News
Dynamics NAV 2013 Now at RTM Milestone
Microsoft has rolled out its Dynamics NAV 2013 solution to manufacturers, the company announced today.
Dynamics NAV 2013 is the first of Microsoft's enterprise resource planning (ERP) products to have a cloud component via Windows Azure. The RTM milestone indicates completion of the product, which will have new features and deployment options.
"Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 is a landmark release, building on a strong product foundation to deliver new levels of customer and partner value through faster, more efficient implementations, compelling new and enhanced application functionality, and unparalleled levels of customer choice on how to deploy and access the solution," wrote Microsoft's Max Beuker in a blog post Tuesday, announcing the release.
Dynamics NAV 2013 was last available as a release candidate (RC) in the first week of September, representing an unusually fast turnaround from RC to RTM for Microsoft. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, the RTM version is largely unchanged from the RC.
"The RC in most cases is a fairly complete product and any changes that may have been made would have been minimal," the spokesperson said in an e-mail.
Microsoft outlined a few of the new Dynamics NAV 2013 features and improvements in its announcement of the RC. "Dynamics NAV 2013 has powerful and diverse new application functionality, ranging from charting to cash flow analysis to time sheet registration to assembly to expanded out-of-the-box RoleCenters to Unicode," according to this post from the Dynamics NAV team blog. "The user experience innovations range from the SharePoint and web clients to end user productivity features on the rich client to improved integrations with OneNote and Excel."
This MSDN Library section provides more details about what's new in Dynamics NAV 2013. Among the additions are:
- improved inventory, supply management, resource management and warehouse management features;
- a "connector" to enable integration and data synchronization with Dynamics CRM (either 4.0 or 2011);
- faster implementations via RapidStart Services;
- enhancements to business intelligence and user collaboration tools; and
- the ability to accept online credit card payments.
Dynamics NAV 2013 also features a new Web client, which lets users access and interact with Dynamics NAV 2013 over a network. "The Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web client does not replace the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Windows client but complements it by enabling scenarios that are not possible with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Windows client," according to Microsoft's description.
Additionally, the product includes the Dynamics NAV Portal Framework for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, a Web application framework designed to let users access data in Dynamics NAV 2013 via SharePoint 2010 sites.
Microsoft partners can access the Dynamics NAV 2013 RTM here. The system requirements for both the Windows client and Web client are listed here.
Last spring, Microsoft announced it plans to eventually make its entire Dynamics ERP portfolio available both as on-premises and cloud-hosted offerings, starting with Dynamics NAV 2013. The second Microsoft ERP product to be cloud-enabled will be Dynamics GP 2013, which was released as a beta earlier this month, with the final version set to become generally available in December.