On the eve of celebrating a new year and saying farewell to 2015, Microsoft has already launched (a month ago) the brand new version of NAV – simply labelled ‘2016’. There won’t be any “R2” variation this time, unlike the Microsoft tradition for product releases since the major turning point of 2009, which marked the first appearance of the Role Tailored Client.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015, which was released one year ago, offered revolutionary features in the ERP world such as the arrival of a tablet app, and the reports creation made easy with Office Word. NAV 2016 is going a few steps further, launching a phone app (available on Windows phone, iOS and Android); fully integrating Power BI; natively communicating with Dynamics CRM; enhancing its connectivity with Office 365; and adding an OCR (Optical Characters Recognition) integrated interface. It is difficult to succinctly list all the new features of this new version, but beyond the “wow” ones mentioned above, three new functions seem to stand out and could change your day to day habits.
The first involves Workflow. A new technical feature in NAV 2016 allows the application to trigger code on events, such as an action that can be run when something is happening. For instance, you can setup NAV to request an approval if a user is modifying a sensitive field on the Customer Card, or to receive an email if the stock level of an Item is going below a defined threshold.
A second feature is the Posting Preview. You can now simulate what posting a document will do when you press the “Post” button. If, for example, you want to see the result of posting a General Journal, you can hit the “Posting Preview” button, and you will see, in a temporary record, all the entries that would be generated. This will decrease the errors of a potentially wrong G/L setup, or will help you to understand the consequences of any posting.
Finally, the Currency Exchange Rate Service should grab your attention if you are an international company dealing with clients using currencies other than the Australian Dollar. You will be pleased to know that you are now able to connect NAV to a range of live feeds of your choice that will always keep your currency rates up to date.
Microsoft Dynamics keeps innovating and moving forward with NAV 2016 and Fenwick Software is looking forward to implementing 2016 for its clients. Of course 2016 is fully compatible with any Fenwick Gold modules that Fenwick Software has already provided for the previous versions.
