I’m here in Mannheim, Germany with ~1360 others. Released yesterday was the new version Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016. Today the Managed Service for NAV (i.e. NAV as Saas) and the Power BI content pack for NAV were released. So, as you’d expect there were a lot of announcements about the great new features available.

From a developers point of view there are five or six new features that represent a paradigm shift in how we develop and ship solutions, comparable to the paradigm shift in UI with the introduction of the Role Tailored Client in NAV 2009. And like NAV 2009 it feels like we are in a transition phase, we still have some limitations and the “old” way of doing things but if we don’t learn the new way we will be left behind.

Exciting times!  😀

These are the features I am talking about. I won’t go into the details as I’m sure you’ll find those everywhere…

• Event Model
• Extensions
• Workflow
• IDE improvements
• Standard support for external services
• Saas

I anticipate this will (and should) change how we think about NAV design patterns, source control, release management etc… and there have been sessions here at Directions on those very topics.

Also shown were improvements in Web client and in O365 links, Microsoft made a point of doing all their demos in the Web client and say it is now as productive as the Windows client. And they showed a teaser of the next version, codenamed Madeira, which really is IN O365. It looks awesome!