because all the beautiful fjords in Norway are located on the west coast of the country. Fjords in Norway are located on the west coast of the country, so here you have both the fjords, the mountain, the glaciers and all the good stuff. So Bergen is a very good starting point if you want to explore Norwegian nature and Norwegian culture. Of course, you should also visit Oslo that is the capital of Norway, but if you decide to visit Norway, you should definitely put Bergen on your list for Norway.

Mark Smith: 2:43
And is that where all the cruise ships go up? You hear about the cruises of the fjords and things like that.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 2:48
Yeah, yeah, correct, there is a lot of cruise ships coming to Bergen. There are also coming to Oslo, of course, but we are a very large cruise port here in Norway and there are a lot of cruise ships coming here every summer and crowding our beautiful city with a lot of tourists from all over the world actually, and often they start here in Bergen and they travel up north to visit some of the great fjords we have up a bit north of us. So it's a very lots of tourists here, especially during summer.

Mark Smith: 3:23
And are you far enough north that you see the Northern Lights, or is that a bit further up?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 3:30
We can see it sometimes, especially when there is high activity on the sun. It can reach down here actually, but to be guaranteed to watch it you should probably go up further north, up to Tromsø or one of those cities up north. Tromsø is also a great place to visit in Norway. I actually worked for a company for a year or so that was located in Tromsø, so I traveled a lot up there. So, yeah, we can have it there sometimes, but to be guaranteed, you need to go further up north. But actually, no, the sun is very active, so lately we have had a lot of northern light here, even down here south.

Mark Smith: 4:15
Tell me about food. Is there any kind of delicacies or dishes that are very Norwegian and you would recommend if a friend visited?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 4:28
Well, especially here near the fjords and the ocean, it's a lot of seafood. So Bergen is kind of built on the trade, with fish, especially stockfish, coming from further up north, being transported down to Bergen and then in the old days they shipped it south to Spain and Portugal as stockfish. So kind of the Portuguese bacalao is very often used Norwegian stockfish. Uh, so kind of the portuguese bacalao is very often used norwegian stockfish. So everything seafood is big here in bergen and we have this. If you go to bergen you should try our fish soup. There is a special fish soup called bergen fish soup and that's a very good soup.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 5:13
So seafood is great here because we get it so fresh. And, as you mentioned, I have a boat and I like to go out fishing and catch both fish and crabs and what the sea can give us. So it's great to go out in the boat together with my son because luckily I have a 14-year-old son and he loves also to go fishing together with me. So when the weather allows it we love to take the boat out fishing and bring home food to prepare at home. So that's a great thing to do, great to have that opportunity.

Mark Smith: 5:52
Yeah, so tell us a bit about your origin story. How did you get into tech to start with and then, ultimately, how did you get into Business Central?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 6:01
Yeah, that's a long story. I think when I was early in my teens I discovered personal computers. They were not the computers we have today but they were much smaller and very little capacity on them but they kind of fascinated me. So when I was 14, I bought my first Dragon 32 computer. That was mostly used for gaming, but I also did some basic programming on it. So that was kind of fun. So that kind of triggered the interest.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 6:40
But my plan was actually not to go into tech. I was determined to become a teacher actually. But when I was in high school I studied accounting and when I was in high school one of my teachers needed a part-time employee to do some accounting for some firms he was involved with. He had purchased an accounting software called PC Plus and for those who know the Business Central history they know that PC Plus was the first software the guys behind Navision that later became Business Central produced and that was back in 1987.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 7:25
So my journey with this product that I work with today actually started far back then and little did I know that I was going to spend pretty much my whole life working with that product back then. So that's a long journey and I've followed that product for over 30 years now and the fun thing is that there is still functionality in Business Central that was originated from PC Plus. Even today there are traces of that left. So I kind of feel like I know the DNA of this software. I kind of feel that I know the DNA of this software. I kind of feel that I know the DNA of the software when I work with it and it's good to be able to draw that history all the way back to PC Plus from what we are using today.

Mark Smith: 8:19
This is phenomenal. I never knew that the NavVision roots came from this product.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 8:26
It did from from PC+. That was the first product these guys created.

Mark Smith: 8:32
It came out of Denmark, right yeah?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 8:36
it came out of Denmark and it was called first PC+, then Navigator and then NavVision until Microsoft acquired it in 2002, in July 2002. And then it had several names in the Microsoft time. During the time it's been a Microsoft product, until today we call it Business Central.

Mark Smith: 9:03
Tell me about the jump between Nav and Business Central. What were the big building blocks of change at that point, apart from a new logo?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 9:19
and a rename running Business Central on the cloud. That was the big jump, I would say. Not having to have all the hassle, if I may call it that, with all the on-prem installations, because right before it was launched as Business Central in the cloud, it was starting to get pretty complex, I would say, to run a very smooth on-prem operation with Navision, especially if you were doing it on a large scale, it was pretty demanding. It was a pretty demanding software to run as an on-prem version, I would say. So I allowed the jump to Business Central and be able to run it in the cloud and have this experience with the software always being upgraded and you don't have to talk about hard drives and performance of SQL servers and bandwidth and caching and security and all those things. So being able to lift our customers and our users onto the cloud, I think it's the biggest jump, most significant jump we have made through that area. I have followed this product.

