Yearly Archives: 2010

Challenge of the year: Reviving the blog

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image I woke up this morning and checked my to-do list for today. Business, business, business, and some more business. And yet it seems that my to-do list never goes blank, a couple of customers or projects are always in the backlog. I don’t know why exactly, but after opening the browser I typed the address of my blog—something I didn’t do for a long time—and I was stunned.

Almost three months since my last post. The oldest post on my blog’s home page is four months old and counting. I could remember times when a post couldn’t survive four days on my home page. My blog wasn’t dormant, it seemed downright dead.

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A new book about Microsoft Dynamics NAV

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Back in my time (now I feel old :)) if you wanted to read a book about Microsoft Dynamics NAV, you just couldn’t—there wasn’t any available. Today, if you want to learn about NAV, not only there are books about programming and implementing, but with new Mark Brummel’s book you can now learn about the most important aspect of Microsoft Dynamics NAV customization projects—the application design. The book hasn’t yet been published, but is already available for preorder through PACKT Publishing at the following link: Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Application Design.

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Cloud computing – what is it anyway?

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image Not even a full day after having delivered my presentation about the possibilities of Cloud Computing in the context of Microsoft Dynamics NAV at Decisions 2010 virtual conference by MSDynamicsWorld.com (which by the way you can still access on-demand if you missed it), my friend Steve has forwarded me a Forrester Research article published on ZDNet by James Staten: Could cloud computing get any more confusing?

A great read and a fantastic short analysis of what is and what isn’t the so-much-talked-about Cloud computing.

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Error With Exposing Currencies As Web Services

  • Reading time:4 mins read

If you try exposing Page 5 Currencies as a Web service in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, and then consuming this web service through a .NET application, you are almost guaranteed to encounter some unhelpful and generic XML errors that give you absolutely no clue about what exactly, where and why, went wrong.

Here’s an example of the error:

There is an error in XML document (1, 3634).

The error took me a while to debug and pinpoint the source, but in the end I managed to find a neat solution which I find worth sharing here, just in case somebody out there is scratching their had over it.

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When Does Waterfall Work Well?

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Today I’ve completed delivering the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step course in Belgrade, Serbia, and I totally enjoyed it. The discussions were great, there was a lot of experience accumulated in that room, and all of the thirteen people attending the training were participating and contributing knowledge. If ever, this time during training I got zillions of ideas for blog posts, too bad I forgot most of them immediately thereafter 🙂

One of the discussions we led was about waterfall and its (in)effectiveness. Some of the people, those who primarily come from development background, expressed their belief that waterfall is a bad and an outdated approach which usually leads to failed projects. I shared some of my thoughts on the topic, but I still believe that I didn’t give a good explanation when the waterfall approach works better than an agile one.

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When Should You Purchase The NAV License?

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Microsoft Partners often postpone the actual purchase of the customer’s NAV license until the project is fairly close to go-live. In the meanwhile, they do the development and the testing on-site (or off-site) using their own partner license.

I’ve heard arguments (or better: excuses) to engage in this practice, and I have a very strong opinion on this. So, when is the right moment to actually purchase the NAV license for your customer?

Well, regardless of the fact that 1) you are contractually obliged to purchase the license for your customer at the first moment they get in touch with the solution (which is fairly early in the project), and the fact that 2) you are violating your licensing agreement with Microsoft if you deploy your partner license on third party’s infrastructure, there is 3) a fairly compelling technical reason why you might never want to even try doing any project work involving customer with your partner license.

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Is Microsoft About To Enter The EMR Playground?

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image Austin Merritt of Software Advice has posted an interesting analysis of a possibility of Microsoft entering the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) market through acquiring a strong existing player.

Almost a decade ago, Microsoft has aggressively entered the ERP market through acquiring a series of ERP vendors, gaining a large customer base in practically all business and industry verticals—except medical.

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Learn About Web Services at WinDays 10

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WinDays is here again. Year over year, it’s hard to come to terms with the time and how quickly it’s passing by. (Or is it just me getting old, and preferring to ignore that fact?)

Anyway, this year is the tenth anniversary of the first WinDays, and the only one I ever attended as a tourist. This year the conference is split into two events: WinDays technology and WinDays business. Technology part is for geeks, Business is for suits and ties. Even though my personal interests have shifted slightly from geek towards suits and ties, I’ve again nominated a presentation (and got a speaker’s slot at the conference) in the technology part of it. Once a geek, always a geek 🙂

This year I’m speaking about Web Services in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009. It might seem no news for many of you, but in my country NAV 2009 has not yet even been localized, and with the localized release coming soon there could not have been better timing for this presentation. I’m going to show the potential and simplicity of web services, and again try to convince people that ERP as we know it is slowly dying, and is soon to be replaced by an even uglier beast.

See you in Rovinj!

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Van Vugt’s dynamiXs

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A year ago I used to run a monthly roundup of NAV blogs and give you a short gist of who said what. Then I got lazy and stopped blogging on the weekly basis, and boy what a mistake I did – because some nice new blogs appeared in the meantime. I am somewhat ashamed that I learned about this blog only recently, but there is a gem out there you shouldn’t miss: Van Vugt’s dynamiXs.

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NavigateIntoSuccess.com – Unsafe?

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So, if my MVP award wasn’t a prank even though it came on April 1st, I’ve just been struck by a possible bad-taste prank which is a couple of days overdue. I’ve just tried to reply to couple of comments posted here, and Internet Explorer just threw a red-background error page in my face telling me that NavigateIntoSuccess.com has been reported as unsafe. Reported? By whom?

I really don’t know who or why would report my site to Microsoft as unsafe, but I do know what the consequences can be for me: loss of traffic, and loss of reputation. Nice try, whoever did this—because I assure you – NavigateIntoSuccess.com IS safe.

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