Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month

• By Kurt Mackie
• 11/25/08

Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The NAV 2009 product, designed for small- to medium-sized organizations, is expected to be available Dec. 1 in a number of countries.

Tatarinov, who is Microsoft's corporate vice president for Microsoft Business Solutions, addressed an audience of customers and partners. It wasn't the best of times to be talking about a new product launch. However, despite the bad economy, "more than 50 percent of successful Dow Jones companies actually got started in times of recession," he noted.

Tatarinov emphasized the user experience in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009. It has been designed to have a "look and feel just like Office," he said. In addition, Microsoft provides 24/7 online training support to get its customers up to speed.

The product features an upgraded roles capability, letting users see screens relating to their job functions.

"With NAV 2009 we are shipping 21 pre-configured roles that address the needs of specific personas in organizations," Tatarinov said, adding that they can be customized or expanded by Microsoft's partners.

NAV 2009 also features integration with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to enable business intelligence capabilities. Tatarinov said that the integration makes it possible to "make sure that everybody in the organization…gets access to sophisticated business analytics."

The last new element to NAV 2009 is its incorporation of Web services using "pre-integrated interfaces," Tatarinov said. As an example, he presented a product demo of an order-processing scenario in which a product delivery date gets checked by calling a service.

At some point, NAV 2009, and other Dynamics products, will be integrated with Windows Essential Business Server, Tatarinov said.

"We're announcing that the entire portfolio of Dynamics products will be integrated, tightly integrated, with the recently announced Windows Essential Business Server, which is a server solution addressing the needs of medium-sized organizations with out-of-the-box integration of the entire portfolio of security tools, management tools, and the rest of the infrastructure tools," he said.

Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Essential Business Server 2008 just last week.

The integration components will be add-ins to Windows Essential Business Server 2008, allowing the administration of Microsoft Dynamics via a single console. Microsoft has already provided this add-in capability for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 users.

Users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 will have the ability to create customer self-service Web-based interfaces using a feature called "eService Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0," which will be available by the end of the year.

General availability for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 varies by country. Dec. 1 is the planned date for the following countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom and United States.

More Microsoft Dynamics NAV details can be found at Microsoft's Web site here.