Yearly Archives: 2011

Microsoft releases Sure Step 2012

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imageA couple of days ago, at a Sure Step 2010 training at Sundsgården, Helsingborg, Sweden, while students were preparing to take the exam, one of the students asks me where she can download Sure Step 2010. I give her the link, but she tells me: “No, that’s Sure Step 2012, I’d like to download 2010”.

That came as a surprise. “No way” – I say – “It hasn’t yet been released.”

Or has it?

And then I check, and almost can’t believe it – it’s really there. I completely missed the tweets, the Facebook announcement, the LinkedIn discussions. It seems that I’m not particularly social nowadays. A quick check of Twitter shows me that there wasn’t too much buzz around it, and most of the blogosphere simply redelivers the same content, which either comes from the official announcement (which I also missed Smile) or from whoever blogged first.

Instead of giving a simple “excited” redelivery of the announcement, here’s my take on Sure Step 2012, what’s new, what’s not new (both sadly and thankfully).

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The Beauty and The Beast: NAV and .NET

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imageIf there wasn’t one already, someone should have invented Belgium. There are two things in this world that I love, and probably shouldn’t (and an oversized red speaker’s shirt I got from Luc today did a darned god job at concealing the unlucky consequences of overly indulging in both of them): beer and chocolate. Boy, do Belgians know their beer and chocolate!

But they know their NAV, too, and after NAV TechDays 2011, which have just ended in Antwerp, and two days of top NAV content, I can only say – great job, Luc and the team, and please make it a tradition.

If you attended my presentation about .NET interoperability, then there are a couple of demos I couldn’t deliver due to time constraints, and I promised to blog it. So, here we go.

It’s about streams. You already know that in NAV there are two data types, InStream and OutStream, that allow you to stream data in and out of generic sources or destinations. They are a fantastic tool, because they require you to know nothing about the type of source or destination, and you can store and retrieve data without having to care if the data comes from Internet, or a BLOB field, or is it written to a file, or transported over an XMLport. Stream makes it abstract and allows you to simply handle the data, and make the object itself care about the specifics.

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Stratus Setup Wizard launches pilot in LATAM

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Today, Stratus has officially entered the pilot phase in Latin America, after the latest build of Stratus Setup Wizard has smoothly and flawlessly configured Stratus in a local customized version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2.

Through cooperation with a partner company from Colombia, Stratus will soon be commercially available in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Panama, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Costa Rica.

What makes me feel really thrilled, is that the month in which Stratus will officially RTM (fingers crossed!) has started with a flawless and smooth deployment of Stratus in a localized copy of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. It was a great test of the Setup Wizard which now automates most of the steps necessary to deploy Stratus. After the Windows Server, SQL Server and NAV were installed, it took less than half an hour for the Latin American NAV to appear in the browser on my iPad.

Stay tuned for the fresh news, because this month there’s going to be plenty of them.

Continue ReadingStratus Setup Wizard launches pilot in LATAM

Status of Stratus, T-1 month

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imageThe summer was hot in this part of the world, and Stratus only helped keep the heat up. We were not only snorkeling through the summer, we did a lot of work to keep up with our goal of going live in September, and we are still on track. So far so good.

Over the past two months, we have done the following:

  • Signed up 100+ companies for test drive
  • Reached 60+ countries
  • Signed a series of contracts with partner companies, including NDAs, MOUs and final agreements
  • Started several pilots with telecoms in Europe and Latin America
  • Demoed Stratus at a number of events, in Europe, United States and New Zealand
Continue ReadingStatus of Stratus, T-1 month

Status of Stratus

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Stratus - an actual screenshot of the Role CenterI’ve been asked too many times why I am not blogging more about Stratus, the web client for NAV developed by my company. People really want to know about it, and I am really keeping it far too silent.

Let’s change that. Instead of sending a ridiculous amount of e-mails every day, I’ll just keep you all posted through this blog.

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NAV TechDays 2011 in Antwerp, Belgium

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imageIf you are a follower of Mibuso.com you may already know that they are organizing NAV TechDays in Antwerp, Belgium, on September 29 and 30, a conference dedicated to all NAV developers, solution architects and technical folks in general. The content will be strictly technical, and speaker list includes a lot of Who’s Who of NAV folks including Michael Nielsen and Freddy Kristiansen, and MVPs including Eric Wauters, Jörg Stryk, and me.

It will be two days full of exciting technical sessions, mostly discussing the upcoming NAV 7 release, Cloud computing, integration and extensibility of NAV through .NET and web services, and development in general.

I hoped to deliver a session about .NET interoperability, but Microsoft folks seem to have reserved it for themselves, so I’ll deliver a still nice session about testability features and how to use them to customize NAV bug-free.

If by now you are not in the “where do I click to register” mood, then let me know that if you register by June 30, you may win one of the two iPad 2 devices that nice folks at Mibuso.com are giving away to two lucky participants.

Ah, ok, now we are talking business Smile Here’s the link: http://www.navtechdays.com/2011/registration.asp

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Countdown to Decisions Spring 2011

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imageAre you ready for Decisions Spring 2011 conference, which is bound to start in less than a week, right on your desktop? For the fourth time already it’s going to deliver cutting edge content, independent views and analysis, and an immense opportunity to network with your peers, partners, or prospects.

