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Read the latest news about Dynamics from Directions EMEA 2016

Travelling at about 450mph on the flight back to the UK from Directions in Prague, Dave Whitham finally had time to digest and think about all the information presented to him over the 4 day Directions EMEA Conference. He had time to find out about Dynamics NAV 2017, Dynamics 365 and some interesting add-ons!

About Directions EMEA
Directions EMEA is an independent conference for Dynamics NAV users and partners. This year, Directions was record breaking, bringing together over 1700 NAV certified professionals from over 500 Microsoft Dynamics NAV Partners from all over the world. Official figures state that this year there were attendees from 52 countries.

Directions EMEA is a huge event in the ERP community, with a truly global reach.

My experience at Directions EMEA
The 2016 Directions EMEA Conference was without doubt one of the best and most informative conferences I’ve ever attended. It was entirely focussed on the next release of Power BI, NAV, Lexmark OCR and also – the new baby of Microsoft; Dynamics 365.

What made directions so great, wasn’t just the content on offer. I had ample opportunity to network and share ideas with over 500 other NAV partners from all over the world. It was also great to speak directly with some of Microsoft’s development and executive teams about my thoughts for NAV. What became apparent as the event went on, is that these developers and engineers are enormously proud of their creations.

My excitement for add-ons
While I was there, I took the opportunity to sit in on a lot of tech demos, and browse the assortment of add-ons to the core NAV experience. The NAV add on community is really thriving at the moment. They’re normally born out of missing functionality or shifting business requirements and bolt onto the core NAV product.

They provide huge functionality boosts to the existing NAV architecture. And this year there’s some really exciting new products and additions scheduled to be released. Some of the one’s that interested me the most were solutions geared towards helping Professional Services utilise the rich functionality of NAV. There were some other phenomenal expense management add-ons too. I totally see value in some of these add-ons, so I’ll be exploring partnerships with these add-on providers in the near future. Keep your eye on our blog for announcements.

A bit about NAV 2017
One of the major announcement of the conference was the launch of Dynamics NAV 2017. It’s scheduled to be released on October 24th. We’ve talked about NAV in a previous blog, (authored by yours truly) –  so please feel free to stop by! It boasts an increased efficiency in incoming documents functionality and inventory items can now be categorised and segregated too.

Keep an eye out for a webinar I’ve scheduled on the 9th of November. We’ll be talking all about NAV 2017 and all of the brand new features I got a look at during Directions itself.

And the showstopper – Dynamics 365!
Dynamics 365 was a huge part of Directions this year. Microsoft told us that it’ll be available in the US on November the 1st. It’ll then start becoming available in other countries in early 2016. Unfortunately, I have no idea what specific countries this will be – Microsoft have been tight lipped. Despite this, I do have to say the Dynamics 365 product looks absolutely brilliant. The tight integration between ERP and CRM really impressed me along with the reduced navigation between applications.