NAV 2017 Official Release Date and News from Directions

I’ve finished with a first two days on Directions NA. Both of these days I had sessions and I couldn’t prepare this article earlier. I wanted to say a lot, but I couldn’t.

First, NAV 2017 still didn’t official released, but finally we know when to expect. Not on Directions NA and not on Directions EMEA, but few days after that. Official release of Dynamics NAV 2017 will be at October 24th. And, Microsoft also promised that we will get official release of Dynamics 365 for Financials (ex. Project “Madeira”) shortly after. OK, we will wait these dates, but generally we already know what we will get with these releases.

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Some of these functionalities were presented by Marko Perisic and his team on Keynote, and some of them on other sessions. I’ll noticed some of the in this article, but I’ll write more about them in the future. Now, I want to speak more about future of Dynamics because I think this is something the most important in this moment. As you can see on the following picture, we have something very interested and Paul White said “This is an AND strategy”.

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Based on this strategy Dynamics AX and CRM will continue to live only as part of Dynamics 365 solution. Something is not clear enough because we expect CRM as part of both Enterprise and Business edition of Dynamics 365, but AX will be part only of Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition and on other side, Project “Madeira” will be on the same position in Dynamics 365 Business edition. But NAV (GP and SL as well) will continue to exist as independent solution, in this moment available on-premises and as subscription. On the first sight this is the perfect for all NAV fans, but I need more time to be sure.

In any case, we will get new opportunities and we have to learn how to make the most of them.

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And what about Project “Madeira” and licensing. We have some pictures earlier where we found recommended priced about 40 USD for each App. That is a true, for example if you want only Project “Madeira”, you need to pay 40 USD, but if you want some other app, for example PowerApps, you need to pay the same amount for this app per user per month. But if you want to have access to all apps (currently 4 of them), you need to pay only 50 USD for all of them as Plan model (and yes, this price will decrease with the number of concurrent users). And you can use Team Members for only 5 USD as some kind of limited users. And what is good more? If some of exiting NAV clients with Perpetual licensing model want to transit to new subscription model, he will get pretty big discount for every month.

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And I said that I don’t want to write about all features, but I need to notice few of them. I already wrote about Cortana Intelligence in Inventory Forecast, but now we saw Cortana Intelligence in Cash Flow Forecast; it is a perfect and you can use this in NAV 2017 and Project “Madeira” and the best is that it is very easy for using and configuring.

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End something more – new development environments. First you can use Visual Studio Code in the future as new code oriented environment (soon more about it). Marko presented live work with new tool.

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And on the end, new development tool for incredibly easy work. You just need to click on Edit button in your Web Client and you will get perfect logical environment where you can change pages, add fields to table and page… And on the end just click Stop and choose how you want to use this development… You can see all changes as preview in Web Client, Tablet Client and Phone Client. And all changes will be finished in Web Client and Windows Client, as well (of course, this is just short description – soon more about it).

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End again about dates, the new development environment preview will be available for Christmas.

Sales and Inventory Forecast Using Cortana Intelligence for Project “Madeira”

I’ve just finished with all my jobs and I can start to prepare for my trip to US on Directions. I’ll depart tomorrow morning and I’ve just find some space to put my things about one very nice feature in Project “Madeira” and I hope in NAV 2017 as well (just confirmed on Directions NA, it’s part of NAV 2017 – 25.09.).

This is part of August “Madeira” update, but I finally find enough time to show it. When you run Project “Madeira”, you need to install this feature because it is Extension. But this is very easy in “Madeira”.

1-1.jpgAfter you finish with installation, you can configure this in Setup Scheduled Forecasting using Sales & Inventory Forecast Setup. This is naturally and there is not some unnecessary details.

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When you decided how you want to put this feature to work, you can go on item list to see your predictions.

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What is the most important? Complete procedure is made by Cortana Intelligence and connection to Cortana Intelligence is automated configured in Project “Madeira”; you just need to use it – nothing more. As I already said, you only can change setup if you need it. This is the new power of new products – the perfect integration with other Microsoft tools to get the best possible results. I cannot wait to start using these new features.

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In any case, bye and see you in US tomorrow.

Final List of My Lectures – Fall 2016

I’ve already wrote about my sessions during this fall conferences, but now I have the final agenda for all conferences where I’ll attend. If you want to come on some of my lectures, I’ll be happy and I’ll try to help you as far as I can.

