Day One NAV General Session at Microsoft Dynamics Convergence

The first day of Convergence is always a thrill; excitement is high, everyone is curious about what is to come, and there is a lot of discussion of what will be announced. Like all years, 2015 has not disappointed. There were plenty of great announcements and excitement at the Keynote with Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, delivering much of the news. I particularly loved the demo “a day in the life of a salesperson” that Julia White did. Her presentation of the wide variety of tools that are now available to us all to work in a cloud first, mobile first world was realistic and inspiring all at once, and in particular the section showcasing use of the Surface Hub was really great. If you want to see it yourself, you can view it through the new Convergence video library, where key sessions are being made available 24 hours after the conclusion of the session.

While it is always exciting and inspiring to be a part of the shiny new future Microsoft shows us every year, I actually look forward to the NAV general session more than any other session.

I anticipate getting a quick check in on the road map as well as in the numbers on the install base, enjoy seeing what new demos there might be, and getting a few nuggets on what might be coming for the next version.

Jesper Lechance Raebild did a great job of guiding the attendees through all of that with his typical dry humor, and put up a few demos, some of which impressed the room, and some of which did not.

We also go to see some nice customer stories, showcasing new NAV capabilities and focusing in on Cloud First, Mobile First.

It was also nice to hear Marko Perisic address the group with a message on how the newer upgrade paths will truly be more like an oil change to your car instead of engine repair. Marko did also give us view of what they can tell us about ‘Corfu’, the next NAV release, revealing that workflow, document management and OCR, e-services integration, and enhanced finance functionality will be upcoming improvements to the product as well as continued effort to streamline and simplify the UX across all clients and align with Office 365 and Windows 10.

The final treat of the session was the offer by sponsor 1ClickFactory to provide a copy of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 Tablet Client. Anyone can sign up at http://nav2015demo.azurewebsites.net. It’s a great way to get your hands on a copy of the tablet client in Azure and try it out. I tried it myself today on my Surface Pro 3 and was able to get it up and running in only a couple of minutes and now have a copy to play with until the offer expires on March 30, 2015.