Two of the big topics at WPC2014 were cloud and mobile.  And the place where I see these two things really converging are with Office 365, which will handily connect with Dynamics NAV. 

Couple this to the fact that Dynamics NAV 2015 (which is just around the corner) will look even more like an extension of the Microsoft Office family, it all points to a great user experience. Mostly.

Access at any time, on any device

Thanks to Office365 being 'in the cloud' and its ability to work across PC, phone and tablet, many of us are already enjoying the ability to access the following information regardless of our location, the time of day, or the device we're using:

• Contacts
• Email
• Calendar
• Documents

When you start factoring in accountancy data from Dynamics NAV this is all pretty exciting: you can not only stay in touch with your customer when you're travelling on business, you can also find out whether they've paid you on time. This is brilliant, but for one area.

Should you be mixing business with pleasure?

During the sessions that I attended, another key message that I heard more than once was that Microsoft is very excited at the ability to manage and view social feeds thanks to the ability of Office365 to connect with tools like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and (of course) Yammer.  The question it raises for me is - how truly useful is this data to the Dynamics community?

Know thy customer – but not too much

Whilst in the context of your friendship circle it's great (important even) to keep on top of life events like birthdays or what they did at the weekend, do you really want to know what your customer thought of the concert they went to?  Do you really need to know when their birthday is? 

When you're working on rolling out a Dynamics NAV implementation, is your customer going to have 'social media feeds' at the top of their priority list? Already many of us receive notifications on LinkedIn that occasionally seem outside of the realms of business and potentially this kind of non-business information is going to get a whole lot louder - does that mean it's going to get in the way?

Where's the Filter?

Bearing in mind that this kind of information will be available to businesses, even if they don't want it, I think the onus falls to us to take a look at the way in which we use social media tools and what we post where.  For me at least, I'll be making sure I keep a clear distinction between the feeds that are strictly business and those that are for pleasure.