The cost to "upgrade" from Classic to RTC.

David_Singleton

Yes this is a "how long is a piece of string thread" but I just wanted to get a bit of a sanity check here.

As I assume are most of the rest of you, I have been getting a lot of queries from customers asking about the cost to "upgrade' to 2013. I put Upgrade in quotes, because even though that is what the client says, in 90% of cases this is not really an upgrade, its is going to be a completely new Navision implementations. Of course upgrading is generally possible, but in reality the gains from that would not justify the move. In my experience most clients that could upgrade, really just need to move to 2009 executables to get Web services and a few other nice features.

So clients after 10 years or so of paying the upgrade/maintenance fee, being now told that 2013 is a new implementation is not settling well with them. When it comes time to explain the cost of "upgrading" 300 reports and 150 forms to RDLC and Pages, not only is it politically difficult, but its impossible to quote in those terms unless using the MS idea of 3 days per report (and of course they wont actually convert 300 reports but that's another issue). In reality it is time to go back to the drawing board and do a full analysis, Board Room pilots, design etc.

I already had one client that found its actually cheaper to buy Oracle than to upgrade to RTC.

So I am not sure if there is a question in there, as I know that there is no way to answer the "how much will an upgrade cost" question, but I would like to hear other peoples feelings on this and how you best approach it with long term customers. In addition, many customers approaching me are doing so because they were upset with the response they got from their existing partner, and I guess wanted a second opinion.

jglathe

Hi,

putting the "upgrade" in quotation marks is the right approach, IMO. I would give the same answer when it comes to "upgrading": functionality-wise it is sufficient to do a (technical) update/upgrade to the latest 2009 runtime, to get the web services. Everything else is not really an upgrade, but a redesign to make it work, at very high cost. "Upgrading" to NAV2013 is actually losing usability for long-term customers. When it comes to web clients, I suggest having a look at Anveo WebDesk. "Upgrading" reports to RDLC has the worst cost/benefit ratio. Add to this the "repackaging" of certain local Add-Ons which have been removed from the standard package. For an existing customer this is a no-go.

In other words: Thank you, David, for putting this thread up.

with best regards

Jens

Edit: replaced "update" with "upgrade". Small distinction

davmac1

I think doing the data upgrade, and then re-doing the mods needed in pages and reports will most of the time be a lot quicker.
I don't know how they come up with 3 days per report.
Most reports are not that difficult and they are quicker to write in NAV 2013 than Classic, and far less annoying and cumbersome than NAV 2009 RTC reports.
Since pages don't allow the format customization that Classic does, most custom forms can be done quickly from scratch as pages.
Custom logic, where applicable, can be copied and pasted from the old to the new.
That leaves the normal upgrade merging of codeunits and dataports that need to be converted to xmlports.
Of course this is still new to us, but I am looking forward to my first NAV 2013 upgrade.

Alex_Chow

The answer is "it depends"

Anywho, it really depends on the upgrade. I've done a very complex database upgrade from version 3.7 to NAV2009 RTC and it took about 300 hours. Most of the time spent in development was REMOVING coding and REORGANIZING code.

The add-on was with E-Ship and EDI, but fortunately, the folks at Lanham has done a pretty good job.

Now depending on how you define the word complex above, your results may vary.

asmilie2b

From a user's perspective, we are currently trying to go forward on upgrading to NAV 2013. The cost we were quoted was quite large, and a bit of a difficult sell for me when it is compared to how much upgrades cost previously for the firm. But, it is an opportunity for me to probably convince the firm to get the Application Builder, or maybe the Solution Builder license, so to be able to do as much page and report conversion ourselves. It would definitely pay back itself with the Application Builder license

clausl

List reports reports takes less than an hour to upgrade. This includes List reports with multiple indented dataitems.

Document reports takes around 3-4 hours, but really you should try to use the standard document reports in NAV 2013 and then modify these if neccessary.

I can offer you a 1 or 2 days training course to accomplish the above speed. Or even better, you let me upgrade your 300 reports and then I charge you 3 days for each report. That is good business for me

/Claus Lundstrøm

Rob_Hansen

We've upgraded several customers from Classic to the RTC. A couple were on very old versions (2.6) and those were treated as reimplementations...it's really not feasible to handle those any other way (just a little jump of 5 versions after all). Clients that wait that long should be made aware (from time to time) that jumping multiple versions will increase the upgrade cost, so some expectation setting is important there. The move from classic to RTC is a beast unto itself, but it comes down to a sales pitch. All the things they love about NAV (the structure, the filtering, etc.) will still be there. Do they want to lose all that and move to another system? Or stick with a solid application and bite the bullet to upgrade to a newer, better, more powerful platform with the same core features/benefits they always appreciated, and much more.

The clients we've upgraded (rather than reimplementing) were handled as (like davmac1 posted) a data upgrade, with all customizations essentially recreated. Table and codeunit customizations were not a big deal. Form and report customizations...redone from scratch (we've never used the form transformation tool, believing it's nearly as quick to build the pages from scratch and you end up with a better/proper RTC approach). Yes, these are expensive upgrades...but there's no magic bullet to get around that. Proper analysis and elimination of unnecessary customizations is key.

Not sure I added a lot of value there...just my experience and two cents worth.