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Statement of Direction
www.microsoft.com/dynamics/nav
RoleTailored Design
RoleTailored design enables people to cut through the clutter, delivering just the
information they need, where and when they need it. It offers perspective by
providing an overview of the work ahead, so that organizations can plan and
prioritize efforts.
Market Focus
Microsoft Dynamics NAV is especially suited for midsized organizations with
unique business processes and a strong need for a flexible, vertically focused
solution. Individual locations of multi-site and international organizations (MIOs)
represent another strong group of customer prospects because of the solution’s
comprehensive functionality, flexibility and capability to integrate with other ERP
systems.
We will focus on 5 core industries; Manufacturing, Retail, Distribution,
Professional Services and Public Sector from a go-to-market perspective.
Development wise, we are taking a slightly different approach to each industry.
For Wholesale and Distribution, Professional Services and Manufacturing
companies, we will continue to ensure that Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides
functionality that addresses the most common business needs within these types
of organizations. We will also ensure that our partners and ISVs easily can build
their vertical and micro-vertical solutions on Microsoft Dynamics NAV to address
these specific needs.
To address specific needs for Retail and Public Sector organizations – as well as
other industries – we will enable our partners to build their vertical and micro-
vertical solutions on Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Please find more information about Microsoft Dynamics Industry Solutions here.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV covers the following application areas: Financial
Management, Sales and Marketing, Manufacturing, Warehouse and Distribution,
Jobs and Resources, Reporting and Business Intelligence.
Simplicity, adaptability and ease-of-use remain core product values and with
each release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV we strive to deliver a product that
empowers both partners and customers to build and grow a successful business.
The latest version is Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009. Released in November 2008,
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 is a landmark release offering a groundbreaking
RoleTailored user experience, major new technology innovations, such as more
flexible solution architecture and Web services, and tighter interoperability with
Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft SQL Server 2008. These new
innovations further strengthen the product’s core values of simplicity,
adaptability and ease-of-use while significantly boosting user productivity.
Moreover, these innovations, especially the new user experience in Microsoft
Dynamics NAV 2009, set the stage for future versions.
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Figure 4: Microsoft Dynamics NAV – Business Productivity – the result of our core values.
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As part of this work, we will include enhancements in the application that make
it easier for our partners to build solutions on Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We will
always support the most common and core business scenarios out of the box to
support the five key industries. Thereby delivering a richer application that is
even more relevant for partners to build solutions on.
Financial Management
Financial Management continues to be a core area for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Features which are compliant with global standards, such as IFRS/IAS and local
GAAPs and legal requirements, will continue to be part of Financial Management
in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
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Manufacturing
Our goals for Manufacturing include providing the best possible horizontal
solution for supporting manufacturing, with full integration to the rest of the
Microsoft Dynamics NAV functionality. The solution already includes functionality
for supporting the entire manufacturing process – from the planning of material
needs to the shipping of the finished goods to the customer. This functionality
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Service Management
Service Management was improved in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0, and we will
continue to focus on support for service organizations.
For the common business scenarios we will focus on the following in the next
releases:
• A flexible Service Contract process, including integration to Cash Flow
Management.
• Revenue Recognition process where the prepaid amounts are transferred
from a liability account to profit/loss account in the right sequence are
essential for the service provider
• Service Level Agreement - benchmarks, targets and metrics to be utilized
as a supplement to the economic conditions in the Service Contract
(conditions like – General, Invoice and Invoice details and Price Updates )
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Environmental Sustainability
Microsoft has a long tradition of tackling tough challenges on a global scale. It
started with our original vision of a computer on every desk and in every home.
It continues with our current mission, which is to help people and businesses
throughout the world realize their full potential. Today, society faces concerns
about energy use and about dangerous changes to our climate and environment.
Microsoft is committed to helping address these challenges, read more here.
Until our investments bear fruit, there are several Microsoft Dynamics NAV
partner solutions available to support companies and organizations with their
environmental sustainability needs. These include compliance, reporting and
tracking solutions, enabling companies track and report their energy output.
