Navision or Great Plains?

etherboy

Hello everyone:

Does anyone has experience with Navision and GreatPlains? We are an Apparel importer & distributor and are looking for a solution for our in-house DOS program.

I have looked at the Navision and it's great. However, i'm also looking for an integrated EDI function and the demonstrator said it's a licenced code so he is not leaving a demo software at our site, the other concern is that Navision is using CIDE language and might take some time to learn. But its advantage is that it's easy to customize its data structure, forms and reports.

Has anyone here used GreatPlains or compared Navision to it before? It's based on VB so maybe we can pick it up more easily. But is it easy to customize and create reports like navision? And how is it's EDI capability? Any reply will be highly appreciated.

Regards,

Eric

jCarter

greetings, i develope for both the great plains dyanmics/eenterprise accounting packages and for navision financials....

as for developing...great plains has a proprietary language just as navision does..for great plains its called dexterity...while they do have some builtin functionality for VB it is very limited in what you can do...for fully custimizing and creating objects you would need to use dexterity

hope that helps .... btw i personally prefer developing for great plains over navision due to the fact that navision limits the developer on routines made available while dexterity leaves more to the programmer...kinda like vb as compared to c

John_Tegelaar

Ho, ho, that's a bit too quick judging. It's true that C/AL is not an "all purpose" programming language, but it is quite good for its task - making changes in the Navision structure and code to tailor the system to the customer's needs. For those who want to do far more versatile programming, there is also C/FRONT available.

C/SIDE, by the way, is the name of the own Navision database management system, not the programming environment. But you can run Navision on SQL Server as well, if that suits you better.

I would not look too much at the EDI functionality. First, Navision can be extended fairly easy to have EDI data exchange for the protocols you use, but -more importantly- the future is not EDI but data exchange by means of the widely supported XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language, see www.xbrl.org), or XML based scheme's as used by BizTalk (see www.biztalk.org).

John

alpap

Hi,

Have had extensive experiance of Navision and Great Plains. But have an integrated EDI solution in Navision previously developed, with full compatibility for Edifact and Tradacomms standards for most VANS.

If you want more info get in touch.

Regards

AP

MuzzyDawg

Actually, I would look at the NavisionDamgaard Commerce Gateway offering. This product is built on Microsoft's BizTalk server. The best way to describe how BizTalk works is to think of it as a universal translator. The purpose of this server is to send documents automatically between various systems via XML.

Yes, this is a new initiative by Microsoft and Great Plains and NavisionDamgaard are both on the development teams. Microsoft has been demonstrating this product for the past year and in fact has been demoing the BizTalk server by utilizing the NavisionDamgaard Commerce Gateway at all of it's Microsoft Fusion 2000 events. The demo shows Commerce Gateway sending transactions back and forth with an SAP system in Redmond, CA (Microsoft's home base) and another facility using Navision in Denmark.

What this offering does is make EDI utilization cheaper and easier to utilize and in fact allows users to select software products on a best of breed basis.

Very impressive!