NAV 2013 and why you should get excited..

Please note: This article includes many links to RSC.com.  The RSC group was acquired by Encore Business Solutions in December of 2012.

I  couldn’t wait for the release of NAV 2009. With the new changes to the client, users could switch up their work environment without having to get a partner involved. The feedback and dexterity were greatly improved. Whilst I felt that the new release was a great stride in the right direction I am far more excited about the release of NAV 2013.

The latest connotation of the NAV product is an awesome mix of functional and application enhancements that have me champing at the bit to get my first implementation under my belt.

Let’s get started, in no particular order here are a few of my favourites:

Remember back prior to version 3.xx you could only have 2 dimensions? Then came “Unlimited Dimensions” and suddenly you could analyze your data endless ways.

Everyone agrees that the dimension system is great, no need to add segments to your G/L, instead you add new dimensions as your business grows and changes, easily producing a P&L by Branch, or how about one by Salesperson, maybe Line of Business? All in NAV’s stride.

The downside however from a SysAdmin standpoint was the amount of data that this created, a lot of which is replication of the same data aka denormalised, which could result in a performance degradation, and some serious numbering crunching if using the data in a separate cube for BA/BI/CPM purposes; NAV 2013 promises to change this with a near true data normalisations and a neat implementation to ensure performance is improved.

There are a couple of “new” ways that can be used to access NAV 2013 amongst them are ODATA (http://www.odata.org/) a new HTTP technology based way of accessing data by creating a query in a format similar to web address , SharePoint Parts, and a dedicated Web Client.

The web client is exposed using IIS, but the installation is taken care of very well with the installer. When opening the client it appears very very similar to the rich client, however it is short of a few things, being a web browser you can’t context right click. You also can’t view the chart parts and there is no report rendering. That being said, if you strategize what you make available on the web client there could be immediate positive business impact.  We’ve played around with this and had it working on an IPhone via VPN as well as on android and IOS based tablets. We’ve also used browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Dolphin. The other great thing about the web client is that all changes (bar those mentioned) is that any and all changes made to the Rich Client pages automatically  work in the Web Client without an extra coding or deployment processes.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that managing Service Tiers in NAV 2009 was painful. NAV 2013 changes that. A new MMC Snap-in has been created that simplifies the management of Service Tier.

I’ve had a lot of customers make the comment that when another user is posting they sometimes see a degradation in performance, or even end up with a document that has not been posted. This can be frustrating to remember to come back to a document and post it at a later time.

In NAV 2013 a new feature has been added that allows a user to submit a document to a process in the Job Queue and be posted in the background by the system before altering the original user whether the posting was successful or not.

There is a new tab on both Sales & Receivables Setup and Purchases & Payables Setup called Background Posting

Microsoft Dynamics 2013 Resources