Add-on holding up my upgrade!

tedcjohnston

I'm trying to get from 4 to 2009 but can't due to Lanham not releasing their credit card code in 2009. Does ANYONE have an in with Lanham that can get this done? We were told in November that all their add-ons would be ready for the release (November 08). EShip was not released until March, and we are still waiting to get their Credit Card add-on.

EDIT- I should not have posted a rant here- sorry.

Alex_Chow

tedcjohnston wrote:

Be forewarned if considering Lanham add-ons. You may be seriously held back in your upgrade time line.

That's not really a fair statement for Lanham specifically.

You should hold up on upgrade if you have ANY add-on, or until it's actually released by the company that made the addon.

David_Singleton

I agree with Alex's comments, and in addition would like to add...

As much as 2009 is a great product, and I think for new clients its probably a great starter product, I really would recommend that you wait for Service Pack 1 if you are upgrading. If you don't then you are going to really regret it a week after SP1 is released, and you realize all the stuff in it that you need, and the additional cost its going to add to your project.

I know you really don't want to hear this, and I would agree with you that the delay's from Microsoft are extremely unfair, especially for people that have been paying support for 3 years in anticipation of this new product. You have waited a long time to move from 4xx, so it is probably better to wait just a few more months for the new product.

themave

David Singleton wrote:

I agree with Alex's comments, and in addition would like to add...

As much as 2009 is a great product, and I think for new clients its probably a great starter product, I really would recommend that you wait for Service Pack 1 if you are upgrading. If you don't then you are going to really regret it a week after SP1 is released, and you realize all the stuff in it that you need, and the additional cost its going to add to your project.

I know you really don't want to hear this, and I would agree with you that the delay's from Microsoft are extremely unfair, especially for people that have been paying support for 3 years in anticipation of this new product. You have waited a long time to move from 4xx, so it is probably better to wait just a few more months for the new product.

But then will you have to wait longer for Landham to release a compatible SP1 for there add-on's Just wondering, were does it ever end.

Alex_Chow

NAV2009 has a new development environment, so it takes longer than usual. Usually, companies that makes addons are pretty quick about releasing their product after MSFT's product launch.

generic

I would have to disagree with you on addons. Most addons, it takes months for them to release their solution even though they get their hands on the new version of NAV months before it is released.
What's funny is that Lanham was actually part of TAP program, and there are customer that are using 2009 version of E-Ship. My guess, they are running into many technical issues, and so they don't want to release the software because it won't work.

Lanham Credit card uses I believe IciVerify and I wouldn't touch IciVerify with a 10 foot pole. That software is integrated through a file based integration that fails constantly. Iciverify has build a virtual modem in Java and that's how it communicates with credit card authorization. It constantly fails, and you have to reboot the pc for it to work.

David_Singleton

themave wrote:

But then will you have to wait longer for Landham to release a compatible SP1 for there add-on's Just wondering, were does it ever end.

Not really. I think that the big issue is the technology jump of making add-ons work with the RTC. Once that is done, moving to SP1 should be quite trivial since it will just be a code update. Its quite a job to get some add-ons to work in this new environment, lots of experimenting and testing, but of course once that is all done the next one is easy.

themave

David Singleton wrote:

themave wrote:

But then will you have to wait longer for Landham to release a compatible SP1 for there add-on's Just wondering, were does it ever end.

Not really. I think that the big issue is the technology jump of making add-ons work with the RTC. Once that is done, moving to SP1 should be quite trivial since it will just be a code update. Its quite a job to get some add-ons to work in this new environment, lots of experimenting and testing, but of course once that is all done the next one is easy.

Not sure which add-on's you work with, but there has had delays for every single upgrade, going back to:

2.0 - 2.6 - the line was it is a major upgrade.
2.6 - 3.1 - the structures have changed, bla bla bla
3.1 - 3.7 - bla bla bla
3.7 - 4.0 - bla bla bla
4.0 to 4.0 SP1, SP2 SP3, the same thing

In fact the delays and problems with add-on's actually discouraged us from upgrading, we skipped 2.6, 3.1, 3.7, and waited all the way to 4.0. Of course we also had to skip the 4.0 SP1, SP2 and SP3 , instead we had to pay our developers to downgrade the bug fixes, since the cost of actually appling the whole service pack was cost prohibitive

generic

It's one of the major issues with vertical or addons. Once you've purchased it, you are stuck with the solution and will be at their mercy of that vertical solution.
The other issue is that there is no information as to how much testing and quality of code has been done.
Also when addons upgrade their version to Nav version, very little testing is done.

For example LS Retail released 4.0 sp2 version of their database. First of all it was late for months, and when we finally got it we couldn't post a single transaction. There was a key changed in ILE and LS Retail was using the old key.
So obviously they didn't test at all. The quality of the code speaks for itself if you look at the LS code.

I would be very careful of solution that effect inventory/serial/lot. NAV has bugs in these area and they are constantly fixing them. When you add a vertical solution that modifies these areas, you will be in a world of trouble when you start running into issues.

MS NAV should implement the missing on inventory features and do not rely on ISV in regards to inventory.

Another issue with Lanham is that they've combined E-ship and EDI into one product, so if you purchase E-ship you get hundreds of objects from EDI that you may never use.

davmac1

The complexity of the upgrade and the changes it requires to standard NAV code are the key.

Our add-ons are relatively straight forward and come out on time.

Eship is addressing a major area of functionality that probably should be in the base product.
Microsoft should take some of the money it is throwing around and use it buy key ISV products and bundle them into the base product.

I was amazed that Microsoft was willing to pay 44 to 47 billion dollars for yahoo. For a tiny fraction of that they could buy every broad-based ISV product out there and integrate them into their ERP systems.

generic

Some of the addons are in certain shape that will require them to be rewritten in order to be usable for base product.

For example MS bought warehouse management from Lanham, it took 3 or 4 version and in several areas a complete rewrite to make it a usable product.

DenSter

generic wrote:

it took 3 or 4 version and in several areas a complete rewrite to make it a usable product.

I don't think you can make that claim. Just because they took the product and modified the design, does not mean that it was not a usable product. Maybe it took them 3 to 4 versions to finally figure out what they wanted to do.

SimonW

I think Lanham are not alone in wanting to wait for NAV 2009 SP1 to be released before they release their next version.

tedcjohnston

While I agree with some of the posts, I must stand up for Lanham's CC add-on and explain my rush.

The add-on does use ICV however, since version 3.19 of Lanham and the current version of IC Verify, we have had very few problems. I haven't had to reboot the server running the software for months. We have 4 locations in three states pushing over 5K transactions last month. I think one failed to retrieve the answer from ICV. It works.

As to the rush, we are rebuilding our web site on a new platform. Need to tie it into NAV. Want to use Web Services to do this. Plan to roll out 2009 in classic client and use the Server service to just handle web service requests from the web site. The business perception is that the new site will increase our web revenue by a significant amount (very important in this market) thus the priority.

As this started as a rant :oops: , thus should not have started, I'll leave it here. We like the add-ons supplied by Lanham.

davmac1

You might look at the web writing to staging tables and use the job queue to process incoming and outgoing requests.

A combination of NAS with XML and SQL views also works well if you need instantaneous responses.