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Comments
Please don't say this. First of all I remember unfixable bugs such as even as lately as V5 we had reservation or order tracking entries orphaned and causing stuff like you could literally not book a shipment and your truck just stood there waiting for the paperwork, resulting in some really really frantic support calls, and it was not fixable, we could just make a tool that would delete such orphaned entries and they could run it daily. It was very embarrassing and thankfully it only happened at some very understanding clients who got that it is Microsoft's shame not ours, but if it would have happened to the more harsher, "you are my software vendor, I don't care who is yours, fix everything for free" kind of clients it would have been a problem.
Second although it is no longer the case for me thankfully, many people work for rigid partners where you have to account for every minute of work as "billable" or "training" or "time off", so they cannot really do this sort of stuff i.e. they cannot fix bugs without charging for them and of course they cannot charge for them. I remember having such jobs and it was very unpleasant between thsi kind of pressure from customers and bosses.
I think if I will ever return to the world of partners, I would only work for ones who don't have the we sell standard software + x hours of customization mindset, rather they have the invest into your own product, even if not an add-on then still some kind of ever increasing range of "our own standard customizations and bugfixes" that can be put into every project quote.
But then only the big ones can do this who sell 10-20 copies of every version. I remember when we sold 2 copies of 3.6, 1 copy of 3.7, 1 copy of 4.0... fixing a bug in such a case is simply not an investment, as it goes away in the next version.
So basically I would say only big partners can do economical bug fixing, for the small ones it will be an economic loss.
But honestly, release of 2013r2 made me a lot more optimistic re future, and i do not consider to train myself for SAP for now
And yeah, i had one of my very first projects on 3.00, with sql server, and customer's DB grown by 1GB a week... After this nightmare i am pretty much alright with all next versions of NAV
Developers are forced to package crap together quickly instead of carefully testing them out.
I remembered 2-3 years ago, Microsoft was implementing SCRUM process for their development team to eliminate bugs? How's that working out?
AP Commerce, Inc. = where I work
Getting Started with Dynamics NAV 2013 Application Development = my book
Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV - 3rd Edition = my 2nd book
I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this thread, but I don't think it is going to accomplish anything. No one has offered any real specifics about what they want. I do this too, and whenever I look back on it I realize how ludicrous it sounds. "I want more functionality" is not a requirement. "I want all new ISV rules to be cancelled" is not a requirement. You can't make a blanket statement and expect something to come of it. What functionality do you want? What specific rules around ISV certification do you want cancelled? Why do you needthem and not just want them? They are valid points, but expand upon them. We shake our heads when our customers try to pass statements like these off as requirements to use the product. We're all customers of Microsoft and I guarantee they do the same thing to us when they see things like this.
My Blog - nav.education
This is accounting / order processing / etc. software, not some shiny toy. Even pure "DOS" type UI would be OK because the objective is to simply key in data as fast as possible. There are companies still using stuff like that (Unix based, terminal emulators) because if it is efficient then why change it? Of course for new sales that looks very bad when doing a demo and I can understand that. That there is a need for new shiny stuff for new sales. It is a competition, a race.
But on the other hand apparently nobody considered the existing user base for example when forced to upgrade (because it will not be supported) users are upset that they have to re-learn stuff without any obvious benefit (most cases will not actually have role based configuration because there are no clear roles in the organization to begin with etc.)
This all would be OK if the Classic would simply not developed further, just made compatible with the coming versions of Windows, and the tax / regulation changes backported. This would be a very low maintenance cost and Microsoft could focus 99% of the efforts on the RTC. That would be entirely right. What is not right is forcing the existing user base to upgrade to this or sooner or later lose support.
I mean will have to do just this. I will have to call a meeting and tell users "Look, I dislike it as much as you do because finally after years of customization we have a convenient system and I would not want to change it. Finally we have every possible warning printed out conditionally on our invoices, finally we have the layout of everything just fine tuned, and now we have to start again. But we will lose support one day if we don't. So I dislike it as much as you do but we must go for it. Let's look at the bright side and hope that one day a web client will actually come handy, I don't think so because I made you already a web based sales order entry, maybe integration possibilities through web services will be one day handy although I have already integrated the web shop by anothr way, or you will want to have graphs on your reports, which you don't because I already made an excel expotr for all the important reports. But anyway. Maybe they will still be nice."
It's really sad that I have to do this. That there was not an option to just keep things with the basic level of maintenance (compatible new versions of Windows and new tax laws nothing else).
