NAV 2018 Web Client Improvements

With new Dynamics 2018, there is a lot of improvement in a Web Client. One of the first improvements is availability of Print Preview for non-Internet Explorer browsers (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Safari). In these cases, the Preview button didn’t appear on the request pages of reports. Now it exists.

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We have possibilities to change size of previewed document, use “select text” or “pan the document”, as well as download document or print it from preview.

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On the other side, now we can use Web Client as tool for user personalization. Of course, when we change something, it can be viewed in Windows Client as well, but place for configuration is Web Client.

I think that Web Client is good enough and it can be used as the main client (as we have in Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’); of course, some of the features are still better in Windows Client, but this client can be used in regular daily business (I know some of my colleagues will not agree with me, but I think this is more related with our habits). But I expect more and more new features in Web Client (we already saw future UX on Directions).

In some features, I more prefer Web Client in comparison with Windows Client (example is Ribbon on documents, where we have all actions for lines in the main ribbon).

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OK, there is a still some limitations and you can find them on the following links for both, NAV 2018 and NAV 2017.

Browser Limitations with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web Client:

·        Dynamics NAV 2018

·        Dynamics NAV 2017

Feature Limitations of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web Client:

·        Dynamics NAV 2018

·        Dynamics NAV 2017

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All sessions from NAV TechDays 2017

NAV TechDays 2017 has just finished a few days ago and I already wrote about my expressions. Now, all sessions are already published and I want to have all of them on the one place. There are all of them:

Opening Keynote

Deep dive into the new development tools by Stanislaw Stempin, Jesper Schulz-Wedde and Esben Nyhuus Kristoffersen (all from Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen)

Desktop & Mobile Client Enhancements by Horina Serbanescu, Andrea Tino and Tomas Grubliauskas (all from Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen)

Application SaaSification by Henrik Frovst Madsen and Tommaso Pimpo (all from Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen)

Azure Functions Deep Dive by Vjeko Babic (Cloud Ready Software)

C/AL, Coding for Performance by Jasminka Thunes (NxM Business Solutions) and Jörg Stryk (STRYK System Improvement)

Creating great API’s by Anders Larsen and Nikola Kukrika (all from Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen)

Rock ‘n Roll with VSCode by Waldo (iFacto & Cloud Ready Software)

PowerApps, Common Data Services and Common Data Model by Michael Nielsen (ForNAV) and Mark Brummel (NAV Skills)

Easier and DevOps-friendly Dynamics NAV environments using Docker / Windows Containers by Tobias Fenster (Axians Infoma), Jakub Vaňák (Marques Olivia) and Freddy Kristiansen (MDCC)

Best practices to get automated tests running on your solution by Luc van Vugt (fluxxus.nl) and James Crowter (Technology Management)

Office 365 business apps powered by Dynamics 365 “Tenerife” platform by Ievgenii Korovin, Andreas Moth and Monica Ahuja (all from Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen)

Source Code Management with Visual Studio Code Made Easy by Soren Klemmensen (360 Visibility) and Jonas Andersen (Elbek & Vejrup)

Enjoy and see you there the next year…

The future of NAV – a small wrap up

These days we got a lot of messages about the future of our product – Dynamics NAV. Now I’m seating in a plane and traveling to Nashville on NAVUG Summit and finally have found some time to make a small wrap up with all important things. I think now, after two Directions in North America and EMEA, picture is clearer.

Roadmap

The first thing I want to mention is roadmap of Dynamics NAV. I think it is absolutely clear that in this moment we have Dynamics NAV 2017 as ‘on prem’ and ‘on cloud ready’ solution, but as SaaS, we have Dynamics 365 for Financial and Operations Business Edition, generally based on Dynamics NAV. But this is just in this moment, because Marko Perisic announced in Madrid last week that we will have published Dynamics NAV 2018 at December 1st. This announced is mostly based on partners feedback and this is absolutely this what partners wanted. For now, SaaS solution will stay the same, with the same name and in the same countries (US, Canada and UK). But with this new NAV version, partners will get new solution and the most important, with this new NAV version they can start to use Visual Studio Code for Extensions v2. This is important because partners now can start immediately with new model of development and to be ready for the spring and new solution.

