Web services are an industry standard software interface that allows software applications to interoperate using standard interface specifications along with standard communications services and protocols. When NAV publishes some web services, these functions can be accessed and utilized by properly programmed software residing anywhere on the Web. This software does not need to be directly compatible with C/SIDE or even .NET; it just needs to obey web services conventions and have security access to the NAV Web Services.
Some benefits of NAV Web Services are:
Very simple to publish (that is, to expose a web service to a consuming program outside of NAV)
Provides managed access to NAV data while respecting and enforcing NAV rules, logic, and design that already exists
Uses Windows Authentication and respects NAV data constraints
Supports SSL—Secure Socket Layer
Supports both the SOAP interface (cannot access Query objects) and the OData interface (cannot access Codeunit objects)
Disadvantages...