Microsoft Mobility Solutions With Dynamics NAV Is Strong on Integration but Limited on Standard Features

Mobile Solutions may not be the central focus of the Dynamics product offerings, but Microsft  Product Manager Tom Taylor and Technical Manager Tom Loyal were on hand at the NAVUG Forum in Las Vegas last week for a demonstration session on mobile solutions for NAV.  With handheld device at the ready, they walked through their "Mobile Sales" product with its inventory, customer data, task routing, and NAV synchronization capabilities.

Mobile Sales is a mobile solution for web-enabled mobile devices, and tends to be most strongly associated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, but it is not a web application - integration to NAV is done through discrete client-server synchronization activities that upload mobile transactions and download company data like inventory and customers.  The solution is compatible with NAV 4.0 SP3 and 5.0 SP1.  It also requires Mobile Server for replication, and handheld capabilities including Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional, touch-screen compatibility, and SQL CE for the mobile device database. 

Standard solutions are still limited right now to the Mobile Sales offering, although the presenters also showed a concept application that could manage trucking and warehouse plans. The current mobile solution outlook for Dynamics is focused around the Mobility platform, which uses the Windows Mobile server for replication between the mobile device and NAV. 

The same platform is expected to be utilized by ISVs building their own mobile apps for NAV and other Dynamics products, and in fact some vendors have already produced applications with NAV and Windows Mobile of varying scale in Europe. 

Users attending the presentation were generally positive, but had a somewhat mixed interest in such a solution.  Some were interested in the proposed solution, while others saw the functionality as too limited to compete with more full-featured but non-integrated mobile solutions already on the market.  ...