You generalize all NAV users. You've made the same generalizations in other posts. It's another example of a blanket statement and one that is simply not true. It may be true for your users, and those are absolutely the users you should care about more than others, but it is not true for all users of the software. And that's what we're talking about here.
I forget the numbers, but there are what, 100,000 NAV companies and 1,000,000+ users. Even if it is 80% of users that are heads down data entry (which at least here in the US I would argue at minimum that the reverse is true, < 20% heads down), you're telling me that those other 200,000 users should be ignored? Their wants and needs of the system should not be considered? It's a balance in getting ALL users a system that they can use and a balance between what will make it most profitable as a product. Microsoft cannot simply look at my users or your users, US users or Austrian users, and make product decisions.
That is developing it further. I understand what you mean, but it is. They would be actively maintaining the product.
Do you think a customer would stay on maintenance for this? It may be cheap for a small customer, but what about a big one? Do they drop it to a flat fee to stay on Classic and lose out on revenue? Keep people on staff who's sole purpose is to remember the older system and only provide support for a part of it, for a client base that gets lower every year? That money to keep it up to date comes from somewhere. A case can certainly be made for this option, but it's a lot more complicated than you make it out to be.
In all honesty, if you think there is a market for this type of company, go after it. If there is a gap in Microsoft's offering, fill it. A customer that is not interested in upgrading and will stay on their version forever. Find other like-minded technical resources that know this stuff and jump on it. Provide a hosted solution with old versions of NAV and Windows. Maintain the tax compliance, it doesn't change that often from what I know. Support the native database. If it is really that low maintenance a small partner should be able to do it, especially for their country.
I don't disagree that there should have been an easier option for them and that it should have been handled better. Maybe Classic should have been supported for longer. But again, and I fall back on this point a lot, everyone has known this was coming for more than five years. Microsoft's support policy for versions hasn't really changed. If it is important for a client to stay current they should have been planning and budgeting with the help of their partner. It stinks to be put in that situation as a customer, I would hate to be in that position as a business owner, but this didn't happen overnight.
My Blog - nav.education
However if some things must be done, like many conditional information on documents then it must be done. Even when it goes out later. Because people are unhappy know, so it must be done to make them happy and later on worry about how to not make them unhappy again.
You make the same mistake like most people on this forum that you think it is about business. No. It is about people. You don't implement a customization because it benefits a business this is entirely wrong. You implement it because Manager X as a person likes it. Maybe he cares about the business. Maybe he cares about his favorite ideas. Who knows? Who cares? It is about people. I studied business administration for a bachelor degree and had to un-learn it because I realized nobody cares. Maybe owners do. But actually even owners often support an idea because they like it and not because they are sure it is beneficial for the business.
I haven't the slightest clue how the upgrade will affect the business in general, I just know how it affects the emotions of the users and managers. And the owner. This is what matters.
This is exactly why the idea of hosting an old service fails. I don't think anyone feels good about taking their app from their servers and putting them somewhere else. It just does not feel right.
Budgeting? I can count on hand the number of busineses I know who have any sort of a budget other than a sales budget. This is way, way too professional i.e. way, way too big business kind of thinking. When you think about budgets you again think within the framework of impersonal business. This is IMHO a mistake. I think in the framework of people.
Sorry, I don't want to you are wrong you are just thinking in a certain big business framework, that of stock exchange traded large corporations with cubicles and meetings and presentations. I am thinking in an entirely different small business framework where you cannot afford to do things too professionally, rather everything happens on the personal level. But isn't that what the NAV world is really for, the small business world, hence the informal world without IT budgets and suchlike?
Perhaps you are right in the sense that a certain kind of "emotional budgeting" is in order i.e. frequently telling people that bad times will come and we will have to invest without gaining much from it. But in my experience nobody cares until they are there, because they think "maybe I will have another job elsewhere by then".
I guess at some level people find it hard to believe things they dislike. So they sort of accept the words but don't put them in the heart. They stay kind of incredulous.
And nobody seriously expects that there can be such a thing as a not backwards compatbile change, or a change where functionality is more limited in some respects, not enchanced. Everybody finds such an idea incredible because it is like the opposite of progress. So I find it hard to prepare people because they don't fully believe it that for example a functional client or code that worked for it can just be taken away. It just sounds so incredible, like as if the new car would be slower than the old car, that nobody fully believes it in their heart.
