Continia Document Capture - new release, new approach

During the intense days of the Microsoft Directions 2018 EMEA conference, which were filled to the brim with inspiring product, business, technical and licensing sessions, I managed to join one I was particularly looking forward to - it was Continia's product overview for the Dynamics 365 Business Central solution. The products the company provides are, in my opinion, revolutionizing the market.

The Document Capture solution is the undisputed leader of the current SME segment in Poland and Europe in terms of optical character recognition (OCR), a way of entering and processing paper documents in enterprises.

With the release of the new version of Dynamics NAV and its rebranding to Dynamics 365 Business Central, Continia has decided to refresh the current (sometimes complicated) sales model for its own ISV solutions. The biggest novelty from the perspective of end-customer licensing is a fixed monthly base, which in practice means that the user has the option of dynamically changing the level of use of the solution, and therefore different payment amounts over the months, depending on actual use. Another change is the complete abandonment of segmentation of the solution based on the various parameters that make up the final pricing. Only one criterion has been introduced - the number of documents per month scanned using the solution. The number of users and the number of companies within a single database are no longer relevant.

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

Importantly, certified solutions extending the basic functionality of the Dynamics Business Central system (so-called add-ons) in the cloud version are made available within the MS App Store platform and do not require any additional development work on the part of the MS Partner serving the enterprise. The end customer can extend the version of the system he has with the desired functionalities, and if they do not meet his expectations, before the trial version expires, he can resign from their further paid use. Such a model of using partner solutions has not been available in the Dynamics community before.

Extensions - a new way to castomize Dynamics 365 Business Central

It was with the introduction of Extensions solutions, which are available both on-premise and Cloud, that Microsoft Partners decided to change its approach to the solutions provided as part of its portfolio of services.

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 part of the range of functionality, co-developing the full form of the product. The purpose of this division was to provide the most selected parts of a given Document Capture solution to meet the different requirements of multiple customers.

Very often, the functional extension was used, for example, only for processing (OCR) of cost purchase invoices, and the functionality of searching and combining purchase invoices for stock materials with posted purchase receipts (PZs) was never used.

In the case of Dynamics 365 Business Central, only the package that covers and meets actual expectations is selected, and its price depends on actual monthly usage.

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