Thursday, 13 March 2008

Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution

Microsoft recently released a 'new' product in the Dynamics space. Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution. I say 'new' as in reality it is Dynamics NAV with a rebuilt GUI.
They have taken away all but the basics that a small business would need. Pretty much all that's left is simple G/L, Sales and Marketing, Purchasing, Inventory and Resources.
All the other functionality is still hidden away behind the scenes. The intention being that when a customer is of a sufficient size to need those extra bits 'migrating' them to a full blown NAV is just a case of modifying the forms and adding to the menus.
The new forms are very nice. They present the information is a user friendly manor and make it easy for a user to see related information. Where in NAV you would be going to menus to get at related information e.g. Cross References for a customer. as you can see in the screen shots in NAV you would open the customer and find the one you wanted. Then click the Customer Menu. Then Open the Cross References
















In Entrepreneur Solution you open the Customers screen. This gives you a list of all customers with some easy filter controls.


By clicking the blue arrow next to the customer you want you get that customers card and in the tabs at the bottom of the card you can select the cross references.



I kind of like this layout. When I was working for MBS I had a fair amount of exposure to Axapta, now Dynamics AX, and some of the screens in the new Entrepreneur Solution have a similar initial look and feel without the dozens of menus to actually make things happen. I can see some of the new screens being popular with larger NAV sites as well as the customers that Entrepreneur is aimed at.
I think it will be very interesting to see how Entrepreneur takes off in the market place.