Microsoft has just launched the new Dynamics NAV 2016 at the Directions EMEA conference in Mannheim, Germany. Paul Woods and Daniel Argus from EBS were there to learn how to use this latest version and report on the best key features.
Directions EMEA is an independent conference for Dynamics NAV partners, organised by partners. Directions EMEA brings together over 1400 developers, implementers, technical experts, sales and executive/owner representatives from Dynamics NAV Partners across Europe & the Globe. Microsoft supports this independent conference as a platinum sponsor. At the conference, Microsoft hosts 50% of the sessions to train partners in new and upcoming product releases as well as sales, marketing and business training workshops.
Daniel Argus from EBS has written about his experience at the Directions EMEA Conference on 5-7 October and fills us in on some of the key features that EBS customers will be able to take advantage of.
We finally made it to Directions EMEA and what a fantastic first day it has been.
The morning began with a stirring Keynote, where we learnt that this year is the highest attended Directions EMEA conference with approximately 1350 people from over 42 countries, all here to learn how to use the latest version of Dynamics NAV at training sessions led by Microsoft’s development team.
There are also 425 first time attendees. So we are not alone!
The key topic of the conference is the release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016. It was announced this morning that NAV 2016 is now officially available.
Some key new features of Dynamics NAV 2016 that we discovered today were:
Phone Experience
New Phone optimised apps for iPhone, Android and Windows phones.
You can perform keys tasks on the Phone App such as update customer cards, view KPI charts and drill down. You can also run any financial report, creating a PDF.
You can also take advantage of the phone’s GPS (to get directions to a customer for example).
Workflows
A set of workflow templates will be provided with NAV 2016 “out of the box”. For example, approvals for purchases using a pool of approvers where 2 or more people need to approve an invoice before it can be posted. You can also extend workflows for automation and smarts such as automatically creating a payment journal after postings a purchase invoice.
New Web Client
In 2016, the Web client is much more feature rich and can completely replace the need for a windows client. There are over 60 enhancements to the 2015 web client.
New features include:
o On demand scrolling
o Column searching
o Freeze pane capability
o Hide/Show fast tabs
o Ability to Change company / timezone / Language
New Finance Feature
o Posting Preview
You can now view what ledger entries will be created before posting, a great way to check if the correct accounts and values will be posted to avoid reversals and credit notes
o Vendor Pre-payment Report
When you have a vendor payment journal with one payment line that covers multiple entries you can run a report to show all the applied entries (similar to a test report) but you can see all related entries and any warning or errors will appear (before posting)
o Deferrals
When for example a sales invoice covers a 12 month period, you can setup a deferral schedule to split the posting of the 12 months between unearned income and sales revenue. You can customise the calculation method, for example Straight Line, Number of days, or User defined. You can set this up for Items, G/L Accounts and Resources.
Native CRM integration
With simple setup, you can link CRM Online to Dynamics NAV 2016. For example, you can now view CRM opportunities and cases direct from the NAV customer card fast tabs. You can also drill down from NAV and launch CRM online to find out more details about the customer. Similarly in CRM you can view the customer balances and have NAV activities appear in the CRM feed, for example when Invoices have been posted.
E-Everything
o OCR Recognition
You can take advantage of the tablet/phone camera to take a photo of an Invoice and upload this as an Incoming document in NAV which can then make use of a OCR service to detect the correct vendor and invoice value.
o Currency Exchange Rate service
You can auto update the exchange rates using services such as Yahoo
Power BI
Release on 6/10/2015 will be a NAV Content pack for Power BI.
This will be compatible with NAV 2013R2, 2015 also.
This will be an out of the box KPI power BI dashboard that can be customised
There is still much more to discover about Dynamics NAV 2016 over the next couple of days. We hope the conference will also be a great opportunity for us to meet ISV’s that offer solutions that could be of benefit to our EBS customers. I look forward to reporting on more of the latest information on the new Dynamics NAV 2016 in my next blog post from the Directions EMEA Conference in Germany.
Please look out for my next blog posts where I will look at key new features of Dynamics NAV 2016 in more detail.