Like many other enthusiasts in the NAV community, David runs a family business with his wife Karen. Their son Christopher got his start in NAV working in the family business. This is the kind of business which made NAV more successful than any other product in the ERP mid-market and we in the NAV R&D team can thank David, Karen and Christopher for their involvement in the product and the community which made NAV what it is today.
Like David I have had the pleasure of being part of the Dynamics NAV story for more than two decades—but on R&D team. Being a part of this for so long, I also have my favorite releases, each of which has meant something special to me:
Navigator 3.56: The "Last DOS version". With a full IDE, the AL language, multiplatform support and a high performing database (does anybody remember SCO Unix) this concluded an era with an extremely high quality release, which is still used by many customers today.
Navision 2.60: The "Windows release" which matched 3.56 in terms of quality and in addition had COM support, new object oriented features in C/AL and a fantastic Windows UI. "The beauty of simplicity".
Dynamics NAV 2013: The "New NAV runtime release" which introduces a completely new, highly scalable, managed runtime with deep integration into .NET, SQL, and Office. NAV 2013 also included an array of new client features using the same page definition, with more to come.
David has written fantastic books about previous versions of NAV – but reading David and Christopher's new book reveals to me that NAV 2013 is their favorite too!
Michael Nielsen
Director of Engineering
Dynamics NAV at Microsoft