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Directions NA, Chandler, AZ, US

Directions EMEA, Prague, Czech Republic

MS Sinergija, Belgrade, Serbia

NAV TechDays, Antwerp, Belgium

NAV 2017 Limited Beta W1

In my previous post, I said that you can download NAV 2017 limited beta version. But there was a problem. If you tried to download you could see that W1 (and NL as well) were missing.

But now, Microsoft fixed it and you can download all version (W1 and NL as well). You can find 20 different localization versions (W1 + 19 other countries). Once again, just follow this link to sign Agreement and you can download it after that.

Good luck with new NAV. From tomorrow, I’ll start with series of articles about new features. I hope you will like it, but still the best place to find everything new in NAV 2017 is Directions NA and EMEA. See you there.

What is New in NAV 2017?

I notice, Microsoft yesterday has published a “What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 Limited Beta” document on a PartnerSource. And they also provide a link to download this limited beta version here. In the same time, during the Directions conference call we were introduced with Directions sessions and where NAV will be in the future (you can find more details about it on Waldo blog). Because of that, I strongly suggest to download both of them to see what is new and how it works.

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Of course, when I looked in the document, I’m seeing there are still some new thinks still didn’t published (I think this is still by NDA or…). But briefly, these are the most important news.

  • Improving incoming documents with OCR support for document lines, filtering…
  • Item Categorizing and Item Attributes (I’ve already wrote about this).
  • Finally we can cancel sales and purchase invoice and credit memos.
  • We have Account Categories and some other functional improvements (Reconciliation, Jobs, Fixed Assets, some US financial reports…).
  • Simplified setup of CRM and better features in CRM integration.
  • Better Office 365 integration and especially introduce in NAV on Outlook mail and calendar.
  • Smart notifications and finally really good extensions capabilities (you will like both of them). You can find a lot about new extensions on Mark Brummel blog. And something really new – Application area tags (I’ll write more about it soon).

OK this is just briefly, and I will write more about these features soon as something more.

My Session on NAV TechDays 2016

Recently, I’ve published information about my sessions this fall. But now, I’m spreading a scope of my lecture to the end of this year. After Directions NA and Directions EMEA, where I’ll speak about choosing the best Azure platform for NAV and about using combined waterfall and agile project methodology, I’ll be lecturer on local Microsoft conference in Serbia – MS Sinergija. On this conference I’ll speak about differences between NAV 2017 and Project Madeira (Dynamics 365).

And finally, on the end of this year conference season, I’ll be lecturer on NAV TechDays. First I wasn’t sure if I have enough time to make session by my standards, but I decided to have common session with Steven Renders about, by my opinion very interesting topic – Power BI and NAV.

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We chose the title: The Power of Power BI and Dynamics NAV. We will speak together and this will be the first time to have a common session with some colleague. I hope, Steven and I will synchronize everything very good and you will love this session. If you want to know more about topic, you can use link above.

But in short lines, you will see what it takes to develop a dashboard in Power BI Desktop. Starting from getting the data out of Dynamics NAV, we will create a data model. On one hand we will see how to achieve this using Power Query, which we will enhance with measures, calculated columns and tables using DAX. On the other hand we will use OLAP Cubes, connected to Dynamics NAV and other sources, to build the data model. How to create dashboards… what about DAX, M and R… how to compare using of OLAP cubes with ODATA Web Services based data…

See you there, soon.

NAV September Cumulative Updates

This month, Microsoft has been released new Cumulative Updates earlier then usually. That means, they have just published new CU for the lat NAV releases today.

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You can download all these Cumulative Updates from the following links:

There are really a lot of interesting Platform and Application hotfixes and local hotfixes as well and you just need to download and test them. I’ve just noticed them and I need to check all of these.

My Sessions on Directions NA and EMEA

Few days ago, I wrote about new Directions NA and EMEA. Now I can announce my sessions. I’ll have sessions on both of these Directions.

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First, about Directions NA, I’ll have two sessions. First session is about Azure and NAV, i.e. How to choose the best possible Azure platform for NAV. This session will be on the end of first day (5:15-6:15pm).

Second session will be related with some soft skills and it will be Water-Agile-Fall methodology and NAV implementation. This session will be the first after Keynote at the second day (10:15-11:15am) and I hope, this topic is interesting enough to come so early :).

Regarding Directions EMEA, I’ll provide the same session about NAV and Azure as on Direction NA. This session will be 12.10. at 17:15-18:15.

See you there.