Category: News

Part 4: #MSDynNAV Dynamics NAV 2016: Office 365 with PowerBI

Dynamics NAV 2016 continues down the road of Microsoft building ever tighter integration between it and their Office 365 product.

Dynamics-nav-2016-office-365

One of the most significant improvements here has been the integration with PowerBI. This is the business intelligence or dash-boarding product that’s been added to Office 365. What 2016 brings is the easy ability to ‘wire up’ PowerBI to use data from your Dynamics NAV system even if that is on premise.

I’ll go on record as saying that business intelligence type reporting has been a weak part of Dynamics NAV for the nearly twenty years that I’ve known it with third party tools like Jet, ZAP, Target etc, Microsoft needed to address that gap.

Finally we seem to be getting from Microsoft a set of tools with 2016 that mean that we can provide a best in class BI experience without any of those third party tools.

There have been major improvements to PowerBI recently including its ability to talk to SQL’s Analysis Services (which we use for analysing large sets of data from NAV like ten years of your invoice history for instance) and the dash boards with some great gauges, charts and maps. Its really getting to be a class tools that actually makes it quite simple to design your own layouts once the data is wired in.

And Dynamics NAV 2016 makes it easy to setup those data connections meaning especially if you use Office 365 already, it should be your default management reporting tool. Expect to hear more and more about it over the next few months.

And the ultimate is to do what has already been demonstrated in the next version of AC which is to have the PowerBI results displayed in NAV itself. The NAV team don’t like being beaten to launch, so if that’s not in the 2017 version I’ll be very surprised.

Note

This post is part of a 9-part series. A link to all the posts in this series are below (updated as published);