Technology

Top 12 Microsoft Dynamics NAV features to defeat recession

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imageThere are three kinds of people: those who watch things happen, those who make things happen, and those who wonder what happened.

The world is in crisis. Some countries are hit harder than the others, some markets have sunk deeper than the others, but the effects of global economic recession are obvious, and if the crisis didn’t hit you yet, fasten your seatbelt—it surely will.

With the whole world wondering what’s going on, the winners will be those who learn to navigate the troubled waters and make things happen. This is much easier with a piece of good business management software, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

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Cookbook user experience, anyone?

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image I’ll never forget my first NAV project. I was helping a customer migrate data from their old COBOL-based application, and was spending most of my time with a mid-aged lady who at first fascinated me with her mastery of their old application.

That was until I found out she actually had no clue whatsoever about what she was really doing.

What I perceived as her masterful dexterity with a character-based user interface of a DOS application, in fact was total cluelessness about both her business and her software.

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Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009

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Where I have been for the past eight months…

image This blog started enthusiastically, I had as many as 14 posts per month. Taking into account that blogging was only a hobby, I blogged like crazy. Then I went silent.

No, I wasn’t tired from blogging, I didn’t experience a writer’s block, quite the contrary! I was working on a project. A top secret one. Now it has been done, and here are the results:  a book called Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009.

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What does a Microsoft Dynamics consultant do?

  • Reading time:4 mins read

image I wonder what people do with Google (or any other search engine for that matter) results past page two, or three. Or ten.

The other day a visitor came to this blog by googling this question: What does a Microsoft Dynamics consultant do? Two things I don’t understand: first, how far in the search results did they have to go—my blog most certainly didn’t land on first ten pages; and second, did they find here on my blog what they were looking for?

I decided to improve both.

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Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Is Here

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!!! Check out my book Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 !!!

The long awaited Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 has been released for download earlier this week, and has just been publicly announced at Convergence 2008 Copenhagen. If you have PartnerSource access, you can download Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 here.

This one is the most important release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV ever, as it brings a completely new architecture, a shiny new user interface, web-services enablement and much more.

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Featuritis Cure

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Don’t you just love when users come up with new feature ideas at a microprocessor clock rate. Even before you finish developing one, five new requests pop up. This is a disease, and it’s called featuritis!

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Read My Lips: Why?

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Recently, a reader, commenting on my last post about Sure Step, pointed me to an article by Karl E. Wiegers
“Read My Lips: No New Models!” I initially responded to the comment, but I figure the comments aren’t read as often as posts, so I decided to blog it.

It’s doubly funny that the reader is using Dr. Wiegers to devalue and dismiss Sure Step: firstly, the article has really nothing to do with implementation methodologies at all, and secondly, when I delivered Sure Step training at WinDays pre-conf earlier this year, I gave to each attendant a copy of Karl E. Wiegers’s latest book “Practical Project Initiation”—at the time it was the best book available that matched both the message of my training and the point of Sure Step as a methodology.

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A case for Sure Step: how Sure Step brings project success

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Methodology is a tough topic. There are good methodologies, there are bad methodologies, there are good methodologies gone bad. Methodology is not a silver bullet, it won’t just make any problems disappear, and is hardly ever the single source of success or failure. But a methodology can be a major contributor to success. I could put it this way: you stand much better chances of success if you apply a methodology, then if you don’t. With something as critical as an implementation of business software, methodology is a key success factor. According to Jim Johnson of Standish Group, it’s number nine on their ten identified most important success factors.

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NeverENDing story

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Hint: this is a post for developers, and mostly junior developers, those who are still learning how to code properly. I know, I promised not to blog about stuff like this, but I simply couldn’t help this time.

A friend of mine has asked me for help.

“There is this C/AL function I had to rewrite, now I end up with 106 BEGINs, and only 105 ENDs. Do you have any idea how to find where this missing END belongs?”

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