Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software product from Microsoft.

The product is part of the Microsoft Dynamics family, and intended to assist with finance, manufacturing, customer relationship management, supply chains, analytics and electronic commerce for small and medium-sized enterprises. Value-added resellers (VAR)s can have full access to the business logic source code, and it has a reputation as being easy to customize.[1]

Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Features
3 External links
3.1 Press
4 References


History
The company was founded in 1984 in Denmark as PC&C ApS (Personal Computing and Consulting).

In 2000, Navision Software A/S merged with fellow Danish firm Damgaard A/S (founded 1983) to form NavisionDamgard A/S. Later the name was changed to Navision A/S.

On 11 July 2002 Microsoft bought Navision A/S to go with its previous acquisition of Great Plains. The new division in Microsoft was named Microsoft Business Solutions and also included Microsoft CRM.[2][3]

In September 2005 Microsoft rebranded the product and re-released it as Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

The product itself has gone through several name changes as the original Navision company or Microsoft has tried to decide on how it should be marketed. The names "Navision Financials", "Navision Attain", "Microsoft Business Solutions Navision Edition", and the current (2007) "Microsoft Dynamics NAV" have all been used to refer to this product.

In November 2008 Microsoft released Dynamics NAV 2009, with a new role-based GUI. Microsoft originally planned to develop an entirely new ERP system (Project green), but has decided to continue development of all ERP systems (Dynamics AX, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL). All four ERP systems will be launched with the same new role based user interface, SQL based reporting and analysis, SharePoint based portal, Pocket PC based mobile clients and integration with Microsoft Office.


Features
As of 2006, NAV is licensed using the "Business Ready License" (BRL) model. The customer purchases user sessions, which have access to certain parts of the system included. There are two types of user - Business Essentials (BE) and Advanced Management (AM); AM provides access to more functionality than BE. Under the previous licensing model, "Module Based License" (MBL), users came with no functionality - this all had to be bought separately. Microsoft offers a path for customers to transition from MBL to BRL licensing.

The product gives administrators the option of using either a native database server (now called 'Classic') or Microsoft SQL Server, as the DBMS. SQL is better able to cope with large database sizes, but requires more maintenance than the classic database. The original database server is often referred to as 'C/SIDE' which refers to Client/Server Integrated Development Environment.

Relative to Microsoft's other 3 ERP products, Dynamics NAV's sector is distribution and manufacturing companies that want more than "out of the box" functionality. Yes the solution has a strong feature set, but more importantly it can be thought of as an "ERP System construction set". The Pascal like development language is easily accessible to appropriate developers and is designed for rapidly customizing the software. There is no need for complex server side Transact SQL stored procedures as the one language manages the application and database. This typically results in new development or modifications that take about 1/2 the time of traditional ERP applications.

On the downside, all changes, even changes as simple as adding a field or modifying an existing report is considered a source code modification. They are also "universal" meaning if you modify a screen it applies to all users. Many competitive systems which may not be as easy to modify the source code, often provide a customization layer above the source code that can easily adapt to basic changes such as moving or hiding fields or adding extra fields.