Microsoft Dynamics NAV Conference: Day Two Part II

Day Two of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV conference, Directions EMEA, continued with some great product sessions highlighting the new Jet Express for Word, making the creation of Word templates for NAV even easier (see yesterday’s blog for more information on Word and NAV 2015!), emphasis on the ease of single sign on with NAV 2015 and Office 365 and the return of the popular, “10 Tips and Tricks”.

Office 365 and single sign on may not be the most riveting of subjects but it does promote the ease of providing secure access for your users without the faff of log-in after log-in. What is interesting is the fact that once again NAV 2015 is leading the Microsoft Dynamics pack with its use of OAuth. NAV’s flexibility makes it the ideal platform for pioneering new technologies.

The “10 Tips and Tricks” is a firm favourite each year. It serves to teach us that there is always more to learn and other ways of working with the software. This year’s session focused on tips and tricks for working with NAV 2015. Highlights below:

1. Do more with PowerPivot – use object queries in NAV to provide datasets for pivot tables in Excel
2. Enhanced cues – tiles showing monetary values and conditional colouring can be set for example to show RAG status
3. Self-service business analysis
4. Report builder
5. Office web apps; ease of developing mini-apps for NAV 2015
6. NAV and SharePoint
7. Word reporting – can open nav reports in word and use word templates and formatting
8. Dashboard, dashboard, dashboard!
9. Power BI for Office 365 – Excel to analyse NAV data, SharePoint to distribute and display via Office 365
10. My Report Inbox feature: Users add reports to their own job queue and set format, date/time they are run