Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software product from Microsoft.
The product is part of the Microsoft Dynamics family, and intended to assist with finance, manufacturing, customer relationship management, supply chains, analytics and electronic commerce for small and medium-sized enterprises. VARs can have have full access to the business logic source code, and it has a reputation as being easy to customize.

The company was founded in 1984 in Denmark as PC&C ApS (Personal Computing and Consulting).
In 2000, Navision Software A/S merged with fellow Danish firm Damgaard A/S (founded 1983) to form NavisionDamgard A/S. Later the name was changed to Navision A/S.
On 11 July 2002 Microsoft bought Navision A/S to go with its previous acquisition of Great Plains. The new division in Microsoft was named Microsoft Business Solutions and also included Microsoft CRM.
In September 2005 Microsoft rebranded the product and re-released it as Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
The product itself has gone through several name changes as the original Navision company or Microsoft has tried to decide on how it should be marketed. The names "Navision Financials", "Navision Attain", "Microsoft Business Solutions Navision Edition", and the current (2007) "Microsoft Dynamics NAV" have all been used to refer to this product.

Features
NAV comes in two versions: Business Ready Licensing (BRL) and Advance Management (AM).
The product gives administrators the option of using either a native database server or Microsoft SQL Server, as the DBMS. Native database performance degrades rapidly with increases in size.

Future
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, with new role-based GUI, is currently expected to be released around December 2008. Microsoft originally planned to develop an entirely new ERP system (Project green), but has decided to continue development of all ERP systems (Dynamics AX, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL). All four ERP systems will be launched with the same new role based user interface, SQL based reporting and analysis, Share Point based portal, Pocket PC based mobile clients and clients for Microsoft Office.