resume week 4 fall 2018 junior training

The new year just started students returned to Rolduc Abbey on January 14 for the fourth week of the Opgona Junior Training. Luc van Vugt continued as the trainer for the technical track, while Coen Overgaag took over the functional track from Rob Gabriels to pick his specialisms: Finance and Manufacturing.

functional track

The fourth week of the functional track was dedicated to finance. So, the entire program was set up from the viewpoint of the controller. Every day had a theme. The daily flow was:

• Discuss self-prepared questions created from learnings of previous day
• Theory and background
• Business Central functionality mapped from theory
• Cases

In order to have a common business administration understanding the trainees had to finish a reader the first two days explaining business administration.

The first day the theme was: A new company and migrate from a legacy system. This was done both from the consultant and the controller point of view. The second day the theme was: variables that influence the postings; the setup of the system influences the final postings and thus also the financial result. It is very important as a financial officer to recognise all these “handles” and know how to influence this to get the required output. The theme of the third day was: the monthly and annual activities of the controller. To understand the cohesion between these activities. The fourth days theme was: the financial rules that are important to have a consistent system. And in the fifth day we concluded by going through financial reporting.

technical track

As the technical students had failed to get their homework assignment done (see our resume of week 3), and as the Junior Training is not only about Dynamics 365 BC, but is also about learning to become a professional developer, we started the fourth week with a self-assessment and retrospect of this project.

• How did you about with the planning?
• How did you communicate?
• What have you learned from all this?
• And not the least: what does your employer get out of this?

The assignment was to be picked up again after this week.

The Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning the students got to work with reports. One half in C/SIDE, the other in VSCode, like we had been doing in week 3 already on request of their employers.

Tuesday afternoon test automation was on the menu. Testability Framework, test case design and hands-on. A topic especially of interest when developing extensions for AppSource.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: Data Exchange. XMLports, Queries and Web Services. The student had to work out an extensive exercise with an XMLport where transactional data had to be put in the right place in Business Central. Indeed, a nice challenge for newbie BC developers. How to cut up the assignment, taking one step at a time.

At the end of Friday afternoon, we looked back at a fruitful week and looked forward to the final week.

what’s next

For the functional track the next training week we will mainly focus on production module and start with theoretical background to transpose this to Business Central. We will conclude the week with a demo that integrates all lessons learned from previous weeks.

Having worked 4 course weeks on Dynamics 365 Business Central topic wise, the technical students should be set to get working on an integrating project, in the fifth and last week of the course, in which they will be challenged on what they have learned. The course will be concluded with a demo of the application that will result from the integrating project. A board of invitees will be judging the demos.

Looking forward to our last course week.