Multiple companies, one data center - how to publish NAV?

pcgen1

Here is the situation - multiple sister companies, operating autonomously, owned by a single holding company. The plan is to implement Navision at each company, with all servers being hosted at a single data center facility. Being that each company currently has its own domain, Exchange server, etc., what's the best plan for publishing Navision to the users? If you go Citrix or RDP you lose the native integration between NAV, Outlook and the other Office programs. Do you move the exchange servers to the data center? Is the data center a good move or would it be better to have a server at each company? Any comments appreciated.

Thanks

ara3n

hello pcgen1

if you use citrix or RDP you will not loose native integration between nav and excel if you install office on citrix and publish those apps as well.

as far as having the server in datacenter as appose to local server in each company, I would suggest datacenter (providied users have good network access).
It's a lot easier and cheaper to maintain and implement the project.

With separate databases and servers, you'll have to worry about object synch. Maintain multiple sql servers. You would have to have multiple NAV licenses as well and split the number of users.

If the companies are all in US/europe and will have the same requirements, keep them in the same database.

pcgen1

Thanks for the reply. So even if the companies operate completely as separate entities - we should use a single SQL database? This could be as many as 500 users. We have kicked around installing Office on the Citrix servers and installing an Exchange server on the shared domain, but then users will essentially 2 different workspaces - their current desktop environment and the one at the data center. We were also thinking of having the shared mail server configured to forward all incoming mail to the respective users main e-mail address. It just seems like it might confuse some of the lower tech users, but I guess this is what we need to do.

ara3n

if there are that many users, you could split the companies across 5 db 100 users each. Have the db on separate drive (spindles). same applies to log files and temp db db.