Convergence Rocked

Okay, so I am a really bad first time blogger. I put up a site and then fail to add a thing to it until Convergence 2006 has ended. My excuse? Too busy Converging.

This was my 4th Convergence and by far the best one yet. It was a watershed year for Dynamics NAV within the Microsoft world. Not only did NAV put forth record attendance, but several exciting things occurred:

• Announcement - Dynamics NAV has over 1,000,000 users (likely the first of the four product lines to hit this mark)
• Announcement - Bill Gates is excited about NAV 5.0 becoming the first of the four product lines to use the new Dynamics Client. He was first brought in to the loop last August and chose NAV as the product to show in his keynote!
• Announcement - We have heard this before as partners, but now the customers have heard that NAV is the largest selling Dynamics product in the world.
• Discovery - Benchmarking tests now show that there is no performance difference between a native NAV database and a SQL NAV database. The testers took a v3.6 native database and restored it in to a v3.6 SQL database and then ran them both with v4.01 executables and found them to be equal in performance. And that was without any code changes or key optimization. Imagine the performance you can get if you do optimize the keys.
• Discovery - we saw a way cool demonstration of what I thought at the time was the future of reporting and BI during the NAV General Session. Come to find out that SQL2005 and present-day NAV can do all of this TODAY! Be sure to watch the NAV general session on your DVD when it comes to you if you missed the demo by Thomas.
• Announcement - there is a connector available now for MSCRM to NAV. And if the customer buys 10 seats to MSCRM, the connector is free.

There are more items, but some were not delivered publically and I will not do so here. There is a lot of momentum behind NAV within Microsoft at this point - well deserved and some of you would say "about time."

Please feel free to share your comments and thoughts...

NAV Parties

You know that the Dynamics NAV team is good at building product. They are innovative, clever, and efficient with code. You probably also know that they are very good at having a good time. Dynamics NAV team parties are the best parties at Convergence. They are entertaining, populated with great folks, and just plain fun. In case you haven't heard the whens and wheres, here you go:

• Friday, March 24th from 5:30 to 8:00 at the Hyatt - NAV User Group Reception
• Sunday, March 26th from 7:00 to Midnight at the Hyatt - Dynamics NAV Gala

See you there.

Confirmed NAVaholic - John Kleb 

Although I am not usually one to watch web videos, I found Matt G's video about NAVigating Convergence to be worth the watch. You can find Matt's video on the main Convergence page on the right side of the page. Look for...