Introduction

Microsoft Dynamics NAV does a lot of things really well. It has areas for sales, purchases, inventory, manufacturing, and financials just to name a few. It has the ability to do just about anything a company needs it to do, but that doesn't mean it will.

Businesses rely on multiple applications to run their operations. In the past, most of these applications have been housed on-site on the company's own servers. Integration between them was limited to flat file exchange or talking directly to the other database. Over the past few years there has been a major paradigm shift from the traditional client-server architecture towards a hosted model, often referred to as The Cloud. With the introduction of Web Services in NAV 2009, Microsoft has made sure that Dynamics NAV will continue to meet its customers' integration needs for this new type of infrastructure.

In this chapter, we will go over the old and the new. We will discuss how to do simple integrations using text and XML files...