What is Business Central?

Wow, it has been a couple of years since I wrote a blog! We’ve been quite busy delivering projects and services for Business Central and Microsoft Dynamics NAV and our business has grown organically over these very fast four years. Anyhow, let’s get on with the topic at hand!

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a well-known ERP system which has been around for years and years. It has gone through many versions, the latest being NAV 2016, NAV 2017 and NAV 2018.

In April, 2018, Microsoft released Business Central. This is a replacement for NAV. No further NAV versions would be created and so NAV 2018 is the last version of NAV that will ever exist.

Basically, Microsoft renamed Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Now that is a mouthful, so we just called it “Business Central”.

Business Central does not have version numbers, per say, but is just referred to with release dates, such as the “April 2019 Release” or the “Oct 2019 Release” and so on.

Microsoft aggressively updates the product with monthly service packs (fixes mainly) and bi-annual updates).

One of the advantages of Business Central is the flexibility in licensing and deploying it. Here’s the breakdown:

Business Central can be licensed in several ways:

1) Perpetual licensing - one time purchase plus annual maintenance fee for the rights to service packs and upgrades.

2) Subscription licensing - lease the software and pay on a quarterly or annual basis.

Business Central can be deployed in several ways:

1) On-premise

2) Private cloud - this could be any cloud provider of your choice.

3) Microsoft Cloud (SaaS) - on the Microsoft cloud you will receive automatic updates.

There are pros and cons to each deployment method which I will cover in a another blog. It’s good to be blogging again, it is something I enjoy and shouldn’t neglect for so long. Look forward to seeing you at the next one.