what is the experience of your customers using NAV 2009 SP1

activ8

Hello,

I know it's not a technical qeustion...
What is the experience of your customers using NAV 2009 SP1 RTC ?
Especially the one using a previous version of navision in the past ?
Speed, usability, UI ?

Marije_Brummel

I have two customers running on the RTC, both are happy.

UI and usabilty are very good. People enjoy working with it.
Speed is ok.

One of the customers is a new customer who don't know the old UI. The other customer has one department who works with the old UI. They decided to implement new departments with the new UI. Reason: usability.

einsTeIn.NET

It's very hard for users who know the old UI to switch to the new one. If you're going to switch to RTC from a users point of view it will be more like a new implementation than "just" an update to an old implementation. And of course some users get on with it better than others.

activ8

I was told that when opening an order page (or other document page) it can have a delay of more then 2 seconds ...
After that you see the page building up.
If you push a drop down button it can last even longer.
Is this true, or is this because of bad server hardware or configuration ?

Marije_Brummel

The RTC has a object caching issue. The first time you run an object the service tier needs to cache it for a user.

Once the object is cached it will be fast.

Known issue that hopefully will be solved in V7.

djswim

I'm not an end-user, but I've been working with NAV since 2.x, and the changing of the shortcut keys is my biggest gripe, but I've only been working with RTC for 2 weeks and I'm already starting to catch on.

The speed issues are a little cumbersome, but I'm also using a VPC on a not-very-powerful machine, so that could be part of the issue as well.

Pages instead of forms don't seem to be that big a hassle, but I haven't had to do much customizing yet.

I've been told that most of what I know about report writing is useless now, but I haven't had to do that yet, so I don't know how far behind I really am.

The biggest development thing is having to log into classic to make changes and then into RTC to see them... I could definitely do without that.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it, but they certainly aren't going to run out of improvements they need to make any time soon

Alex_Chow

djswim wrote:

I've been told that most of what I know about report writing is useless now, but I haven't had to do that yet, so I don't know how far behind I really am.

That's not true.

Only what you know about how to change the layout is useless. Everything else is the same.

djswim

Alex Chow wrote:

djswim wrote:

I've been told that most of what I know about report writing is useless now, but I haven't had to do that yet, so I don't know how far behind I really am.

That's not true.

Only what you know about how to change the layout is useless. Everything else is the same.

Well you just made my day then

Marije_Brummel

I'll make it better.

I've designed some pretty nice RDLC reports now, and I must admit that when I go to a Classic Client report I "miss" the options in RDLC and find making visual changes such as fonts/sizes/visibility and draging controls around much easier in RDLC than in the classic client.

Then again, working with headers and footers in RDLC requires some skills.

djswim

Actually, it REALLY makes my day because the layout stuff was always the most tedious, so any change is probably a good one.

As for headers and footers, I'm somewhere between junior and mid level developer so if there is too much of that I was going to have to get help anyway

Alex_Chow

Mark Brummel wrote:

I've designed some pretty nice RDLC reports now,

Define "nice".

Are you talking about list type reports? Or document type reports?

List type reports are simple enough to make. I haven't see a nice looking document type report using the RDLC yet.

activ8

Another question, is it possible to print classic reports to pdf ?
If not what's the solution then ?

einsTeIn.NET

Take a look at this topic http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=37848 and this blog http://www.dynamicsblog.at/index.php/2009/01/13/nav2009-use-saveaspdf-in-classic-client.

activ8

einsTeIn.NET wrote:

Take a look at this topic http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=37848 and this blog http://www.dynamicsblog.at/index.php/2009/01/13/nav2009-use-saveaspdf-in-classic-client.

Where are the days when you didn't have to do 10 work-arounds to make it work like it should?

einsTeIn.NET

I don't like it too. Especially the second one is a very strange workaround.
So, I searched for a pdf printer that can be controlled by control characters. This was much better than these workarounds, although you have to modify all NAV reports that should be printed as pdf. But because of some additional features like stationaries, watermarks, document merge, etc. this was really a benefit.

activ8

Much easier solution for printing pdf on RTC using classic reports:

Use BullZip in combination with windows filesystem automation.
Then you can use CREATE(windowFileSystemautomation,true,true) instead of using the EXISTS and ERASE functions of NAV because these will only work on the server and can not check if a file is created on the RTC computer.

You don't have to modify any report and you can print to pdf without the webservice workaround. :whistle: