Navision Financials on Apple PC's

Luc_VanDyck

We have a prospect that bought 40 Apple computers last year. What are the options to run Navision Financials on that type of computers?

Citrix is expensive. How about Windows emulation (hardware or software)? What are the experiences?

horrigan

Citrix is expensive--- but not as expensive as Navision, and not as expensive as the cost of the data which goes into Navision.

I have not tried this myself, but I hear that it is possible to run the Navision client under a Windows emulator. I also hear that Navision tried to use "plain-vanilla" Windows whenever possible, so it would run under as wide a range of Windows environments as possible. Running Navision on the Mac is NOT officially supported, and as far as I know, it has not been officially tested.

There are several products like PCAnywhere which you can use to dial into a Windows box from a Mac--- but they are slow and (like Windows emulators) not officially supported.

If you just need a subset of Navision on the Mac workstations, you could build a web page for your intranet, using WebShop or one of several third-party products.

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Tim Horrigan, NCSD
<Horrigan@AOL.com>

Currently in search of new employment!

Certified as a Solution Developer and an HR/Payroll Specialist!

cbradney

Hi Luc
We have a few customers that run Apples (Apple resellers, actually, as well as other Mac users). They all run Citrix Metaframe on NT4 or 2000. Running the Citrix client on a Mac gives you most of the functionality of the normal Navision client, although if you need to get Navision to pop cash drawers or similar it might be a bit interesting (specifically in the case of mapping Citrix serial ports to Mac ports). I think with the newer Citrix and new 6.x client it should be easier though. We did get some Point of Sale going and Im sure if needed itd be much easier these days with 6.x client.

Numbers of Mac users from all our Mac using clients across the country over Citrix combined would be about 350, with 150 concurrently on one system being the daily average, 40 on another, the rest.. who knows as they have PC/Mac combined environments. Suffice to say, we have Mac only (apart from the Citrix servers) installations that run perfectly well. Concurrent user numbers are just a realm of the standard Citrix implementation though.

Emulation such as SoftPC on recent Powerbooks can be very slow, even just to run the Cronus database from the local hard drive, I am not sure about SoftPCs abilities to connect through to a non virtual network (if VMWare can do it SoftPC can do it).. Im sure hardware emulation such as a PC on a PCI card would be much better as there wouldnt be any instruction interpretation required.

I think if it were my choice - I'd go with Citrix - you can run all 40 users very easily off a dual processor Intel box, and while the Citrix client licences are expensive its a set and forget issue. By that, I mean get it running once and it works in the Citrix window no matter what the client or where you are. If you look at emulation issues then when the client upgrades their Mac they might need a new version of the emulation, or the MacOS 9.x patch or 10.x new release might not support the emulator etc etc. (btw apparently 10.0 is quite slow). Who knows what Navision version will not work in the emulator too - although Im tempted to guess all would at the moment including 3.x. Think also of the most recently released offerings from Navision and how the clients would connect to those if they were purchased. Emulation with User Portals? interesting.. Commerce Gateway? etc etc

Of course, there are other thin client solutions such as Tarantella etc..

My 0.02c.. perhaps 0.03c worth...

Craig

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Craig Bradney
Technical Manager
Deloitte Navision Solutions & Services
Australia
Tel:+61-2-93227796
craig_bradney@deloitte.com.au