Dynamics

Microsoft Dynamics Mayhem

  • Reading time:1 min read

If you thought “here he comes again” with the bugs and stuff, no – this is not about it. This is just about a new sales campaign launched by PACKT Publishing, the good guys who published my and Dave’s book three years ago, and plenty other good books thereafter, as well.

So, if you haven’t purchased my book yet, or any other cool Dynamics book, now is the time: during February, PACKT is giving 10% to 30% percent discount on all of its Dynamics books and offerings. Printed books are 20% off, e-books are 30% off, so this might be a good time to support us poor guys who have to make a living from literary efforts Smile

Find more about the offer here http://www.packtpub.com/news/microsoft-dynamics-mayhem.

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Decisions Spring 2011 – don’t miss it!

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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!

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Was it necessary to kill the Classic client?

  • Reading time:4 mins read

dinosaurAbsolutely.

The world needs to move ahead. The technology advances. Who doesn’t want to keep up with the progress, stays behind. That’s how it has worked since the dawn of civilization.

I can’t know the exact reasons why Microsoft has decided to stop support for the Classic client with NAV “7”, but I can offer my view and position on why I believe this was absolutely necessary.

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Adriatics Community Launched

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Thanks you all, who participated in yesterday’s Microsoft Dynamics Community Adriatics launch event in Zagreb. I’m sorry that Live Meeting equipment could not be set-up in the Microsoft’s big conference room, but I was promised that in the future maybe something could be done. I hope it doesn’t mean moving to a smaller room where the equipment is already installed, because I prefer more in-person audience. In any case, I would like repeating this launch in the region, and I’ll use this blog to let you know about it.

In my opinion, the launch was a success, there were more participants than I expected, and definitely more than registered.

[Post was updated on October 8th, to include more links and downloads]

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Two more Microsoft Dynamics NAV books

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twomorebooksAs reported by Marq, two more Microsoft Dynamics NAV books have been published by PACKT this week: Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 SP1 Programming Cookbook by Matt Traxinger and Microsoft Dynamics NAV Administration by Amit Sachdev and Sharan Oberoi. With Vincent’s and Chandru’s Sure Step book announced yesterday, this makes for three Microsoft Dynamics books in a single week. Three books a week, not a bad score. Congratulations guys!

I’m now going to pre-order my copies, and you should do the same. As Marq says, buy the books, enjoy the knowledge!

Last week, there were three Dynamics communities announced. This week, three books are announced. Do you see a trend here, or is it only me? What’s going to happen next week? I don’t even dare thinking…

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Adriatics Dynamics Community

  • Reading time:3 mins read

mbscommzgIt’s the second “me too” today. Waldo has started the day with announcing the new season of the Belgian Dynamics Community, which was me-too-ed by Marq announcing the Dutch Dynamics Community. It’s my turn now to me-too the announcement of the Adriatics Dynamics Community. Three community announcements in a day—now that’s something!

I call this community Adriatics, because it won’t be limited only to Croatia—the idea is to spread it to other neighboring countries: Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia. We kick it off in Zagreb on October 4th, with the theme of upcoming localization of NAV 2009 SP1 and Sure Step 2010.

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Sure Step in action: business process change

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Service Providers (or colloquially partners) often refrain from undertaking organization or process changes during implementation projects of Microsoft Dynamics solutions. And it comes as no surprise: there are many risks related to it, and customizations are taken as a more traditional approach.

Customizations are easy to predict, they do come at risk, but at least the risks are known and often easily managed entirely within service provider’s organization and reach, while organizational change is unpredictable, and often exceeds consultants’ knowledge, experience and expertise.

However, with or without intention or consent, organizational change will always happen. No solution has ever been 100% fit, and since the customer must do their business with the solution, the remainder from fit to 100% will always and without exception be satisfied with an unmanaged, unintentional, but evolutionary process change.

Instead of leaving it all to chance, Sure Step offers much better ways.

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Cloud computing – what is it anyway?

  • Reading time:3 mins read

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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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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Microsoft Dynamics for Manufacturing – differences between various Dynamics flavors

  • Reading time:4 mins read

image Houston Neal from Software Advice recently wrote a nice and a very detailed article on the Differences Between Microsoft Dynamics products. It’s an interesting article and gives a good overview of where different Microsoft Dynamics products stand, and overall I recommend you to read it, even though personally I don’t agree with everything in there.

I like good argument, but I don’t like disagreeing just for the sake of it, and this was one of those articles that I would prefer disagreeing in private. But Houston was so persistent in me expressing my opinion on his article here on my blog, that I just decided to speak up.

After all, everyone is entitled to my opinion 😉

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