Actually even I, who should probably know better, have not given up all hope. I guess once the 2009 support runs out, there will be a massive user upheaval like thousands cancelling maintenance or suchlike or complaining to papers like The Economist or suchlike and MS will have to rethink some stuff. Even I find it hard that thousands and thousands of people will spend effort into re-gaining stuff they had before and re-learning stuff they have learned before even when the different stuff does the same thing, I think this is so much the opposite of progress, clearly regress, that I am still faintly hoping a bit that something will happen. I am still not 100% sure just everybody goes along with this...
Just want to make that apparent to people that are browsing these forums.
AP Commerce, Inc. = where I work
Getting Started with Dynamics NAV 2013 Application Development = my book
Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV - 3rd Edition = my 2nd book
I want everyone to think about the big picture. I want everyone to realize that "people" are not just the ones who purchased a NAV license and do data entry, but also the users at Microsoft who have to support it, the partners who have to work with it, etc. No one brings them into the conversation in these posts, but they matter. There are many more points of view that aren't being represented here and unless there is understanding about more of them then well-founded decisions can't be made.
I really do agree with a lot of what everyone is saying here. Miklos makes some excellent points. Microsoft has made a lot of very one sided decisions lately, but most of the responses here are doing the same thing, only considering themselves and how NAV changes affect them. That mode of thinking is overly simplistic and it has to change on all sides.
My Blog - nav.education
stirring the pot can be a good thing :twisted: Anyway, I think Miklos has some very valid points. I haven't given up hope, too, but my expectation is that Microsoft will have nearly killed itself before they start acting rational again. This also means that most of the partners will have died of starvation or gone off to other products - that's one of the problems when you have too much money for your own good and can afford not to listen to people. @Michael, Thomas: Good start. The opening keynote was worth watching.
I'm not sure about the latter. There is always criticism, that's right. But the criticism on the RTC and RDLC has been building up for years now, with apparenty no-one listening. Saying that there are only blanket statements and no real requirements posted (here or in other forums) is... well, not true. I would not write up a wish list here, it's no use, nobody of influence is listening. The more important parts are on ILoveNAV already, BTW. But be assured that we at least try to look at the bigger picture. What I see (on all levels) is that the RTC/Cloud/"In and On" approach simply doesn't work. Not for the partners, not for the existing clients, in the few cases that I know also not very good for the new clients, and IMO (but they wont tell until they're really losing money) not for Microsoft, too. And that's not news, only to Microsoft, as it seems. In my professional life I've been hearing the SaaS nonsense since 20 years or so. It never worked the way it was intended. Also, bringing up a new interface with less functionality than the established (however quirky) one never went over well with users and developers. Making it mandatory before it's ready is a sure recipe for desaster.
with best regards
Jens
I think the RTC works, but I am not sold on the rest yet. I think it will, but like most things it is not there yet. And it totally depends on the market they are after. I really don't get why people hate the RTC. Totally baffles me. #1 complaint from end-users: software is too hard to learn. Microsoft does something about it and standardizes, and it's the end of the world.
I'm glad they are out there, but not nearly enough people vote on them. And when they do vote they don't scroll past the first page. It needs improvement.
By far their biggest mistake for sure, but I get their rationale.
My Blog - nav.education
- 14-16% maintenance means every existing customer because a new customer every 7 years (7 years of paying maintenance = buying it again)
- therefore the interests of existing customer should be just as important as building features that drive new sales
- for new projects I am fairly OK with 2013 R2. Only thing is that I would have to budget reports/documents roughly double, but it is set off by for example easier integration and similar things.
- look at the existing customer who bought it in 2005 and thus until 2013 paid enough maintenance to consider to have bought it again:
- web services make e.g. web shop integration easy? yes, but we solved that long ago: everybody who is going to have a webshop ever, and has NAV for 7 years has a webshop already and integrated. the dot-com boom was like 15 years ago... webshops are so old that if they were a car you would not buy one
- every RDLC report can be exported to Excel? Thanks a lot, but I had 7 years to add Excel Buffer everywhere it was needed, and it took like 2 hours each max, including the coffee break
- role-tailoring pages, hiding unnecessary fields that confuse users is really cool! except if we are using it for 7 years then either got used to it or did it with the form designer long ago. Deleting fields from forms is something even an internal IT person with 0 NAV knowledge just visual basic form designer can do... whatever little advantage this offers, like hiding unnecessary actions and making necessary ones really big for the benefit of the dull and careless, is offset by retraining.
