Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series went through the five previous generations of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision) product. In late 2008, at the European Microsoft Convergence user conference, attendees saw the sixth major release of the product, dubbed Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009.

The product’s subsequent launch in the US was in February 2009 (the replay can be seen here). But rather than merely reciting the enhancements from the official PR and sounding like other media and analyst reposts, this final part will try to focus more on the nitty-gritty. Namely, it will analyze how this particular product release might have mitigated many of the traditional flaws of Dynamics NAV (and former Navision) while building upon the product’s traditional (if not proverbial by now) positive traits. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series went through the first three generations of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV product, which at the time was called Navision and was owned by the formerly independent namesake company. How has new parent Microsoft treated the product since acquiring it in 2002? Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series concluded that Microsoft would not converge all of its diverse Microsoft Dynamics  product lines into a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Rather, the vendor has been attempting to leverage the best practices and technologies across all of the products, where possible.

The idea is to deliver applications that have the following characteristics: are familiar to users within their organizations, fit with existing corporate systems, fuel business productivity, and enable confident and informed decision making processes. Read the rest of this entry »

I can partly understand analysts’ temptation to beat up on Microsoft’s forays into the enterprise applications space. To be fair, ”the empire” has had its share of strategic and tactical miscues, as if it had wanted to give these naysayers some ammunition. For one, many analysts and market observers first criticized the giant for not having a unified enterprise resource planning (ERP) product line, but rather several diverse ones, coming from acquisitions of former Great Plains Software and Navision Software a/s.

Today, we are talking about the following four Microsoft Dynamics ERP product lines:

1. Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains) [evaluate this product];
2. Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision) [evaluate this product];
3. Microsoft Dynamics SL (formerly Solomon) [evaluate this product] ; and
4. Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta) [evaluate this product] .

Read the rest of this entry »