For many years Navision was always very much integrated into Microsoft products, especially Office. Now that Navision was acquired by Microsoft 5 years ago, this integration has only but grown. Especially the latest technologies like Sharepoint and PerformancePoint can be completely integrated with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Calling Sharepoint something like a file-server is absolutely an understatement. Sharepoint is a Document Workspace, where you can indeed post documents, but – even more – use for sharing information within teams, or build your personal information dashboard – completely with data populated from NAV.
With the functionality of Employee Portal you can create within NAV specific “Web Parts”. These Web Parts show for instance a Customer Card or a Sales Order. Also in NAV, you can set the necessary parameters to identify which group of users can use which web part, and whether they can edit the data or not. In Sharepoint, the user can then select these web parts and build his role-based portal. Employee Portal is an additional granule that you can buy with an Advanced Management license type. Each user only needs an Employee Portal User, which is significantly cheaper than a full NAV-user.
But even if you don’t use Employee Portal, it is really easy to use NAV-data in Sharepoint. For example, you can create a simple Excel pivot table and pivot graph that fetches data from NAV using an ODBC-link. From within Excel you can publish this data straight onto Sharepoint as a web part. In this way, the user will always have the most up-to-date report in his portal. The most difficult part of this is to be creative which kind of webparts you need, because everything is really easy to implement.
Recently Microsoft has launched PerformancePoint Server, which consists of several combined products like ProClarity and Business Scorecard Manager. This is again one of the killer-applications that can save users from lots of frustration. You can use PerformancePoint for analyzing historical data that is exported from NAV, create fantastic scorecards and integrate this into Sharepoint. Next to this, you can also use this data for forecasting your stocklevels and other business planning. It can easily be filtered on Geographies, users, departments, so that everyone only sees his specific data to do the forecasting. We will definitely talk about this a lot more in the near future, when more information becomes available.
I wrote a blogpost ones when I was at parter conference where I attended a "self paced lab" of PerformancePoint:
http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/waldo/archive/2007/07/12/hands-on-labs-ms-office-performancepoint-2007-monitoring-and-analytics.aspx
Posted by: waldo | 30/10/2007 at 07:57