Announcing the General Availability of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018
Virtually every business we speak with today is feeling increased pressure to modernize business processes and accelerate their ability to compete. Often, this pressure is felt most acutely by small and mid-sized organizations. As these businesses evolve, they need systems that grow with them, so they can stay agile, get a holistic view of their business data, and, ultimately, provide them with insights that can help them automate processes and operations. It’s with the needs of these companies in mind that we continue to deliver innovation in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
I am happy to announce that as of today, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 is generally available for our customers and partners. Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 offers significant new capabilities, as well as deeper interoperability across the Microsoft ecosystem, including Office 365.
Dynamics NAV 2018 is the latest version of Microsoft’s end-to-end business management solution designed to help organizations create greater efficiencies, streamline business processes, and empower employees to react quickly to changing business needs with intelligent insights – anywhere and on any device. Most importantly, Dynamics NAV is deeply integrated with Office 365 and includes built-in intelligence, so it’s easy to use, adaptable to specific industry requirements, and helps companies make better business decisions.
Dynamics NAV 2018 includes significant new capabilities and enhanced integrations to simplify adoption and deployment, including:
- Lower costs of implementation and adoption with new automated setup guides that simplify initial setup of Dynamics NAV and help to seamlessly integrate with Dynamics 365 for Sales. In addition, we’ve introduced a new user tasks function that improves user productivity.
- Streamline business processes with new out-of-the-box Microsoft Excel report templates (for example, Trial Balance, Cash Flow statements and more), as well as deeper utilization of Microsoft Cognitive Services for image recognition of inventory Items and contacts. We’ve also added improvements to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities with the Kofax Invoice Capture Service, for process improvement with digitized purchase invoices.
- Empower employees with new embedded and contextually relevant Power BI reports, improving visualization and visibility within the most highly-used lists in Dynamics NAV. Also, new integrations with Microsoft Flow enable users to automate tasks directly in the context of their Dynamics NAV experience.
Our commitment to Cloud innovation
As we continue to execute on our Dynamics 365 product strategy, we realize smaller businesses sometimes prefer an end-to-end business management solution, instead of an application for each individual line of business within their organization. In an earlier post, Alysa Taylor outlined our plan to deliver a business management cloud solution to address this specific need via our partners. We’re executing on that commitment by expanding Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Business Edition to include the full breadth of Dynamics NAV. This next generation solution will be available to the market in the first half of 2018.
We will provide two distinct offerings for our partner ecosystem, enabling them to provide the right solution for their customers:
- A Microsoft Dynamics 365 cloud application, which enables partners participating in the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Program to deliver an end-to-end cloud business management solution to their small and mid-sized customers – across key business functions, including sales, financial management, project management, and operations.
- A business application platform for ISVs, which enables Microsoft ISV Cloud Embed program partners to build and offer vertical cloud solutions directly to customers.
We believe that building on the strength of Dynamics NAV with this new cloud offering will offer Microsoft’s partner ecosystem great opportunity to continue providing innovative solutions to companies that require a comprehensive end-to-end business management solution.
More information
Microsoft partners can read the FAQ on Dynamics 365 offerings and the roadmap page on PartnerSource. Customers should talk to their Microsoft partner for a demonstration of what is new in Dynamics NAV 2018 and the benefits of upgrading. For additional product information, we invite you to visit: http://www.microsoft.com/nav.
