Upgrading to 2013 - One end users personal Dilemas

Mauddib

Hi all. I hope no one minds this "thinking out loud" type post as a deviation from the technical based posts that normally populate the forum. I see there are 100+ pages of topics for me to read through here in this section of the forum and intend to do my best but I thought maybe if I articulate myself here first perhaps some good advice, experiences, personal and otherwise might pop out that will be of use to me.

My background is I entirely self trained in Nav 3.6 in a company in Ireland and then moved to a large Nav re-seller in the UK with Ireland based offices (easy for people in the know to guess which one) and got great experience and training there working with great people.... but then for personal reasons had to move to Germany.

There I ended up in something I can only describe as a hybrid between being an end user and a solution center. But for most utility I think best to think of it as an end user only. They were on a 3.6 Native Database here and since my arrival we have upgraded to Nav 5.0 (3.6) Running on Win 2003 / SQL Server 2005 which is where we are at now. Sitting on a 350GB database with 30+ companies in it and 250ish licensed sessions.

Having just been at Nav Tech Days therefore (you guys were all great, lovely to meet someone of you, Luc you are a god, well done all concerned. Made me proud to be a paid up Mibuso.com supporter(EDIT: I just realised having posted this that that is actually expired!!! Going to renew right now!!)) it was my first real experience with Three Tier and 2013 and so forth. I drooled over the new reports, the Query Objects, oData, XML and PDF support, pages, web services and much more. I had a lot of fun seeing it all.

Now however my dilemma is I realize the longer I stay in an End User scenario the more the current Nav technology is getting ahead of me and the less employable I will become. I therefore have two options. Return to the world of the re-seller and start looking for a new job and hopefully get in a good company (or maybe return to my old one if they will have me ).... or convince my own company to upgrade to 2013 and see how much I can self train and start to look for what training is out there in the world too.

Which is where you guys come in. What have been your experiences convincing people to upgrade to 2013. What arguments and plus points did you adumbrate to them to convince them. What were the negative points you had to come clean about in terms of the upgrade pathway or other issues with the newer versions. What are your experiences out there of being on older versions and watching the technology get ahead of you and your experience and CV becoming outdated. Is my situation unique or are lots of you feeling the same things. How would you all go about it if you were me.... get a new job or convince your company to upgrade.

Basically any and all advice, anecdotes and stories you have I would love to read. Links to blogs you wrote about same. And so forth. And any good hints and tips on the pros and cons I can promote to my IT CEO to sell the idea of an upgrade to him appreciated too. Right now I guess I am feeling rather lost and confused and the worst part is that while my CV of Nav experience becomes more and more outdated, I actually love working in the company I am in now and hate the idea I may be compelled to leave it to ensure my continued employability and usefulness in the NAV world.

Alex_Chow

From my experience, there are no features in the world that will convince a company to want to upgrade.

A company will only consider an upgrade once there's a business requirement that only the new version offers.

If the business requirement is mandatory for the survival of the company, then the upgrade is as good as approved.

Mauddib

Indeed but some of the features I know about would be requirements. Out database is quite large and performance has been an issue for us. I have had wonderful experience teaking it, reducing dead locks, optimising code and much more. I have provided some often startling performance increases. But I can not fire fight that issue forever and there are some great performance optimisations in 2013.

Unicode support is getting more important for us too as we have started getting customers in places like Romania. XML related stuff is important too as our current business model has us interfacing with external systems over XML a LOT. For example Navision periodically polls our webshops for new orders and customers and so forth and there are many external web services we use to provide added functionality. We have also had hell with PDFs so PDF support would be great. And we export a LOT of data to external customer systems too so oData and XML would be important there.

On top of all that, our system is so heavily customised that getting developers trained and up to speed takes a very long time. It was one hell of a learning curve. So we can add in the risk of losing me as their main developer if I feel the need to go back to a reseller environment or other 2013 environment.

The list goes on, but there certainly is enough requirements there for me to make a start. I am curious what other selling points 2013 has that I can sell it on.

I also am keen to hear if anyone else feels like I do, that their current role whatever it might be is one where Nav technology is continuing without them and this worries them.

I would love to hear upgrade stories of any type too, especially if anyone upgraded or is upgrading from a 5(3.6) system.

Marije_Brummel

I've done tons of upgrades and usually there are two reasons.