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At the spring 2018, we will finally get already announced new product – Dynamics 365 “Tenerife”, but only as cloud SaaS solution. As on-prem solution, we will get Dynamics NAV 2018 R2, but with the same code base as Dynamics 365 “Tenerife”. In this moment I don’t know a reason why we will still have the same product with the different names ‘on cloud’ and ‘on prem’. But very soon, we will continue with only one name – currently code name Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’. System will have new modern web interface, sandbox and lot of new features (more about it in another post).

And ant the spring, we will get Dynamics 365 for Sales App with less features (ex Business Edition) and Dynamics 365 for Marketing as preview. Both of these products was presented on Directions and they really look nice and rich.

New Package – New Opportunities

As I said, I don’t want to write about all new features in the future release, but what with the whole package. The main idea is to stop to implement ERP and/or CRM; but to continue to implement full business solution. This is what clients need; they don’t care what part of system it is, the just need to solve their problems and their requirements. And as the new business solution, we will have Dynamics 365 as business solution who cover most of the potential client’s needs. That means we will not sell e.g. ERP, but solution. In this solution we will see what real requirements client has and implement adequate Apps with adequate level of features. Price will depend of this, but we will don’t know prices, because of lot of changes. By my opinion, very important is that now we can combine Apps from ex Business Edition and ex Enterprise Edition. With this we will have more agility in implementation process. And of course, all of this will be integrated with Common Data Service. And even better, we can use CDS for our integrations. We can use not only Dynamics 365 Apps, but also PowerApps, Flow, Office 365, Power BI, 3th party Apps… as the same business environment.

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Conclusion

The final message is by my opinion very clear and very positive. For both partners and customers. Don’t afraid, Microsoft will not stop with this amazing product. Rebranding is not canceling. But with new name, we will get still the same powerful product, but with the great new opportunities as well.

I can write probably more, but I think this is more than enough as the first wrap up after two Directions. Future of our product is a clear.

NAV 2018 after all

After Direction NA announcement, it was clear the next Dynamics NAV release will be known as Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’ and it will be published in spring next year. But…

As we heard on Direction, actually new NAV is already finished from technical perspective and probably because of partners feedback, the final decision is that we will have once more release of NAV as NAV 2018 later this year. More about it is published here in Microsoft official blog, and it is yesterday confirmed by Marko Perisic on Twitter.

But in further, this blog post still speaks more about future of Dynamics 365 as we already heard on Direction. That means we will just get new NAV in a meantime, because product is already finished. As I mentioned in my previous post, we can use this NAV release to be well prepared for the future release of Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’. In this post I made one mistake when I said we can customize NAV 2017 using extensions and VS Code; I actually thought on Dynamics 365 for Financials, but with this new NAV 2018 release, it will be possible as I said on both of these current products D365FOBE and NAV 2018.

With this approach in development, it will be very easy to transform all new implementations to new solution the next year. Because of that, the most important thing for partners is accepting extensions and VS Code.

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And I don’t know if we will get new user interface with NAV 2018. By my personal opinion – not. Probably, it will be announced with Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’, but this is just my private opinion. For more details, we need to wait R&D team.

More truth about the future of NAV

After the first day of Directions NA, there are a lot of confusing posts about the future of Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 for Financials. I don’t know why, because Marko Perisic was clear about all details.

The first well known products are not canceled. This is just rebranding and it means we will still have products with the same features (and lot of new features) as old NAV (and Dynamics 365 for Financials). Now we will just have one common platform for both of these old products and with the same name – Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’ (currently code name). We will have this product on cloud and on-prem (as old NAV). If partners want to deploy NAV on Azure, they will not use their own infrastructure and instead of that, they will use this product as SaaS. But what is the best for partners, they can make project based customizations on cloud as well as on-prem. And this is amazing.

