What's New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017?

There are many great new features in the latest release from Microsoft, Dynamics NAV 2017. We recently showed some of these features in a webinar that I will highlight here. Look for a link to access the recording below.

Integration with SharePoint and Office365

When accessing email (Outlook) from Office 365, you will now see a hotlink for Dynamics NAV within the email. When you are looking at an email from a known customer (one that is already in NAV), and you click this link, a plethora of customer information is shown right in the email. Balances, Sales History, and much more. If the email you received is requesting a quote, you can create a sales quote, invoice, order, or reminders from within the email!

PowerBI can also be accessed from O365 and you can easily create reports and dashboards using the NAV dataset. Impressive! The integration with Power BI will continue to be enhanced in coming releases.

Attributes in Dynamics NAV 2017

One of the more popular new features in NAV 2017 are item attributes. Attributes allow you to signify different conditions for your inventory items. Attributes are different from variants. Attributes are defined by the user and can be either an Option, Decimal, Text, or an Integer type. This feature makes it very easy to find exactly the item you need by searching by color and size, for instance.

Hierarchy of Items in NAV 2017

NAV 2017 gives you the ability to create a hierarchy within the Item Category group, giving you far more flexibility to create item reports than in previous versions of NAV.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in NAV 2017

OCR first came out in NAV 2016. It has been enhanced to allow multiple lines on the purchase invoice, including cross reference on item numbers from a customer’s purchase invoice and other external documents. A new workflow template allows automatic creation of purchase invoices from vendor documents using OCR input.

New setup and Reporting Features

Assisted setup and tasks can be used to create workflows using a wizard. The example shown in our webinar is creating a “New Customer Approval” workflow. Notifications can be seen within NAV and/or sent via email, so approvers can process requests in a timely manner.

New Job Structure and Integration with Outlook

The Jobs area of NAV 2017 has been restructured to streamline the job card, giving you tasks and totals on one screen. Microsoft has also made some terminology changes, using ‘budget’ and ‘billable’, which are commonly used in the North American market. The really cool feature is the integration with Outlook calendar so jobs can be accepted and automatically added to the resource’s calendar.

Cortana Artificial Intelligence

The potential with Cortana is huge! Enabling this feature can help with cash forecasting and inventory projections. You will need a minimum of five months of data for Cortana to start providing helpful predictions, and the more data Cortana processes, the more accurate projections will be. Do not forget about this powerful feature when you make the move to Dynamics NAV 2017.