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Workflow
Today, Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides some workflow capabilities with
Business Notification and Document Approval. Our future strategy for workflow
capabilities is to modernize the existing workflow capabilities into one coherent
workflow solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Mobile Framework
We will continue to position the Mobile Framework as a feature in our ERP
solutions and not as a separate product as we did previously. This will enable
ISVs and partners to continue to build Mobile solutions that are integrated with
the applications in our ERP products and relevant for the different industries and
verticals served by partner solutions.
User Assistance
We will continue to emphasize task-focused content for end-user user
assistance. We will provide a dynamic Help system that works on a variety of
clients. We will enable partners and customers to extend Help to match each
custom solution. We want to ensure that updates to Microsoft-provided Help do
not overwrite partner- or customer-provided Help. Customers will be empowered
to customize Help to reflect their company processes and workflow. Our goal is
to make it as easy for customers to collaboratively extend context-aware Help as
it is to write a Microsoft Word document, or create an HTML file, or a Microsoft
SharePoint page, or contribute to a wiki. Partners and customers will be able to
add instructional videos to their Help experience. Together these will empower
users to define the assistance they need for their tasks in their individual
companies.
1)
The name SharePoint display target will be changed upon release.
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EMBRACE SOFTWARE-PLUS-SERVICES
Software-plus-services, Microsoft’s approach for the next generation of
computing, is an industry shift that combines Internet services with client and
server software to deliver more compelling opportunities and solutions. We will
work to make Microsoft Dynamics NAV take advantage of this blended approach
to provide customers with flexibility and choice in how they use, buy, deploy,
and manage their business processes, such as finance, supply chain, sales and
marketing, or operations. We expect customers to consider which delivery model
to use depending on their unique characteristics and industry requirements.
We will work to make our products even more fitting for hosted deployments.
We believe that more and more midmarket segment customers will want ERP
functionality “in the cloud”. For Microsoft Dynamics NAV, we focus on making our
solution more hostable by providing
• A setup and implementation guide for partners
• Hostable solutions through our partners
We will also incorporate “Attached Services” delivered from the Microsoft Online
team as well as enabling partner delivered services. Examples of these attached
services could be Payments, Commerce Service, Credit Rating, Credit Card
Transaction import, and Address Validation to name a few.
Learn more about the Microsoft Dynamics Software-plus-Service Strategy.
2)
The name SharePoint display target will be changed upon release.
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3 )
Client Extensibility will be renamed upon release
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Scenario Description
Data Entry Enhanced Keyboard Interaction; Auto-complete of
partial value; Next and previous record; In cell
calculator; Copy Previous Value; Copy Cell Value; Matrix
forms
Page Search Provide the user with the ability to search for a given
page
Table Text Table Text
Filtering in Matrix forms One-page data entry Pages, In-Matrix Editing, Filter
(changes) & Refresh
User Defined Views Allow the user to save a given filtered list as a view on
the Navigation Pane
User Configuration Add a splitter control that allows the user to configure
the minimum number of lines that should be displayed
on the screen when entering orders
Progress indicators Provide the user with visual indicators when the system
is busy progressing data
Data Emphasis Support the ability to emphasize data in the RoleTailored
client through visual affects like colors and bold typeface
Scenario Description
Improved import support for Enable fob import without COM type libraries required
COM on the client performing the import
Client extensibility developer Allow partners to add custom controls to the
tools RoleTailored Client by providing C/SIDE tools for
extending the client
Integrate visual elements Provide the ability for partners to integrate custom
visual elements into pages in the RoleTailored Client
Edit and run on pages from Pages: Improved developer experience for Pages
C/SIDE
Data Zoom in the new client Debugging: Implement the data zoom functionality that
was previously available in the Classic Client
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Scenario Description
Time Zones Allow connections across multiple time zones
Improve NAV Server Enhanced streaming
Scalability and performance Reduce resource consumption for the NAV Server and
improve overall performance of the NAV server
Jobs Enhanced Purchase Order integration for Jobs
VAT Regulatory features for several countries; VAT 1:1
relationship between VAT and G/L
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