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About other Apps, we can license Apps as we want to use and we will be in situation to make combination of Apps from old BE or EE solutions. And of course we will pay per feature and per named user. And I must to be honest, maybe we still don’t have all details about licensing and this is one of the most important reasons, why this product is not published just now. Product is already finished, but we need to wait the final adjustments about licensing. This will be on the first place, because Microsoft wants to encourage partners and clients to use cloud solution as more as possible. This is the most important strategy. But all clients can continue to use on-prem solution if they insist. But Microsoft will make much better offer for cloud solution. And we need to be patient to wait the final decision.

New product will have new modern user interface, almost the same as other D365 products and this will be very important for future customers, because they will have the same filling working in different Apps.

And yes, we need to wait until the spring for the new product, but I cannot see some specific issue, because we can continue to implement NAV. If we customize NAV 2017 using extensions and VS Code, it will be very easy to transform these implementations to new solution the next year.

And yes, we can continue to use CDS for integrations, PowerApps, Flow, PowerBI… All of these will be used with the new product as well. We can continue to publish Apps on AppSource, because this service will be continue to use and it will be much more improved. And one more yes, on the closing session, Marko announced that he and his team accepted the most important feedbacks from partners. This is encouraging message for all partners who are afraid from any reason.

Of course, partners will need to change their business models in some parts, more or less, but this is normal situation in whole business. Personally, I’m happy with all new announcements and I think R&D team made a good job.

New UX in NAV (Dynamics 365 Tenerife)

After first Keynote on Directions NA, we got a very exciting news about rebranding of our products and about their common future as Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’. In my previous post, I wanted to announce only the most important news and later write a more detailed. But in a meantime, Waldo wrote a post with perfect explained all these details and I’ll just give you URL to this post instead of writing the same text.

Before I start with other exciting news from the second Keynote part, first I want to share details when we can expect new products:

  • Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’ – In preview, but GA Spring 2018
  • Dynamics 365 for Sales – In preview, but GA Spring 2018
  • Dynamics 365 for Marketing – In preview

Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL will continue as for now with the same name and we will get new versions this year at Q4.

But now, what we have more about new future release. OK we will get a lot of new features, but on the first sight, new UX will be the first what we can see and just to say my personal opinion – It is the great work. We will get complete rendered web client (probably Tablet and Phone and the same time, I’m not sure). Now when you compare all Dynamics 365 clients, there are all almost the same. This is the point, we don’t want to speak about specific different solutions, we want to speak only about Dynamics 365 as a product; and of course, we will run only these Apps we need:

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Now, I can just share some first pictures of the new client to see how it looks like. When we run Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’, we can see new refreshed role center with very interesting ordered information:

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Then in further, when we slightly go down, we can see more tiles and Power BI charts:

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If we click on some tile, we can get very first sight to the most important information in beautiful interface:

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The list pages are very similar as in old client, but without fact boxes. These information will be available on a different place, but by my opinion on much better place:

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And on the end, cards are little bit different with the most important information on the top of card:

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I really like this new interface and I cannot wait to make more tests with this.

New NAV will be Dynamics 365 Tenerife

The first day of Direction NA has just started and Keynote has just finished. The event is the biggest ever with 774 attendees. We heard a lot of news about our product(s). The most important announcement is:

  • The future Dynamics NAV release will be Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’ on-premises;
  • The future Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Business Edition release will be Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’ on cloud.

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That means, we will continue with ‘AND’ story. The main goal will be ‘on cloud’, but if we need we can continue to work with ‘on prem’. But, both of these products will be the same – a full NAV.

But there are more news, especially about ‘on cloud’ story. In the future release, we can provide customer oriented customizations in our SaaS solution, we can run Sandbox environment, our services can be offered… All of this is very exciting and we can find a lot of opportunities, especially in integrations with other products.

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This is not all with details. This is just the first basic review of news. There will be more news soon.