- charts on reports are great! Except that we had 7 years to make Excel Buffer exports and then putting on a Pivotchart is like 1 minute. Thanks.
- web based access! This is really nice to catch up with MS CRM 10 years later
Everything I mentioned here is absolutely great for the new client and not much useful for the old client with internal development, except that the old client buys NAV every 7 years (via maintenance) just the same.
Oh well. Money a bit wasted, but we always saw maintenance more like an insurance, in case the EU drops VAT and implements the wonderfully complicated tax-on-tax systems of Canada, or some similar regulatory nightmare happens that changes everything, right?
Wait, no. It's worse than that. The money wasted case would be if the Classic would be continued, made compatible with new Windows, regulatory fixes, but no new features. So this is worse than money wasted. It is paying maintenance, buying it every 7 years for the grand privilege of being allowed to invest 30 days into implementing a new version that solves problems we have solved long ago.
This... is not a very good deal.
I think people at Adidas must be even more upset than I am
I think the folks who designed it had only new projects, particularly sales demos in mind. (Why else would one put charts right in the client? Totally useless because the low-level clerks who use it don't need them and top level bosses refuse to use the client, they want charts printed and on their desks. But it is totally sweet on sales demos. Every aging executive with 0 IT knowledge loves to see charts on sales demos because that is about the only thing they understand from it.)
But the old user base buying it anew every 7 years was kinda forgotten.
This is, really, it.
I worked 7 years as consultant, then now since 3 years ago as an internal consultant / ERP manager. And if I would not love my job now - as I do - I would basically go and join a new solution center that has no old customers to support
It's just that that the every 7 years "re-buyers" were forgotten.
The switch to the RTC was a big adjustment...no doubt about it. We adopted it early and right away we began designing pages natively (not by transforming classic forms which some people used as a crutch to stick with what they know). The RTC was not ready in NAV 2009 (first release). In 2009 SP1 it was livable...but still many deficiencies compared to classic. 2009 R2 was cloe to ready in my opinion. Still some lacking features versus classic that would be griped about by existing clients, but some nice features that classic didn't have as well (dotnet interop opened a lot of new options). Really though...NAV 2013 is a fantastic product. I've worked with NAV as a developer/consultant for 13 years, and I hate having to go back to versions older than NAV 2013 now (with our large client base we obviously have to...but I can't wait to get them all upgraded!). I can't manipulate things in some areas as much as I could in classic, but there are so many new things I can do...and the user experience is really great now (I honestly believe that). It's a beautiful product that makes classic look like an ancient tool...and yes I realize that the important thing is what the software does and how efficient it is (for ERP)...but it think NAV 2013 is very solid there. The debugger has been perfect...just this week I was able to debug a web service issue quickly and easily...try that prior to NAV 2013.
I'm rambling more than I intended to. The bottom line is that the classic client is done and won't come back. It shouldn't. This is the right technology going forward...and i'm excited about the path forward. It was released sooner than it should have been, but we have an excellent application to work with as of the NAV 2013 release. And this was not sprung on existing customers quickly. It was not only a 4-5 year period from the RTC release to the point of discontinuing the classic client, but the classic client was the platform for what...15+ years? That's a pretty solid lifespan in technology. Do I think Microsoft may completely revamp the client again 15 years from now? It's definitely possible, but so long as the next playform is released when it's properly ready for market (I do agree that was a problem with the RTC and it needed 4 releases to get to a great state), so be it.
The biggest challenge for legacy/classic clients is absolutely the cost of upgrades. We support a few massively customized customers that face a huge cost to upgrade, and need to figure out their future path. Yes, they need to evaluate competing ERP systems against the "new" NAV and potentially go another route...but they'll face even bigger costs with a complete ERP switch. Once they're on NAV 2013 future upgrades should be comparable to what classic upgrades were in the past. This is the time to evaluate the options, and decide when (not if) to move to something new. And when that's done, be very careful about giving every user every little tweak and function to make their lives easy...just because it's both possible and rapid in NAV, still creates a potential upgrade issue later on. So long as the ramifications are understood, then by all means take advantage of the great things that can be done to tailor NAV to be the best possible ERP solution for your company.
Crap..that was way longer than i intended. Sorry guys.
