In its recent Statement of Direction (SOD) document for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the company lays out its plans for the product over the next few years.  Their strategy involves focusing on creating relevant core business functionality and by further developing the application to support current and emerging regulatory requirements. As Microsoft continues to add new functionality to Dynamics NAV, they will focus on five basic values:

• Simplicity
• Productivity
• Continuously take advantage of Microsoft Technology
• User Experience Leadership
• Rapid Time-to-Value

Microsoft continues to invest over $1 billion dollars annually in R&D to further advance Dynamics NAV and the entire family of Microsoft products.  This illustrates Microsoft’s commitment to its products and technologies.  Companies considering technology investments, should consider this factor when allocating capital resources and protection of investment.

SUMMARY OF MICROSOFT DYNAMICS NAV PRODUCT RELEASE ROADMAP
2010-2017 AND BEYOND

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a role-specific user-friendly ERP solution with
innovative capabilities to help customers and partners boost their productivity
and work smarter.

It offers:

Personalized Role Centers corresponding to 21 key job functions
provide individual employees with tools, alerts and efficiency capabilities
tuned to the needs of their particular role within a single screen, while
other RoleTailored attributes make employees’ jobs easier as their work
takes them to other parts of the application.

Enhanced reporting and business intelligence (BI) capabilities
based on the Microsoft SQL Server database, enable employees to drill
into data, identify trends, generate business insights, and monitor how
they‘re tracking against key performance indicators (KPIs).

Web Services allow partners and customers to integrate data and
business logic from Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 with other applications
to support a wide range of scenarios.

Keyboard shortcut changes that improve navigation and aligned with
Microsoft Windows.

Dynamic reporting enhancements that give users more insight into
their data by making it easier to drill through from one report to another
report based on a filter. For example, it‘s possible to drill through a pie
chart in a report and open a new report filtered on the section clicked in
the pie chart. Reporting performance of the server system is also
improved.

Filtering improvements such as Advanced Search features that allow
customers to search for pages, report views and other items with the
Search box, just like in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.

Data entry enhancements such as the ability to make calculations in
fields, enable single-cell data copying and Excel-like navigation.

Connect capabilities that connect users from the Role Center with the
Internet to access resources such as product updates, newsgroups,
training and other tools that are targeted to their role.

Additional quality enhancements such as VAT regulatory features for
EU countries and performance plus improved purchase order integration
with Jobs.