My Dynamics lectures in Serbia this fall

Just before I go on a trip to Orlando (Directions NA 2017), I want to announce something to my countrymen in Serbia. I’ll have two sessions on Sinergija 2017 conference in Belgrade. Sinergija will be held at October 25th – 27th and detailed agenda is still not known.

But my sessions will be the following:

  • Is the new NAV actually Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’?
  • What is Dynamics 365 for Talent?

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You can register with early bird until the end of this day. If you want to attend, it is a good opportunity to register.

Image Analyzer in NAV as Cognitive Service

It really sounds amazing. But if you were been at Microsoft Ignite and attended NAV/D365FOBE sessions, you already seen this service as something what we will have in the future. When I say future, I think on the future NAV version, but if we speak about D365 for Financials, you can test in now.

Now, just small introduction how it works. I’ll show this feature on Items and you will see it works fine. When you run Item Card page, you will see Analyze Picture on a Actions tab as on the following picture.

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When you start this action for the first time, you will get similar notifications as on the following screen and you just need to enable it (of course) if you want to use:

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Then, system will lead through enabling wizard. First you will see a small description about how system uses the Computer Vision API from Microsoft Cognitive Service, where you can find links with more information bout API and services… You just need to click on Next, then confirm that you understand terms of conditions and on the end – Finish (if you want to analyze this current picture, you need to check one field).

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And if you check this checkmark field, system will start with analyzing this picture. This is how it works for the first time. But you can click this Analyze Picture on each Item Card where you already have a picture.

But what if you don’t have picture? As soon as you finish with inserting picture, system will by default run this feature, and system will automatically analyze new picture. When system finish with analyzing of this picture, you will find what system recognize with confidence better then 80%.

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But you can find all detected attributes if you click on a View All Attributes. All attributes with not so good confidence will be painted in red.

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From this point, you can do a few things. First, you will see that system sometimes offer some specific option in Action to Perform. By default, system will mostly offer Ignore as option, but sometimes it is “Use as category” or “Use as attribute”. I think I don’t need to describe what it means :). Of course, you can change this option as you wish and it probably depends of what system recognized. You can also use “Add to the Item Description” for each of attributes and to create specific Item Description based on discovered attributes.

When you finish with everything you can confirm and than you need to finish with attributes. System will add as attributes and as category all attributes you decided.

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Now, I’ve showed how you can start with this feature and how to test it. But I wanted to test it little bit more. OK, it worked mostly nice with images we have in Cronus database (not with all, because you need to have clear enough pictures).

But what we will get in some production environment? I made a few tests taking the pictures for the same items from catalogue (ideal pictures) and made from my own (natural pictures). You can find 5 tests in the following charts:

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Now, you can compare these results. First, I didn’t expect good results from realistic photos, but I was really surprised. Sometimes, ideal pictures got better percentage on the most important attributes (but not so big difference), but system very often recognized better attributes on realistic photos and that means system can understand context of photos. And I got more attributes from natural photos, but of course I got a more noses in attributes list, and this is something I could expect because in real picture you don’t have only one thing on the photo.

But I can conclude that this feature is really powerful. Of course this is just first edition of this feature and this is not unmistakable tool, but it can be very helpful in the future.

NAV news from Microsoft Inspire

I didn’t write for a while, but now we can speak about some news in Dynamics NAV. We got some information on Microsoft Inspire conference and not only about NAV. There are a great news, as announcement of new products, e.g. Microsoft 365 enterprise and business edition… But in this text I just want to mention few things about NAV.

The first, we will continue with both of models, ‘on premises’ and ‘on Azure’. We can expect for all Dynamics products we currently have, ongoing development.

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Except this important information about future releases of all Dynamics group of products, we got the main information about the most important technical and functional news in NAV ‘Tenerife’. You can find them on the following picture:

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And of course, these are not all news we will see in the next release. For example there is a new and better out of the box PowerBI integration, not only on the role centers. Now we will use more contextual PowerBI integration on different places in NAV.

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And not only this. But we will have more information soon… I’ll keep you in a touch.