Microsoft Plans Fall 2012 Release of Dynamics NAV 7

Microsoft offered a few more specifics of its Microsoft Dynamics NAV "7" plan this week at Directions 2011 US, with optimism on channel growth as well as more information on the upcoming release.  In the event's keynote, Microsoft reportedly demonstrated an instance of NAV 7 running in Azure and accessed through a web browser. 

According to Todd Bergeson writing on the Microsoft Partner Community Blog, "This web browser capability is a very recent and very significant extension to the scope of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ‘7' release and has not been announced or demonstrated before." 

NAV 7 will also reportedly bring "RapidStart for Microsoft Dynamics NAV"  for both on premise and in Azure.  RapidStart Services were introduced first for Dynamics AX 2012 as an Azure service.

Microsoft demonstrated in late September the NAV Portal Framework, or NPF, which allows the rendering of Dynamics NAV pages in SharePoint, a capability that Microsoft is reportedly trying to position as an option only for extremely limited tasks, not as a replacement to a full NAV client. 

Dynamics NAV in a browser is already a well-known opportunity that channel partners have been out in front of with NAV 2009 for some time.  Stratus, Conion Media, NAVOnWeb, and MindQuad have all released products that expose the majority of NAV 2009 functionality in a browser using the standard NAV 2009 web services.

So while the technical aspects of browser access are no revelation, the decision by Microsoft to promote its ...