Office 365 Basics for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013: BI Collaboration, Document Management, and Unified Communications

Workers want to access business data whenever, wherever, and on whatever device they choose. And that means cloud services are becoming a better fit for more companies, according to Jannik Bausager, the Director of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Global Product Management team. 

The Dynamics NAV team's vision for enabling cloud-based access to a broader range of structured and unstructured data relies on Office 365 to incorporate elements of document management, BI, collaboration, and unified communication.  Increasingly, companies want access to those services without investing in infrastructure, said Bausager, who was speaking at a recent online meeting of NAVUG.

"That caused the NAV team to think about how to utilize some of the things in Microsoft Office 365 to get information out like getting access to information through SharePoint Online and using Exchange Online," he said.

The challenge for small and medium-size businesses is getting this access to information but at a reasonable cost, he said. The integration of the two products lets users store documents in the cloud using SharePoint Online; enables broader employee access to reporting from Microsoft Dynamics NAV; and also provides the use of Skype/Lync integration from within Microsoft Dynamics NAV, he said.

"With Office 365 you can share your Excel reporting in SharePoint Online, so you can get access to it from any web browser. You will be able to get access to it from your phone," Bausager said. "Email calendar - this area requires [a] desktop install. We have been able to send emails from NAV from quite some time, but it requires that Outlook is installed as a client on your PC so it's not pure cloud based. But now Exchange can run in Office 365, so you don't have to have ...