After registering for the Conference on Tuesday night here in Madrid, me and the team we were all issued with the standard Directions EMEA bag, filled to the brim. There are lots of sponsors promoting their wares to the NAV/CRM Partner Channel. Here is the selection of gifts and advertising found in each “Welcome Pack”. I have already started to speak to some of them to evaluate any benefit to our customer base  – watch this space.

Directions EMEA welcome pack

Here is a list (in no particular order) of some key points I learned throughout the day from the various sessions I attended:

  • The next release of NAV is called … NAV 2018! So no change with this product branding for the moment. Good news there. It can still be run on premise, virtualised on cloud platforms, or fully in the cloud. The method of deployment is still entirely in the hands of the clients, best suited to their own specific business requirements.
  • However, despite the lack of name change, NAV 2018 is released at little later this year, so in December rather than the expected October as per previous years. There will also be another sub release in the Spring called NAV 2018 R2.
Dynamics Tenerife Roadmap
  • The main pitch of NAV 2018 is that there are a number of usability improvements to help get customers up and running more quickly – which can only be a good thing from a productivity point of view.
  • Running in parallel to these releases will be “Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Business Edition”. This will be full NAV 2018 in the cloud on Azure.
  • Post NAV 2018 will be “Dynamics 365 Tenerife” – the exact product name is still to be confirmed and will be known by the codename Tenerife for a while longer. It will still available on premise and on cloud, allowing choice for our clients.

I also dipped my toes into the world of PowerBI to see what’s really involved, from KPI concepts to interactive dashboards. PowerBI is certainly here to stay as it is part of Microsoft’s Power Apps offering tapping into the “Common Data Services” model. Microsoft are investing resources to bring their solutions together and from 3rd party partners.

More to follow on day two …

Jason Bradley – Implementation Consultant