The RoleTailored user interface gets its name for a reason: at its core are user roles that define sets of specific actions and tasks that different types of users perform in the course of their daily job. Users belonging to different roles will have a different view of the system, each of them seeing only those functions they need to be able to perform their daily tasks.

The RoleTailored user interface hides the complexity of the system away from the users, and replaces it with clarity; so users can spend more time productively working with the application instead of searching for functions among dozens of unneeded ones.

If you had a chance to work with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 4.0 or 5.0, you might remember how difficult it sometimes was to locate a specific feature in the jungle of the Navigation Pane. Switching back and forth the specific menus in search of a menu item, especially for users performing tasks in several functional areas of the application, was a frustrating experience.

Unless you used shortcuts, accessing any feature required three of four clicks—provided you knew exactly where it was. The system also didn't do much to help users focus on what needed to be done, and after you found the feature you needed, you typically had to spend extra time searching for documents or tasks that needed your attention. For example, if you needed to post a released invoice, you first had to click your way through to the Invoices feature, and then you had to search for those that were ready to be posted. This required too many clicks and far more interaction than really necessary. All in all, productivity was hindered by technology.

With the RoleTailored client, the feature jungle is gone, and the application isn't even showing you the features you don't need. Your role is defining what tasks you need to perform, so your screen isn't cluttered with functions you'll never use. Work that needs your immediate attention—such as invoices waiting to be posted, or production orders to be released—is always one click away and readily presented using visual cues. Thus, your focus is never taken away and you don't waste time on unnecessary human-machine interaction.

Consultants implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 for their customers will need to master a completely new understanding of the customer's business model: an understanding that is focused on user roles. This understanding is necessary to successfully map the end users to existing roles, or to define new ones—a prerequisite for achieving any benefit from the RoleTailored experience and improving the user productivity. We'll help you to get that understanding in our chapter on Roles and the Customer Model.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 has a nice-looking user interface but true changes are beneath the surface in the new architecture, and many benefits it has brought along. Building a distributed system, deploying a hosted environment, or achieving higher scalability are among the most obvious ones.

The true beauty of the new architecture is that it breaks down the barriers that kept Microsoft Dynamics NAV a relatively closed system, one that was difficult to extend beyond the boundaries of its own user interface. Integrating ERP functionality into workflows having their start or endpoint in external systems (such as master data management procedures or e-commerce scenarios) was difficult, expensive, or both in earlier versions.

Old, two-tiered architecture didn't scale too well; you were normally limited to a couple of hundred concurrent users, and that was only if you had a top-notch multiprocessor database server with gigabytes of RAM. You couldn't extend it easily outside of the realm of the C/SIDE development environment and C/AL language, unless you got medieval on yourself venturing into realm of C/FRONT and its arcane techniques. The new architecture changes all this.

With the new architecture, these boundaries are gone, and you can go as far as your creativity allows. Exposing almost any application functionality as a Web service ready to be consumed by external applications is a matter of simple configuration settings, and connecting just about anything that can speak SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, the Web services communication standard) to Microsoft Dynamics NAV can be accomplished on the fly. Meet the Web services-enabled three-tier architecture.

Three-tiered architectures generally provide better scalability; in fact, they are a prerequisite for it. The Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 three-tier architecture improves the overall scalability of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and its central component—the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server—is what makes it possible. You can also deploy several Microsoft Dynamics NAV Servers in parallel, and connect them to the same database, thus achieving higher scalability levels, especially when you want to separate the workload of several departments to dedicated machines.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server takes over a substantial share of the chores from the client, namely the execution of business logic. This reduces network traffic because only a small amount of data travels between the server and the client. It also shortens locking times because no or very little data exchange needs to happen between the server and the client during long transactions.

The new Web services-enabled architecture means that now you can use Visual Studio to write applications that build upon Microsoft Dynamics NAV functionality, and to seamlessly integrate it into workflows that start or end completely outside Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

All of this was next to impossible in the previous versions. Microsoft Dynamics NAV of old is no more—it has grown from a simple application into a fully-fledged platform. It gives much more out of the box, and makes it possible for you to take your implementations far beyond anything possible with the previous version.

So, everything is new.