Magento claims to be the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform. Given TVision’s recent experience of integrating Magento with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, we’re not surprised.

Microsoft Gold Partner and NAV specialist TVision Technology has been integrating NAV (formerly Navision) with the Web since 2002. Typically the approach to date has been to use web services and message queues to get the highly designed, shopping experience of the web-site to align with the practical process of ordering goods. Getting Magento up and working proved to be substantially easier than using a ‘bespoke’ approach to developing an integrated Web Site.

Magento is not the only ecommerce solution offering a fully featured, easy to maintain front end and integration tools to NAV. It is undoubtedly one of the best in terms of ease to work with and the web-user experience. By using the NAV web services to push data to Magento, TVision further improved the experience. NAV holds the ‘primary’ source of product data, Magento is used to enhance data. That ‘enhancement’ includes making product detail ‘rich’ and providing Content Management System facilities for site managers.

TVision’s first experience with Magento was a multi-country, business to consumer site for an existing NAV client. Richard Thompson, MD of TVision Technology comments, “Because we’re pulling the data for Order Information from Magento it makes the detailed integration work far easier. We’re looking forward to working with the product again.”

The product already boasts an impressive client list with many familiar brand names, Nespresso, Samsung and The North Face to name just a few. Magento was developed as an Open Source solution to meet the needs of online merchants. The key design brief was to provide “flexibility”. The aim,  “to develop a platform that put the control back in the hands of the online merchant and placed no constraints on business processes and flow”, clearly achieved.

Whilst the use of Magento as a front end doesn’t remove the need for sensible Web Designers or the need to do Web Development; it does reduce the overall costs for a fully-featured, integrated Web Site.

For further information on Magento visit: https://www.magentocommerce.com/.

To discuss implementing NAV with Magento, please contact us