June 16 is the NAV day and if you are reading this blog, you should be there, because it delivers some top Microsoft Dynamics NAV content, including four MVP sessions and a keynote by Joshua Greenbaum, an industry veteran and one of leading independent ERP analysts and cloud evangelists, whose Enterprise Antimatter blog has inspired many (yours truly included) while it ran at ZDNet.

Make sure you don’t miss my session, either! I’ll present some pretty cool B2B scenarios, including live vendor price lists, transactional intercompany postings, smart requisitions, and more. See you in the Cloud!

Continue ReadingCountdown to Decisions Spring 2011

Decisions Spring 2011 – don’t miss it!

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imageThe countdown has started–it’s less than a month left to Decisions Spring 2011, the fourth virtual conference by MSDynamicsWorld.com. It’s again delivered from the comfort of your desktop, and you can attend all the presentations and mingle the expo booths in your pajamas and slippers, and nobody would care. Or know.

About the conference

This is what the conference site says about the event:

Decisions Spring 2011 is an independent conference about Microsoft Dynamics solutions organized by MSDynamicsWorld.com. This live online venue is free to attendees and supported by our sponsors. We build this event upon our leading online news and product information resources to provide a conference experience that provides the latest perspectives on Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, and NAV.

Decisions Spring 2011 is simply the most focused and effective way to hear about real world Dynamics solutions and case studies and get practical guidance about the latest Microsoft Dynamics trends from the strategic and thought leaders across the Dynamics community. We bring together consultants, analysts, partners, customers, and more for an event that is educational, informational, and collaborative.

Don’t miss my presentation

Again, I was invited to deliver a presentation there, and this time I went for a tricky topic: business to business integration using NAV. My presentation comes with a flashy title “Harnessing the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Technology Stack for Streamlined B2B Process Integration” (a mouthful, I know) and you can read the summary by clicking here.

Make sure you don’t miss it, because there is going to be a quite cool demo in the end, showing how to integrate multiple NAV installations on process and transaction level, in two simple real-life scenarios.

NAV Day

The conference will be delivered over four days, each day being dedicated to a single Dynamics product (SL is the only product not being represented at the conference). NAV Day is June 16, and you can check the agenda here: http://decisions.msdynamicsworld.com/product/nav

There are going to be some quite interesting presentations, and four NAV MVPs will be sharing their knowledge and experience with you: Eric Wauters, Jörg Stryk, Rene Gayer, and yours truly.

Networking and meeting your peers, partners or potential prospects in the virtual expo room has always been fun and I’m totally looking forward to meeting you there!

Continue ReadingDecisions Spring 2011 – don’t miss it!

Extending NAV through .NET Interoperability

  • Reading time:2 mins read

imageYesterday I’ve presented in Dynamics Brown Bag Sessions series of webcasts, organized by Microsoft CEE. The topic this time was “Extending NAV through .NET interoperability”, and the session was again attended by many partner companies around the region.

For your convenience, if you haven’t been able to attend the presentation, the whole session has been recorded (it lasts just under 2 hours), and I’ve uploaded it here. You can access the session recording (RAR compressed), and the presentation deck.

As promised, I’m also providing the full source code and setup instructions for the .NET interop demo of intercompany postings, and you can download it here.

For those of you who didn’t have a chance to attend the presentation, the intercompany posting demo is a nice walkthrough of how to consume NAV web services through .NET interop. The demo shows how to call NAV web service to populate a lookup page with data from another database, and how to create and post documents in another database.

I would also like to say a big thank you again to Almut Tadsen, Microsoft Dynamics Evangelist at Microsoft and the organizer of the Brown Bag Session series for giving me this opportunity. I’m looking forward to participating in this initiative again.

If you were there yesterday or have downloaded and watched the webcast offline, why don’t you spare a minute of your time to leave a comment. Did you like the presentation? Was it helpful? Let us all know…

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Mark Brummel visits Microsoft Dynamics Community Adriatics

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Yesterday we had 5th meeting of Microsoft Dynamics Community Adriatics, and it was really special in two ways. For the first time we have had an international guest-presenter, and it was Mark Brummel, who I believe doesn’t require more of a special introduction here on this blog than he required yesterday at the community event.

Still, for those who don’t know him (yet), Mark is the author of a great NAV book, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Application Design, an active blogger, and also one of the few MVPs for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Mark talked yesterday about tips & tricks of NAV 2009 RTC, and even though it was the least favorable time to do a community event (right after Easter holidays, when most of Croatian people are still struggling with the idea of going back to office and doing some actual work), there were participants from almost all Croatian partner companies (and one from Slovenia, which is another specialty of yesterday’s event – we actually justified the title “Adriatics”).

Mark talked for over an hour, and people were not tired, and even though pizza was getting cold, people were still interested in listening to Mark, asking questions and participating in the discussion.

But that’s not it. Right now, as I am writing this blog, Mark is delivering a three-hour workshop about upgrading forms and classic reports to pages and RDLC reports, to a roomful of developers.

Mark, thanks a million for accepting our invitation, and for giving us two days of your valuable time! Your contribution to the community, not only here in Croatia, or Adriatics region (to be fair to Matej, who came from Slovenia), but also to the community in general, is simply huge. Dank je wel!

Continue ReadingMark Brummel visits Microsoft Dynamics Community Adriatics