It seems like yesterday that I was posting about this last time, but time does run fast. And so do technology and innovation. Decisions virtual conference is here again, this time in its Fall 2010 edition, bringing a lot of fantastic content split into four separate tracks (AX, GP, NAV and CRM) delivered over four days, starting with November 1. For me, and I believe you too, the most important day is the NAV day, which will be delivered on November 3.
We old dogs really have to learn new tricks with RTC (RoleTailored Client), as I found out couple of days ago. A customer of mine asked me for a quick report. I don’t typically do reports, but I thought—“not a big deal, it’s just a report”—so I fixed it, tested it, made sure it worked, then deployed it to production.
And then I found out it was not just a report.
It just didn’t want to execute in production. Whatever I did I just got a strange error message, something I never saw before. Ever.
While designing a custom functionality for a customer, there was an issue with posting groups: the way the custom functionality was designed would result in value entries being always posted to a single posting group, resulting in inventory balances always going to the same inventory account.
When I brought this issue to my customer’s attention, they said: “but we only have one single inventory account, and we only use one single posting group, so we don’t need this functionality to be smart about this”.
This was an example of what I like to call setup-dependent requirements.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV comes packed with a set of predefined roles for many tasks such as editing or posting journals, creating sales orders, editing fixed assets, etc. It also comes packed with a SUPER role, which can do just about anything it wants.
There are two problems with the SUPER role. They are kind of pretty much entangled together.
The first one is—SUPER can do just about anything it wants (um, did I say that already?). The second one is—there are far more super users out in the wild than there should be. Is this your experience, too?
So I would guess that was it. I’m just returning to Kristiansand, my Norwegian base, after delivering the “Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Development Best Practices” course to a partner, my first custom-developed training ever. My impression is—mission accomplished.
I was not sure at first how this would turn out. Teaching NAV best practices to people some of whom have more experience than I’ll have any time soon, isn’t an easy thing. The challenge for me was—how to deliver something new, really valuable to those people, something they could go home with saying “wow, if only I knew this earlier”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!