AI, Apps, and Office 365: Why NAVUG Summit boosted Microsoft Dynamics NAV optimism

Three highlights emerged from last week's NAVUG Summit Nashville event - the huge turnout, the technology roadmap for the upcoming releases of NAV, and the push for users to start adopting Power BI.

Now in its tenth year, Summit continues to draw a strong crowd. Dynamics Communities reported that over 6,500 people attended the full event, with 1,000 NAVUG attendees making the trip. The success of these conferences and their continued growth are generally good indicators of the overall health of the Dynamics community.  

From a technology standpoint, Microsoft announced last week that NAV 2018 would be released on December 1st followed quickly by R2 and the next core release, code-named "Tenerife," in the spring of next year. These will be huge updates, and there was a positive reception from users about the new list of features.

A few of the new capabilities really stood out for me. First is the introduction of Extensions 2.0, which represents a new way of developing for NAV. The Extensions model moves all the custom code outside of the core NAV implementation, making code modifications easier and simplifying the future upgrade path. Extensions 2.0 is just part of Microsoft's commitment to rebuilding the developer tools for NAV and we think that these improvements will have a big impact in driving higher efficiency for NAV developers, users, and enterprises.  

Microsoft also made it clear at Summit that it continues to focus on AppSource as the marketplace for third parties to deliver new applications for NAV, Dynamics 365, and the full line up of Microsoft business applications and platforms. ISVs and service providers will continue to ...