SharePoint Portal for Navision

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.)