For those of you who follow our blog. I should start off by congratulating Nicki Stewart on the birth of her 4th boy (8lbs 3 ozs) Angus and the completion of her first five-a-side team of kids. I’ll be penning some thoughts here while she’s away on Maternity Leave.

So a new version of NAV(Navision) is imminent with a release date of Qtr 4 2012 being targetted. And since we’ve had both a CTP4 and now the Beta version of it, there’s every reason to believe that date will be hit.

And so far I can only say ‘Wow’. There’s so much in it in terms of some new functionality and on the technical front at the database, server and client level that it opens up a whole new way of loooking at where the ERP / Business Finance Management system sits in an organisation.

Why do I say that? Well, to date the ERP has tended to be placed at the back-end of a business to deal with purely transactions. This has been mainly because of the need for transactional integrity as the bed-rock for understanding what is actually going on in the business. Financial Reality rather than CRM hope (or hype) from Sales and Marketing!

But NAV(Navision) v7 now comes with 3 clients that can be used in various situations. Plus a new Query object. The 3 clients are an enhanced PC Client which includes new Charting capabilities for producing graphs and KPIs directly from NAV(Navision) rather than via some sort of viewer in a window pane; a Web client which directly renders NAV(Navision) Pages on the WEB without needing to design and build HTML pages plus database queries and a Sharepoint Client which does the same but within Sharepoint WebParts.

The new Query object provides a revised NAV(Navision)-like interface and tools for generating data from NAV(Navision). But in addition, it can itself act as a consumer of WebServices. So if you need to enrich your NAV(Navision) data either internally or externally before it’s presented then the new Query object allows developers to encapsulate that within a re-usable object and then use any (or all) of the 3 clients to present that data.

So why a Revolution? Now rather than being at the end of the transactions that a business participates in NAV(Navision) can be put at the centre of a business, providing rich data which includes both internal transactional information and external data from WebService enabled systems like Dynamics CRM or SalesForce. The SharePoint model can come of age presenting the same rich data. And as a business you can deliver that data to your customers over the Internet to help them understand so much more about what you as a business are providing. And I don’t believe any other product on the market comes close to allowing you to do it as easily.

We’re still looking and thinking about all the potential that there is within NAV(Navision) v7 and I’m sure I’ll talk about it further in the weeks to come. Never will our singular focus on NAV(Navision) and an office-based campus be as invaluable as now.

We weren’t there when Navision v1 was launched in the late 90s. We came on board when v2 had just been released in 1999. And I remember the feeling when v3 was released with Advanced Distribution and Manufacturing which made the product more applicable to a far wider range of businesses. NAV(Navision) v7 feels like a combination of the technical evolution on v1 and the functional evolution of v3 combined.

Exciting days ahead.