NAVUG Summit 2017 highlights

What we saw, heard and shared at the biggest NAV community event of the year

Last month our global Equisys team travelled to Nashville, Tennessee to attend, exhibit and present at the NAVUG Summit 2017. It was an eye-opening event, bringing together over 1000 NAV users from across the world to hear the latest Microsoft Dynamics NAV news directly from the Microsoft Dynamics team.

The NAV legacy continues with NAV 2018 launching on December 1 and with a new, cloud-first Dynamics 365 “Tenerife” coming out in spring 2018. We announced that Zetadocs will support NAV 2018 within 90 days from its launch, as well as a number of updates we’ve made to our cloud-based expense management solution for NAV, Zetadocs Expenses. Below are our highlights from the event, please share them if you've also found them useful.

Top NAVUG presentations

Amongst the singing, dancing and networking in the expo hall, we took part in a few sessions to expand our knowledge of NAV and the latest available features. Here's the Zetadocs team at the start of the show:

With 206 sessions to choose from it was nearly impossible to split our time between the expo floor and the presentation rooms. I would have liked to join the Women in Dynamics session, but it was held at the same time as the Expo hall reception, so being at our booth to meet customers took priority.

Here are some of our highlight sessions:

• 50 tips in 50 minutes for Finance by Kerry Rosvold – the full list of tips can be found here.
• Personal productivity strategies and solutions by Greg Kaupp of ArcherPoint
• Getting Serious about Business Intelligence at Nissin Foods session by Julie Han, Sr. Manager of Business Intelligence at Nissin Foods (USA). My colleague Sandra Cummins attended and shared that the Business Intelligence session provided real insight and suggestions to improving business intelligence & company culture within any organization. Julie demonstrated how Nissin Foods incorporated business intelligence into their culture to enable all team members to make better decisions. The presentation included data that showed how companies who truly invest in their team achieve higher productivity and higher revenue levels.

Other highlights included:

• The dozens of Zetadocs users we spoke to at the event, as well as the NAV partners we connected with
• The NAVUG medics sessions
• The very first Member Marketplace, showcasing the variety of industries that benefit from using NAV (and the best red pepper jam we’ve ever had)
• The Microsoft town hall and community awards
• Waiting for upcoming sessions whilst playing LEGO

Cloud-based add-ons for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Based on our experience from building Zetadocs Expenses and Zetadocs Approvals for cloud-based document and expense management for NAV users, we were also thrilled to be invited to share some of our knowledge on cloud-based add-ons with the NAV community.

With NAV on premise being highly customized for individual business needs, it can be difficult to imagine how a move to cloud-based NAV add-ons can replicate that functionality. Equally, cloud-based applications are enabling greater mobility and increasing software flexibility for finance teams (and beyond), the enthusiasm to embrace cloud-first software is justified. Our workforce is increasingly more mobile and software needs to keep up with this demand.

There are multiple pros and cons to using cloud-based add-ons within NAV. Whether it be for document management or expense management or any other functionality such as reports, using software that is based in the cloud is a decision that every modern business should evaluate. Taking individual business circumstances into account is an important part of it the decision-making process.

To help with that process, here’s a snippet from the “Cloud-based add-ons: What they mean for your Dynamics NAV environment” for NAV presentation by Paul Crawley, our Sales and Marketing Director:

How to modernize business processes within existing NAV systems

Whilst most of the conversations at NAVUG Summit are about the upcoming ground-breaking features of Dynamics 365 or the benefits of the latest released NAV version, the overwhelming majority of the NAVUG community members are still using previous versions of NAV.

During our partner showcase session, Mitch Brown and Sandra Cummins shared practical steps NAV users can take today to improve business processes without having to upgrade to the latest NAV edition. We focused on how companies can focus on modernizing document and expense management processes within NAV 2009 through to NAV 2017 without the pain of switching or upgrading ERP software. Zetadocs Delivery, Capture, Approvals and Expenses are already helping thousands of companies globally to save time and money with a fast ROI… a quick win, as we like to call it.

Here are the highlights from our session, but feel free to contact us with any specific requirements for your company:

From the fantastic venue to the agenda packed full of interesting sessions and the expo hall where we could connect with NAV users, the organizing committee really did the event justice and made every detail of the experience a memorable one. We want to thank Mark Rhodes and his team for making it such a memorable 10-year anniversary of NAVUG Summit and of course to all our Zetadocs customers – thanks for dropping by to show you’re your support, give us feedback and ask us questions. You are the reason we work so hard to deliver the leading document management add-ons for NAV.

What was your favorite tip you learned at the NAVUG Summit? Tweet us @equisysplc.

There’s no other NAV event like NAVUG Summit and we can’t wait to see everyone again in Phoenix, Arizona in 2018. Until then – stay in touch.