Completely new to Navision.

tekati

I am a new IT Director for a company who is still using Navision 3.60. I am completely new to Navision and am looking to A) Get some questions answered possibly looking for a consultant or firm to help get things going with the Navision we currently have. And possibly upgrade to a newer version either now or when the new version that should be coming out sooner or later arrives.

1. We are using the Navision Proprietary DB currently. We recently had some corruption occur and paid a nameless company a lot of money to repair the DB. This was before my time. My real question here is this can we move our DB over to MS SQL where I can replicate the DATA to multiple places. We have had the same company make modifications to Navision to support our needs and I would need to know if those changes would automatically work changing over to MS SQL.

2. We are needing a lot of changes made to Navision to support our needs here. It is my understanding that we either own the license to make changes to the reports only (May not need license again I am new and do not know) I heard that we need to purchase a license to make modifications to ALL of navision. If so is this true and where and how much does that cost.

3. Like I mentioned in 2 lots of changes need to be done. I have a strong programming background in many languages and would like to take on this project given I would have a learning curve.

4. Most importantly. We are a seasonal company and our production starts early next month. We have some immediate change needs that we need done ASAP. So I would either be willing to have someone help me understand what I need to do or possibly contract out some work to meet our goals.

Again I just started with this company and have been thrown right in to the mix of a lot of things and unfortunately time is of the essence here.

ara3n

hello tekati
Welcome to mibuso.

1. Yes you can move to sql. yes you modification will work in sql as well. One of the issue from moving to sql is the date field. SQL can go only to 1753 or something and navision date can go to 0 when Jesus was born. There is routine that will need to run to find those dates. A simple way to find out if you have this problem is that to do a backup. Create a new db with navision client on sql. and restore the back on sql. Navision has two separate clients for each version fin.exe is for native db. finsql.exe is for sql.

2. There is a license. fin.flf that is stored at the server folder. This is the license navision uses to see what you can and cannot do in navision. The license file has graduals for specific things. Like only be able to modify the reports, or forms.
If you want to modify all the objects, you need to purchase application designer which is 8K. Somebody can correct me on the exact value.

3. I would read the pdf documents in the installation cd in DOC folder. This will give enough info on how navision works. If you need additional help instead of contacting your solution centers, there are freelancer consultants that can help you. I'm sure they will post in here. I've been working with two other Nurseries in the east cost and I know how busy it gets during their busy season.


So if you have additional questions, ask them away and we will try and help you out.

David_Singleton

Hi tekati,

I would say that ar3an has given you a great start here. So let me add to that.

1/ Yes the code will work out of the box, but 3.60 did not have a lot of the newer features available for SQL, so your partner may have been forced to write backward compatible code that is not optimized for performance. This is not their fault, simply those tools didn't exist back then. If you move to SQL, make sure to use either NAV 4.0SP3 or NAV 5.0 executables. Not 3.60.

Bad news about the corrupt database. That happens very rarely, but when it does its a huge job to repair, normally the corruption is due to network errors, so you may want to take a close look at your network so that it doesn't happen before you get onto SQL. The normal issue is a bad hub or IP printer on the net. The good news though is that NAV on SQL is not susceptible to these errors the same as the Native server.

2. This depends on the size of your system and the number of changes. Just to clarify, there are two code developer licenses, there is a good article on The Dynamics WIKI that explains this : End User NAV developer license The application builder that ar3an mentions is probably enough for you.

3/4. My recommendation would be to buy the Application Builder license and pull in a contractor for 2 months. During that time you would be working closely with them, and would a/ get all your development done, and b/ get free training on NAV development in a real world environment, that would be better than any classes would give you.

I would offer my services at this point but right now I am very busy, and there is no way I could give you the number of days that you need to hit your time frame. There are a couple of other members on this site that I would recommend though.

PS just one other thing. You never actually aid it, but reading through the lines, I sort of feel that you may be considering changing Partners. I have done a lot of work transitioning Users from one partner to another, and I really can say I do not advise it. Generally if you can get development tools and skills in house then staying with your current partner really is the best option. They know your history, and the cost to retrain a new partner is more expensive than the cost to develop internal support.

I project manage for a lot of companies that maintain their systems internally in conjunction with their partner, and it really does work.

I hope this helps a bit. This looks like a very exciting project (wish I had the time) and I think you will get a good result.