Which license to buy for development?

pauld

Hi all,

Our family business recently purchased NAV 2009.
As our cash resources are limited and I have a software engineering degree I would like to develop as much as I can myself.
The NAV package covers all of our operational software needs but we also have a website that enables customers to place orders
and provides product information.
So here comes the million dollar question: Which licence do I need to develop interaction with our website (with f.e. xml dataports)?
Would a MSDN license suffice? Or is my best alternative to just connect to SQL directly which feels quite risky and not so fun ?
I tried to get this info from the MS website but NAV seems quite different in license structure from what I have seen so far.
I purchased quite some programming books but a pointer in the right direction might save quite some time!

Anyone?

ara3n

I would save money and buy the license that allow you to modify and code in reports.

I suggest to use web services for integration.


This means that you will have limitation on modifying CU and tables, but that's ok you can do all the code in reports and send the report to your Solution center to copy and paste the functions to codeunits.

That way you can publish the code units as web services and have the integration ready all by yourself.



It is very important that you learn the application and how business logic works from front end.
DO NOT Learning the product by reading code.
I suggest to also get some books on accounting and how debits and credits work.

ara3n

With MSDN license you cannot modify any existing objects. I believe the permission are specific to only 10 object in a range. I have to lookup what range it is.

David_Singleton

MSDN has the special 1,234,567,890..1,234,567,899 range ( or something like that), and also allows you to modify a few base objects. But that's not the issue. MSDN (for Navision) is a TRAINING ONLY license, its nothing like every other license in MSDN, so you can not use developed code in MSDN in a production environment. You can develop code with MSDN and then convert to an ISV and create an Add-On.

So in simple terms MSDN is NOT an option.

But as Rashed says, there is no point in going beyond the Report designer. It will take you 18 months to 2 years to be able to effectively develop using tools beyond that anyway, so best is to keep things simple and use you partner.

By the way, its going to be very expensive the way you are thinking, why not save yourself a lot of money and have your partner do the work.

David_Singleton

By the way, you mention a so called "Software Engineering Degree". I have no idea what that is, but I would like to point out that Navision is and ERP system, not a programming language. I do hope it was not sold to you the other way around. :-k

pauld

Hey guys,

Thanks for your friendly and fast replies!
@David: Software engineer.. I believe the international term is bachelor degree in software nowadays.
But I also have a Master in Accountancy so I should be okay with the logic of debit and credit but thanks for the tip!

I do realize in most cases it is better (cheaper) to just hire the partner to do the work for you.
But if I know the amount of work involved I can make a better decision, but like I said money is not unlimited.
Our partner really wants to sell their CMS for this purpose, which would do fine but is bulky and it involves placing 2 new servers :shock: (firewall and webserver).

@ara3n: I will look into the web services! The previous application communicated through a Java Web Services Stack called Metro so perhaps I can tie them together.

I bought Programming Microsoft® Dynamics™ NAV from Mr. David Studebaker and Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 from David Roys and Vjekoslav Babić.
I also bought training classes from our partner to get to know the system.
Any other recommendations?

Thanks again for your input, it is really great such a platform and community support exists for NAV!

ara3n

If you are going to use java, you should wait for 2009 Sp1 to be released, it allows NTLM authenication. 2009 only uses Kerebores authentication.
Also Sp1 has about 1500 objects modified and about 500 bugs fixed. It is being released this quarter. You can still start the implementation, but keep the modification at new object range.
That way there will be less objects to merge when you implement sp1 in a month or two.

Feel free to discuss any question you have about modification/ integration here, and welcome to mibuso.