Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Service Pack 1 - Overview

The new Statement Of Direction has appeared, and what a show! There is a roadmap until 2017 with features, goals and new stuff that will be added in the next 4 (four, vier, quattre, …) releases… . Well, Microsoft, pardon me to be a little bit sarcastic about this … but being able to deliver a roadmap until 2017, but not being able to deliver a release date for Belgium or any other country in Group 2 (even 5 months after group 1 release) … it makes me wonder.

Anyway, I won't use my blog for wining about this.

In the SOD, there is also the announcement of the SP1 of NAV 2009, which will be release Q3 of this year. It's a huge one, I can assure you. There is a lot improved, changed, added, removed, … in NAV 2009. Most things about "usability". Let's give you an overview (although I don't have a detailed "list" of all new things, yet).

Reporting enhancements

The reports are even more dynamic. It will be possible to drill through to a report from a report based on a filter: e.g., when you click on a pie chart, a new report, filtered on that section of the pie, is opened.

Also "paging" will be possible, which is beneficial for large, memory consuming reports… . The reports will now be sent in chunks to the requesting client: memory consumption will be moved to the client enabling a higher performance of the server system.

Productivity Improvements

There are several areas where the NAV team succeeded to improve the productivity for end users.

In terms of "Data Entry", we welcome back the "copy previous value", the "Next and Previous Record", the in-cell calculator, the Matrix Forms (yep…), … . It might work in another way, or with another shortcut, but the main thing is: it's back!

The Page Search is also a neat thing… . It allows you to search for a given page. To give you an impression:

And yes, it also works with your custom development without doing any extra job.

Then, the introduction of "user defined views", which gives the user the possibility to save a certain list as a view in the navigation pane.

Furthermore, in the user configuration, you can add a splitter control now, which allows you to change for example the minimum number of lines that should be displayed on the screen.

And last but not least (and not mentioned in too many details, so I don't know how to describe this): data emphasis. It supports the ability to emphasize data through visual effects like colors or bold typeface. Now, I haven't tested this, but from what I heard, it's not "conditional". Now, what's the point of this then? I should investigate this further to go into detail… .

That's for user, what's new for partners? Well, a 'bug' has been fixed: you couldn't import a fob if you didn't have the COM type libraries on your pc. That's not an issue anymore.

Big news for the somewhat more creative developer: you'll be able to add custom visual elements to the RTC pages. To see how this works, I know that Freddy will publish the next step of his "Virtual Earth" app on NAV2009 really soon, which is based on the Client's Extensibility (the term is going to change when SP1 is released, by the way.). So, you get a whole now creative world to build apps in, and (of course) you get the new developer's tools that are needed for it.

Hey, also an interesting one: it's now possible to run pages straight from C/SIDE. Finally, no shortcuts anymore :). On top of that … another thing we welcome back: the "Data Zoom" functionality. Finally. We missed that, didn't we? They took the opportunity to mention a few more things on the zoom-page, like filters. Exporting to excel on the other hand is a bit more difficult: you'll have to use the "export to excel" functionality out-of-the-box. Copy/paste the records is not possible anymore.

Quality Improvements

Another way of describing "quality improvements" is "Bug Fixes" :). The main thing to mention is that they focused a little bit on the performance of the NAV Server. Therefore, the Web Services and the RTC connection should run more smoothly now.
That's it, "fresh from the press" like they say in Dutch. Remember, it's just an overview. As far as I know, there is no "description" of what has been improved (in detail) or how it works. For example, I know there is a data zoom now, but how to execute it? I don't know :(. I haven't found any list of shortcuts (which by the way have been completely reviewed - in a positive way) whatsoever.

So .. More details to come :).