Business Central, the future NAV

Both cloud and on-premise

The latest published roadmap, or release schedule, for Business Central shows that the brand name 'NAV' will not be followed by any more releases. According to Microsoft, NAV 2018 will be the last release under the name 'Dynamics NAV', but will continue as part of the brand name 'Dynamics 365 Business Central', which in turn becomes both a cloud and on-premise application, unlike now where Business Central exclusively is a SaaS application in the cloud.

New name, same roadmap

According to Microsoft, however, there is no question of any decisive interruption in the existing roadmap or release plan for Dynamics NAV. The transition to Dynamics 365 Business Central thus becomes like any other upgrade, just with a name change.

Same code base

Dynamics NAV and Business Central share the same code base. Therefore, Microsoft will probably keep most of their existing NAV customers. For the same reason the transition from NAV to Business Central will also be relatively painless.

Not only in the cloud

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud first solution, designed for the digital transformation to the cloud we currently see. However, Business Central is not only a cloud solution, but is probably already in the autumn, also available on-premise for customers who prefer a local solution.