1. The customer is to far behind in version history and support is a concern.

2. The companies policy is to be on the current version.

Functionality that a customer needs is usually already there, as a vertical solution or customised.

If microsoft releases functionality that has been developed as customisation that actually makes an upgrade more difficult. Off-course, this is only this one, upgrade.

Reasons that might help you are the webclient and dotnet interop and webservices. The latter really makes interfacing much easier, and interfacing is the future of erp.

Mauddib

Thanks Mark. You are always the first to weight in with help when I need it, especially back when I was starting out with deadlocks and optimisation. I knew you would be one of the first to weight in here too

Our database is heavily customised too. I imagine this will make upgrading more than a small chore. Especially with the loss of forms and the new reports and so forth. It will be a hard sell to try and get my company to accept such a complex upgrade path but I would at least like to try before I throw in the towel and worry about job hunting. Any and all upgrade stories to 2013 would be interesting therefore as I am a first timer and unclear what it involves so far.

Alex_Chow

Mauddib wrote:

Indeed but some of the features I know about would be requirements. Out database is quite large and performance has been an issue for us. I have had wonderful experience teaking it, reducing dead locks, optimising code and much more. I have provided some often startling performance increases. But I can not fire fight that issue forever and there are some great performance optimisations in 2013.

Unicode support is getting more important for us too as we have started getting customers in places like Romania. XML related stuff is important too as our current business model has us interfacing with external systems over XML a LOT. For example Navision periodically polls our webshops for new orders and customers and so forth and there are many external web services we use to provide added functionality. We have also had hell with PDFs so PDF support would be great. And we export a LOT of data to external customer systems too so oData and XML would be important there.

On top of all that, our system is so heavily customised that getting developers trained and up to speed takes a very long time. It was one hell of a learning curve. So we can add in the risk of losing me as their main developer if I feel the need to go back to a reseller environment or other 2013 environment.

The list goes on, but there certainly is enough requirements there for me to make a start. I am curious what other selling points 2013 has that I can sell it on.

I also am keen to hear if anyone else feels like I do, that their current role whatever it might be is one where Nav technology is continuing without them and this worries them.

I would love to hear upgrade stories of any type too, especially if anyone upgraded or is upgrading from a 5(3.6) system.

Why are you telling us this? Shouldn't this be directed toward your manager?

Like I mentioned before, technology alone does not sell upgrade or software. You're better off addressing the pain points of your company, how much it's costing them, and how upgrading will resolve these issues. Basically ROI.

Anyway, the way we make decisions in the US is different than in Europe. So do what you need to do.

Mauddib

Alex Chow wrote:

Why are you telling us this? Shouldn't this be directed toward your manager?

Mainly because I have decisions to make myself before I talk to them.

And also because I want to make sure I have all the facts at my hands, and have considered all the angles, before I do so.

The Pros and cons of upgrading. The exact risks and details of what is involved with upgrading. Etc etc.

ara3n

upgrade from 4.0 to 2013.

http://mibuso.com/blogs/ara3n/2012/07/1 ... 2013-beta/

I have to say that reports took longer to tweak and get them close enough to classic reports.

asmilie2b

I would say my situation is quite similar with yours. I am with an end user also doing internal development for them. They are on 5.1 at the moment. I also feel that I will be left behind big time soon staying in this environment and hope they upgrade to 2013 in the near future. Though of course I wouldn't want that to be mainly for my own benefit! Luckily though it isn't and should be an easy sell to them. The things I see as having a major benefit for them are

- Web Client - will enable salespeople to check stock and customer info on the run on mobile devices - probably the biggest reason for them to upgrade.
- Web services
- Native PDF support - No more needing to have certain PDF printers installed, having them failing etc.
- Excel exporting/syncing - Will reduce the need to create many ad hoc reports. Also thinking to recommend SQL2012 with PowerPivot and Powerview, very nice.
- Sharepoint viewer - will solve a long running need for them to have a portal for customers to order through
- Permissions - Possibility of much better security just with the RTC - will not need to go ahead possibly with an intended "ground up" permission redeployment based on tables (painful)
- Speed increases - they suffer a lot from a laggy system. The background processes to be used for posting would help them a lot.
- Ease of administrating NAS and debugging it.
- KPI/Graphs - Ok, hard to ROI on but get's the MD excited - and that helps for a sign off!

And I am still just starting to learn the features. So I have started making my document outlining current issues - how they will be resolved in 2003 and the payback expected = ROI. Fingers crossed.