Dynamics 365 Business Central (Navision) – new version april 2019

At the beginning of this month Microsoft launched a new version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (former Dynamics NAV/Navision). The new version is available both on-premises and in cloud and brings functional and technical improvements.

Unlike previous versions, the new versions will have no more names such – Dynamics NAV 2017, Dynamics NAV 2018 and probably this is due to the fact that Microsoft wants to emphasize that now we are dealing with a continuous process of updating and enhancement, specific to cloud.

Functional improvements

From functional perspective, the accent was put on improving users’ data input into the system. For example, in the new version the user has a function called ”Select Items” which allows to select multiple items on the lines of sales or purchase document.

Another functionality capable of enhancing operating speed is called ”Quick Entry”. It allows for a user to establish what fields needs to edit on a document and in what particular order. Also, the user can setup the fields to be displayed on the page when he works in  extended or collapsed mode (more or less fields are visibile).

From same category of functionalities is ”Focus” option, which allows that a part from a document to be  showed in a separate window, to facilitate working with. In the picture bellow you can see the lines of a sales order, displayed in ”Focus” mode.

There are many new functionalities, we are just mentioning some of them: the possibility to setup an expiration policy on sales quotes, capability to create new items directly from sales/purchases documents, identification and merging of customers,vendor or contact card duplicates, information regarding time when general ledger entries are created, possibility to edit description from general ledger entries etc.

Technical improvements

From a technical perspective, the most salient improvements are to bee seen in the Web client. Practically, there is no more difference between working cu windows classic client and the  browser client  – and  starting with the next releases the windows classic client will disappear.

It deepens the integration with the other Microsoft applications, especially with Dynamics 365 for Sales (former Dynamics 365). Now the user can open directly from Dynamics 365 Business Central entities associated with Dynamics 365 for Sales, and any editing made in one of the entities associated will be synchronized automatically in both systems.

Business Central administrators were not neglected. They will have now the possibility to schedule future updates at a certain date, they can subscribe to notification regarding certain events (future upgrades, results of various operations etc.)  and can manage multiple sandbox enviromments.

The big change regarding development environment is that the actual version is the last which can be programmed in the old C/AL on C/SIDE platform. Starting with next release programming will be possible only  in AL with Visual Studio Code and the base code of the system (from objects) will be converted in a base application, similar to an extension.

Do you want to explore other functionalities in Business Central?  Check here: Business Central Resources