Directions EMEA 2025 Preview: Developer zone to add more role-focused content and attendee experiences

Directions EMEA 2025 begins on November 4, bringing together Microsoft business applications professionals from across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond in Poznan, Poland. Ahead of the event, MSDW spoke with Freddy Kristiansen, a veteran of Business Central development who stepped up his participation in this year’s event. (MSDW is also a media partner of Directions EMEA 2025.)

Freddy left Microsoft in May after many years on the Business Central team and now runs his own company and acts as a community evangelist for Directions. “I’m helping set up the conference and organize the sessions focused on the more technical side of things. I’m also presenting one session,” he explained. 

Role-based experiences

This year, Freddy is leading the new “Developer Zone” at Directions EMEA. In years past, developers did not always have a dedicated space where they could meet up during the event. 

In 2025, organizers are working to better serve interest groups by providing four different zones—for developers, consultants, sales and marketing, and leadership—where attendees can meet with others, network, and share ideas related to their professional interests.  Attendees can use color-coded lanyards to indicate their specialty. In their zone of choice, they will find not just networking and focused discussion, but also additional sessions.

For the first day of the event, community experts will meet in the developer zone to discuss topics related to AI. Day two will be an open-source day, while day three focuses on security, quality, and performance. Freddy expects subject-matter experts and attendees will swap insights and anecdotes about how new technology like AI is playing out in their organizations. 

You can’t get around AI obviously. Everything is AI. It’s one of the big topics for this conference as well. In the development zone we added an open source session, which you won’t see in sales and marketing zone. Open source is something that can really benefit the whole community. Everybody needs these things [but monetization can be more complicated]. We can all benefit from something like AI or open source. For me at Directions we have a chance to do something about all of these things. We are able to bring the community together in these areas.

This also aligns with one of the slogans of Directions EMEA: share the future. The event aims to give attendees an opportunity to make sure they aren’t falling behind.

For prospective attendees still trying to decide whether to attend, Freddy had this to say:

A lot of people really don’t know enough about AI. You can come and talk to people about their experiences and what they think about what is happening here. 

If we go back some years to when we talked about SaaS and cloud, that was a big transition. When we went from on-prem to SaaS [that was huge], but this transition is going to be much bigger. People need to grasp what it can do for them so they don’t get taken by surprise. Directions EMEA is the best place for that.