Community Summit 2026: A Business Central Learning Plan
On this page
Community Summit North America 2026 takes place October 11-15 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee. The organizer distinguishes the overall event from All-Access conference programming, which runs October 12-15. Check your registration for any additional Academy or pre-conference activities. Official event details.
Bitta Apps is attending, and our preparation starts with a question that any Business Central team can use: what decision should be easier when we get home?
If you own a Business Central environment, lead an AL development team, or manage the people who depend on it, use this guide to build a learning plan. The goal is to connect sessions and conversations to a real operational decision, then capture enough evidence to take a useful next step.
Start with the decision your team needs to make
Before choosing sessions, write down a decision that is currently stuck. Keep it specific enough that you can recognize a useful answer.
- Operations: What evidence do we need to understand why posting slows down during a busy period?
- Development: Which business workflow needs better regression coverage before our next AL extension release?
- Integrations: Who should investigate and resolve a transaction that reaches one system but not the other?
- AI and automation: What result would justify a controlled pilot, and who would review the exceptions?
These are planning prompts, not diagnoses. A useful conference conversation can clarify what to investigate. It does not establish the cause of a problem in an environment nobody has examined.
Choose sessions by the question they can answer
Read session descriptions with your decision beside you. Look for the intended audience, assumed knowledge, and promised learning outcome. Use the organizer's agenda to check the current program before committing to meetings.
Our suggested selection test is simple: finish the sentence, "After this session, I should be better able to..." If the answer is only "know more about AI" or "understand upgrades," make it narrower.
| Learning need | Look for | Question to carry in |
|---|---|---|
| Understand the options | A relevant overview or product session | Which option fits our actual workflow and constraints? |
| Investigate a problem | A practical diagnostic or technical session | What evidence should we collect before choosing a fix? |
| Learn how others operate | A user discussion or implementation lesson | Who owned the work after go-live, and what changed? |
| Assess a proposed solution | A demonstration that addresses your use case | What remains to be tested in our environment? |
Leave room between commitments to write notes and find the next room. Your calendar does not need a stress test.
Use product documentation to sharpen the questions
A little preparation helps you ask for a method instead of a general opinion. For a performance discussion, Microsoft distinguishes tools for reproducing a slow scenario from telemetry used to investigate past activity. Telemetry must be enabled before the issue occurs to provide that evidence. Microsoft's performance investigation guidance.
A useful question follows: "Which signal would help us test our suspected cause, and is that signal already being collected?" Bring a sanitized description of the workflow, when the slowdown happens, and which roles are affected. Avoid sharing live customer records or credentials in a conference setting.
For an AL testing discussion, Microsoft documents test codeunits, test methods, and environment-specific testing limits. Automated tests are not allowed in Business Central online production environments. Microsoft's application testing overview.
That makes the next question concrete: "Which representative business case should become a repeatable test, and where should it run?" Keep the conference discussion focused on the test case, its expected result, and the environment needed to validate it.
Give each attendee a different learning responsibility
If colleagues are attending, agree on coverage before the event. A functional lead might focus on workflow and exception handling. An AL developer might focus on extension behavior and test coverage. An administrator might focus on telemetry and support ownership.
This is a suggested division of work, not a rule about who may attend which session. Compare notes where responsibilities meet. A proposed automation can affect all three roles, and each may notice a different prerequisite.
Copy this session-to-action worksheet
Use the same note format after a relevant session or conversation:
- Decision: What are we trying to decide?
- Source: Which session, document, or conversation informed this note?
- Observation: What was actually demonstrated or explained?
- Conditions: Which version, environment, permissions, setup, or connected service did the example depend on?
- Open question: What do we still need to verify for our own workflow?
- Next action: What is the smallest useful investigation or test?
- Owner and review date: Who will take it forward, and when will the team review the result?
For example, a performance session might lead to this action: "Our administrator will confirm whether relevant telemetry was enabled, then our developer will agree on a representative posting scenario to investigate." That is an actionable note without pretending the conference has already solved the issue.
Plan the debrief before the trip
Put a team debrief on the calendar before leaving. Review the original decision, the evidence gathered, and what remains unknown. Sort proposed actions into investigate, test, defer, or discard. Assign an owner to anything moving forward.
A sensible outcome can be a better question, a rejected idea, or an agreed test. You do not need to turn every interesting demonstration into a project. The useful measure is whether your team now understands the next decision and how to support it.
Meet us at Summit
If you are attending and want to discuss a Business Central decision your team is working through, request a Summit conversation with Bitta Apps. Include the workflow, what is uncertain, and what you hope to learn so we can prepare.
Sources
Claims in this article were checked against the following on Sep 14, 2026.