Developer License Question

ChessExpert

Hi there experts. I am a Microsoft Partner, and I have a client that I am working with.

My client is planning to hire me as an employee.

Can I still use my own developers license to perform some development activities for this company?

Or do I have to stay with contracting?

Your expert advise is much appreciated.

matttrax

How do you have a development license on your own? I thought you had be part of a 2 (well, 3 under the new requirements) member team with everyone having certifications.

In that case, you are leaving that organization and technically should no longer have a partner license.

ChessExpert

Thank you, Matrax. Can my client buy their own developers license? Or is there a way for my client to buy a developers license?

Alex_Chow

Yes, the application builder and the solution developer granule.

kriki

[Topic moved from 'NAV Three Tier' forum to 'NAV/Navision Classic Client' forum]

matttrax

Good luck convincing them to spend $35,000 (or close), though. And $5600 extra on maintenance every year.

themave

matttrax wrote:

Good luck convincing them to spend $35,000 (or close), though. And $5600 extra on maintenance every year.

And the license is not the same as a partner license, it is close, but has a few limitations, there are posted tables it can not access. We are an end user, and looked at getting the license. but by time we paid for it. we could pay our developer to do an awful lot of programming for 35,000. It is really tough to justify the license. Unlesss you are going to stop support and do it yourself. That way you could save on the annual maintenance. But then you would not be able to upgrade either. Which might not be a bad thing. there are a lot of installations that never do upgrade. This forum has a whole section devoted to Nav <2.5.

David_Singleton

matttrax wrote:

Good luck convincing them to spend $35,000 (or close), though. And $5600 extra on maintenance every year.

Different companies buy the developers for different reasons. And sometimes it makes good sense. IN my experience most clients that purchase the Solution developer went too far and only really needed the Application Builder, and then on the rare occasions they needed to modify locked tables they could have gotten their partner to do it. Its not so much the cost of the granule, its the fact that once you have Solution Developer there is a tendency to go too deep and change too much and cause damage that would not have happened if the partner was involved.

I have one client that is a semi-regular poster on mibuso. Their company decided to drop support (on 3.70) and purchased everything up to Solution Developer and have done all their own customizations for many years. Maybe if he reads this he will post his comments and experiences.

Somewhat off topic, I had another client that purchased all the developers, in fact they purchased everything, as in EVERY granule (before Business Ready, so granule by granule. And they had 60 user licenses. And they purchased the license 2 years before going live. Oddly when I arrived, (18 months into the project) no code had yet been written, the client didn't even have a test system installed, (the IT manager downloaded Cronus from MiBuSo so he could try it out), they had no programmers, and they only had 20 users that were going to work on Navision. All that had started was business analysis ... for 18 months.

Clearly this was just a case of the partner trying to bump up license revenue. And quite obviously the client had not done due diligence.