Installing NAV 2013 Beta

Finally, NDA has been lifted, and I can FINALLY start sharing what I know about the new version of the product that we all know and love. Well most of us actually DON’T know it, which is why I love sharing this with you :). I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity to attend some TAP events in Copenhagen, and get access to early CTP versions of the new version of Dynamics NAV. As I was attending these events, I was getting VERY excited about the new technologies. The reason is that the NAV team has worked incredibly hard to address all of the painpoints that we feel in the current version of the product.

Not only that, they have also completed development for the new Sharepoint client, which provides almost all of the standard functionality to Sharepoint. Not only that, they have also completed development for the new Web Client, in which almost all standard NAV functionality is now available through a regular web browser. Not only that, NAV is the first Microsoft ERP system that can be deployed in the cloud on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. Not only that, we now also have a way to expose regular SOAP webservices as well as OData webservices. Not only that, we now have a host of new technological capabilities, such as a solid RTC debugger that we can actually modify ourselves, such as a new Query object that will allow us to define SQL queries as an NAV object type. Not to mention the new testability feature, which gives us the ability to completely automate testing. Not to mention a completely redeveloped data stack. I could go on, but hopefully you are getting my point :). It’s been a long time coming, but personally I think it is absolutely worth the wait. I am absolutely convinced that NAV 2013 has taken a HUGE step forward in maturity for our product, and I think it will provide a LOT of benefits for existing customers as well as new customers.

My plan is to create many YouTube clips to show you as many features as I can, and the first one is where I recorded the installion of the NAV 2013 Beta version into a Virtual Machine. In this video I talk about some of the prerequisites, the various components of a regular RTC installation, and I show you some of the features. It covers the RTC, the development environment, and I quickly go into the server management console. Enjoy and please leave your feedback in a comment.

First published May 17, 2012

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