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with best regards
Jens
with best regards
Jens
Jus two remarks... it is possible that people get a bit spoiled in the sense that in the past technical upgrades were very easy and full upgrades not that hard either. If I look at other software, such as SAP the R2-R3 move was huge and their terminology is interesting, they don't call it upgrade, they call it "migration", suggesting that it is almost to be treated as a new, different product. Do you think we should be doing the same, basically telling people don't think I am going to "upgrade" or "refresh" or "update" your application, but I am going to "migrate" you to a new application, to get them prepared for the size and difficulty of it?
As for the existing user base, I am not saying it was too quick, I am saying it solves problems that we had to solve anyway before. It's simply hard to convince people to see the upside when lot of these stuff were solved by different means before.
As for everybody having their small customizations, people ask "can you", not "do you want to". So if you don't want conflicts with people, can = must. Unless it violates some accounting rule or there is a similarly really good excuse, and having to work harder on an ugprade 4 years later is not a good excuse because nobody is even sure they are going to work there in 4 years and even when yes they don't give a hoot about how hard someone else works, can implies must.
For clients asking "can you", it comes down to process. If every user is given free reign to go directly to their NAV resource (either internal or external) and request things and get them done...you'll inevitably end up with a massively customized database over a period of 5-10 years. There should be someone vetting requests and deciding whether to approve them or push back on the user. If a company decides to just let everyone ask for what they want and have their NAV resource provide all the solutions, they just need to realize that at some point it will translate to a significant upgrade effort. Maybe only every 15 years when there is a big technical shift...but still something to be aware of. So long as that understanding is in place, then go nuts...but budget for it later.
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Then in the other side of the equation is that people come and ask can you set up X because they don't even have an idea what is the difference between configuration or programming, or they ask can NAV do X and they only understand a binary answer, Y can be done N cannot be done at all, and they kind of answer that yes, but sometime 10 years later it will take me 4 hours more in the upgrade just doesn't register. So in the other side of the equation you have this constant emotional stress that if you say Y everybody is happy if you say N you have difficult things to explain to unhappy people who will most likely blame you of incompetence because they have a friend of a friend of an aunt's brother in law who saw an ERP software once from 2km away and he said it can be done.
Would you take this stress? Really? Is that realistic to expect?
I am bit fed up that we always talk on mibuso.com as if we were all companies making decisions, with clearly defined business interests, seeing nothing but the bottom line, have no time discounting, plan forward until forever, and this all is supposedly called "professionalism". And this is entirely unrealistic.
In reality there is nothing but people who want to feel themselves good in their skins. And everything else derives from that. One person feels good because the company is getting more efficient and making more money. Another person feels good because she does not have to e.g. manually save and send per e-mail invoice PDF's that could be automated. And a third person feels good because people say thank you for helping our job. That is really all there is.
I think it is high time for this community to lose the, pardon my language, bulls**it bingo language of corporate talk, where everything must be expressed as a profit, loss, sales or cost. Yes, were taught exactly that like 11 years ago at the OnTarget sales training to parrot stuff like "this solves business problems, enables you to sell more and lower costs". You know what? It never worked. Every succesful sale I saw or participated in was about making the business owner and the other participants feel good about it as human persons, because they saw it as something comfortable, helpful, easily automatable, modern, cool, or prestigious.
I just wanted to clarify that i'm not out of touch with reality here...of course each user wants things to make their lives easier and make the application work better for them, and of course they're not sitting back wondering if it's the best thing for the company...they just want to speed up their work and streamline it as much as possible. The dangerous thing is if you put all the users in direct contact with a developer to make all their requests, and the developer just does everything that is requested (because it's possible). The users can't be expected to evaluate whether it makes sense to make the changes...they just WANT the changes. The developer can't be expected to make those decisions either (although some will)...the developer does what you suggest, and simply answers as to whether it can be done or not. You need someone evaluating requests and deciding whether to proceed with them, realizing that they will need to be dealt with when the time comes for an upgrade. If a two day customization will complicate a future upgrade, but it will save 8 hours a month every month for the next X years until the upgrade...then that person can decide it's worth it. If it's deemed not to be worth it...then you have to make the decision (tell the user it CAN be done...but we're not doing it because...) and realize the user will be disappointed. You need some evaluation/control mechanism so everything every user asks for doesn't just get implemented. Otherwise you end up with thousands of hours in customization and a database that will be extremely difficult and expensive to upgrade down the road.
I'm not disagreeing with you in any way here - I know users think and act the way you're saying. That's not the issue.
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