A service pack for Navision, one of Microsoft's four enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, moves that product's portal technology to Windows SharePoint Services. In addition, a .NET wrapper for one of Navision's programming interfaces will allow applications that access Navision data to be written in .NET languages using Visual Studio. However, unlike Solomon's and Great Plains' portals, which include several prepackaged self-service applications, the Navision portal is a developer-oriented toolkit and does not include any production-ready applications.

Lining Up with Wave One

Navision is an accounting and business management package for mid-size businesses. The product is sold through a network of some 2,000 channel partners and, as of mid-2005, has garnered about 48,000 customers, most of which are manufacturing or distribution companies.

Navision 4.0 SP1 comes 12 months after the release of Navision 4.0, which shipped in Oct. 2004. Along with the usual assortment of bug fixes found in a service pack, SP1 includes several new features that are consistent with a set of common design themes shared by Microsoft's four ERP applications. (These themes are part of Project Green "Wave One," recently renamed Dynamics. Project Green is Microsoft's long-term plan to consolidate its four ERP products on a single code base.)

SharePoint portal. SP1 introduces the Navision Employee Portal, which is built on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), Microsoft's strategic platform for creating Web portals. Navision's previous portal feature used an older Microsoft technology called the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit. The WSS-based Employee Portal includes four Web Parts that developers use to create Web-based applications that can access and update Navision data, and call Navision functions. (Web Parts are modular components used to build Web pages in WSS.) For example, developers could build an application that let personnel in a warehouse track and update product inventory using a Web browser. A sample portal application is provided in the service pack, but the Navision portal does not include any production-ready applications.

.NET wrapper for Navision API. SP1 delivers a .NET wrapper for Navision's C/FRONT data-access API, a collection of more than 100 C-language functions for manipulating Navision databases. The new data-access API (called C/FRONT.NET) will support programmatic access to Navision data from .NET languages such as C# and VB.NET. A Microsoft-provided .NET wrapper allows Navision to be customized and extended using nonproprietary languages and the Visual Studio development environment. Developers will no longer need to supply (and maintain) custom wrappers around Navision functions.

Bug Fixes, Other Enhancements

Navision 4.0 SP1 fixes more than 250 bugs across the product's various modules. SP1 also includes several improvements to existing Navision features. For example, SP1 offers several new costing options that will allow companies to make more accurate and timely calculations of overall inventory costs. In addition, SP1 gives users the ability to export several Navision reports (such as Navision's inventory cost and price list, customer order summary, and work order reports) to Excel.

Furthermore, SP1 improves Navision's support for SQL Server via several new functions and configuration options available to developers working in Navision's C/SIDE development environment. The enhancements could help these developers improve the performance of custom applications built on Navision and using SQL Server for data storage. (Although many customers still use Navision's custom database engine, the product also runs on SQL Server 2000 and will support SQL Server 2005, which is due to ship in Nov. 2005.)

Availability and Resources

Navision 4.0 SP1 will be available in Oct. 2005 in Australia, Canada (in English), Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The service pack will be available in other countries starting in Nov. 2005.

The home page for Navision is www.microsoft.com/BusinessSolutions/Navision/Default.mspx.

Navision 4.0 is described in "New UI and Analytics for Navision" on page 18 of the Jan. 2005 Update.

Project Green and Dynamics are described in "Project Green Details Trickle Out" on page 23 of the Nov. 2005 Update.