The most significant change for 2016 in my opinion is the radically better CRM integration. For years Microsoft have only had the dire Dynamics Connector, which replicated data backwards and forwards between the two system. What they have now are direct links between NAV & CRM using web service calls – which is exactly how it should be Microsoft.
I’m still under NDA so I cannot reveal the detail but it will be worth waiting for. Situations where we’ve previously had to use third party applications like Scribe are looking few and far between going forward. It has a flexibility and configurability that we could only dream of up to now.
What I can say is that any integration projects should be put on hold and you should look to upgrade to Dynamics NAV 2016 first. Yes, it’s that significant! From where I sit any customer who uses both Dynamics NAV & CRM, this is the only reason you need to plan an upgrade right here.
One other point is that although Microsoft highlight CRM Online, it uses the standard Dynamics CRM SDK so the integration should work just as well with on premise CRM. Microsoft have not checked on premise as part of their test scenarios but by the time its released, the partner I work for will have as we have on premise to link to as part of one of our TAP programme implementations.
My only reservation at this point is the capability of the CRM web services to accept significant amounts of data. This is probably only going on the initial replication though and is more to do with the CRM performance than the integration.
I’ll re-emphasise, this makes Dynamics CRM part of the Dynamics NAV solution, it brings properly integrated world class CRM to the NAV world. I suspect that 90%+ of Dynamics NAV customers will find CRM on their agenda over the next couple of years. It’s a complete game changer.
There are processes that currently are done in NAV that actually would make allot of sense to do in CRM, credit control being one that immediately comes to mind. The whole complaints/returns function again works much better in CRM but needs to integrate with NAV in order to work properly.
So my other key point is that its going to means that the Dynamics consultants out there need to know both products if they are to correctly architect your systems going forward. Every Dynamics NAV partner will need expertise in CRM to be competent. Otherwise your going to get frustrated with the cracks that will inevitably appear and your systems will not be as good as they can be.
Note
This post is part of a 9-part series. A link to all the posts in this series are below (updated as published);
- Intro
- Part 1: First Public Sight
- Part 2: Dynamics NAV 2016: Functionality
- Part 3: Dynamics NAV 2016: CRM
- Part 4: Dynamics NAV 2016 : Office 365 with PowerBI
- Part 5: Dynamics NAV 2016: Workflow
- Part 6: Dynamics NAV 2016: e-Everything
- Part 7: Dynamics NAV 2016: Windows
- Part 8: Dynamics NAV 2016: Engineering
- Part 9: Dynamics NAV 2016: Azure