Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are a cool concept on nowadays Enterprise Architecture world.
In a real modern scenario, implementing a SOA environment means having a solution that involves sharing data and processes across multiple systems, that permits you to expose your business processes as services that can be
- consumed by other applications (external or internal)
- mixed together or composed into larger and modular business processes (workflows)
How can you obtain a SOA architecture with Microsoft Dynamics NAV?
In my opinion, Microsoft Dynamics NAV will have a "2 phase" SOA approach. Actually, you can expose Microsoft Dynamics NAV informations to external application by writing custom .NET Web Services that interacts with the NAV database. There's not a native approach to the SOA world because NAV doesn't expose Web Services (it doesn't have a built-in service layer).
But the future is here: the next Dynamics NAV version (5.1, built on top of the .NET platform) will be completely Web service enabled with a potential of over 1600 Web services out-of-the box. Customers and partners can add new Web Services as well as extend existing ones, directly with Microsoft Dynamics NAV tools.
The new NAV client will have a service layer ready to be integrated into a SOA environment and we'll have also new and powerful tools for consuming these "exposed" data (I'm thinking to the new Microsoft Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office, available only with NAV 5.1, that will permits you to interact with the NAV data via familiar Microsoft Office business productivity tools and without the need for the full access user license to the Microsoft Dynamics application).
The future of NAV will be always more SOA oriented...
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Dynamics NAV