Mark Smith: 10:46
So back in the day when it was on-prem, was it like a three-tier architecture from a server? Like you know, I came from the CE side of the house with Dynamics and originally my product was MSCRM, was the first version at Microsoft and you know it had an architecture that had a server for the automation or workflow layer, it had one for the storage where your SQL et cetera would run and it had an application server right which is your IIS and your front end allowed you to engage and you would scale out those three type of servers to meet the demands of the application. Of course, once it went to the cloud we never thought about really that so much anymore. Was that a similar type model to the way Now Vision was running, or was it just on a single box?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 11:41
It was often. In the start it was often run on a single box and then it was a two-layer application with a client and a database, a fat database client. And actually, before Microsoft acquired Navision, navision had its own database engine called Seaside, and it was really a very, very efficient database engine. It was performing very well and was very stable and very secure and you could actually plug the power out of the Navision server and plug it in again and the database will still be intact when you power up the server again. And of course, when Microsoft bought the product, they moved it over to SQL Server as the database engine. They were running in parallel for some time, but at some point we all had to switch to SQL Server and that was an exciting and challenging move to move to SQL Server because in the beginning Microsoft actually struggled to meet the performance with SQL Server compared to the old CSA database. And of course, sql Server was also demanding a lot more hardware, especially when it comes to IO operations, than CSA used to do, csat used to do.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 13:09
So I was at that time running some of the largest Navision implementations in Scandinavia with a very, very large databases and huge transaction volumes, and we really had to scale up the SQL side of it to make it perform. So then later on it became a three-layer, a three-layer application with a middle tier. So I can't remember exactly what version that happened on, but that happened some years after Microsoft acquired it and that is how it still is today. If you want to run it on-prem, if you want to, you can run Business Central on-prem today also if you want to do it. So that's still a possibility and we have quite a large base of customers running it on-prem even today. So even you customers can run it on-prem today, but of course we try to push as many as possible to the cloud these days.

Mark Smith: 14:09
Yeah, I had no idea that the code base allowed an on-premise application to run. Tell me about the core system nowadays. I was just at MVP Summit I've just returned from, and one of the comments was when is Business Central going to run on Dataverse? And I thought, and based on my knowledge, I said probably never. And because you know the back end, the complexity, et cetera of what exists in BC requires its own situation. Now, did I tell a lie or was I correct? What's your thoughts?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 14:54
I mean, you never know with Microsoft, you never know what they do tomorrow. But I tend to agree with you. I don't think we will see business central learning on database for a very, very, very long time yet. That is my impression as well, and that is because there are some features in the system and there are some technology use in the system that I think requires its own database engine through SQL Server. So I share your opinion when it comes to that.

Mark Smith: 15:36
And what do you call that proprietary system? You mentioned the engine there. How do you refer to that when you're working with projects et cetera, and what type of knowledge does someone have to have of it to be able to work with BC?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 15:51
I mean, when you run it on cloud, you don't have to have so much knowledge anymore about the back backend of the system because Microsoft is handling that in their Azure data centers and that works pretty smoothly.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 16:08
But if you want to run it on-prem, especially on a large scale, you will need to have some specific knowledge about SQL Server and how you are going to set up your SQL Server to perform good, because running Business Central on-prem on SQL Server is a demanding operation.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 16:26
It requires a lot of your SQL Server if you are running a pretty large system, and you also need to know how you should scale out your middle tier and how many clients you can connect to every middle tier server and what are the operation pattern that your users are putting the load through the system to.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 16:52
So it requires a lot of insights if you want to run it on-prem in a good way, I would say. And that is kind of what I love about running it in the cloud these days, because I don't have to spend time anymore on what's going on on the SQL Server side, what's happening there, what's happening on the middle tier, what is happening on Windows Server. I can focus on the technology and the functionality, and there is enough to focus on there. When it comes to all the integrations you can do with other Microsoft products these days, both the Power Platform and the Azure functions, not to talk about the co-pilot that is coming like a flood into the system these days, with new co-pilot functionality coming every month to the system. So I think it's a relief not to have to worry about that back end anymore.

Mark Smith: 17:53
Actually, Last question I have for you, because I see we've consumed our time pretty quickly, but tell me about. How did you become an MVP? What was that journey for you?

Inge Magne Bruvik : 18:06
The journey for me was well, my main effort in the community is through the dynamicscommunitycom, through the official Microsoft community and the forums there. I love to spend a lot of time there and that was kind of my gateway into becoming an MVP. Yeah, so I'm in my first MVP year now and it's a lot to take in also to have that new role and kind of grasp what kind of ecosystem that brings you into. So yeah, nowadays I also like to do some speeches, some conferences and also add that to my what I do for the community. But I still have a big heart pounding for the forums on the community side. I think that is an area we're seeing that fits me very well, I think. So I like to spend time there.

Mark Smith: 19:11
I like it. I like it. I think you've probably got a good blog post in you of the history, because I've been in this area for 20 odd years and I'd never heard that kind of very original story about you know where. Maybe a timeline of where Business Central come from to, as in you know the origin story of the product is very interesting and you know, you've had it. You've been there firsthand in the driver's seat for so many years.

Inge Magne Bruvik : 19:40
I have. It's been very good. It's been interesting and very much fun and hard work also, of course.

Mark Smith: 19:50
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.