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”.