How do you keep up with this really fast changing from a business viewpoint?

Miklos_Hollender

Not from the learning viewpoint, the changes are not so fast and easy to learn.

But if you are an internal consultant like me, you can upgrade maybe 1 subsidiary per year because your main job is more and more customizations and reports and getting information to management and support and help with audits and tax controls and so on. So I upgraded one to 2013, then one to 2015, and great now there is NAV 2016, what do, I have multiple on 2009 still and one on NAV 5. And the NAV 5 is in a country where localization for NAV 2015 is not even released (Hungary) so it seems we are a bit screwed there. What am I even going to do next year, move one of the 2009 ones to NAV 2016 and the one I moved to NAV 2013 will complain that they want another upgrade? I cannot keep up with that. I simply have too much other things to do. I could use external consultants, but they will charge at least 10 days so €10K and I am hired precisely to save on these costs. Is NAV 2013 R2 even going to be supported for a few year or game over for it?

Of course upgrades got easier, but still. E.g. we bought a factoring add-on that at every upgrade requires putting a lot of OCR type stuff they can scan on the invoice layout. They didn't make upgrading RDLC easier, did they?

If you are an external consultant, like most, things are obviously easier if your upgrades are simply something you sell and there are many sellable new features. But if you have a fixed contract with a customer that ugprade services are part of a fix support fee, well... and you still have to put up with complaints that we just bought a 2013 upgrade in 2014 and now look at here, two versions old now.

Again from a learning viewpoint it is not so difficult to keep up. And maybe if everybody has at least 2013 then further upgrades are really easier. Can you do a technical upgrade again? No code merging, no settings, no data migration, no or little training, nothing?

I will be honest, at some level it makes me want to move back to partner companies again. Would be nice to have many clean new NAV 2016 projects instead of being overwhelmed by basically these forced upgrades while having so many other tasks, and still having to figure out how to exactly reproduce the layout of 3-4 NAV 2009 or NAV 5 companies in RDLC (this is the part of the upgrades I dislike most, this visual layout editing bullsh.... I am not a graphics designer or typographer. Largely because I don't do data migration, I would probably dislike them more - for us, our mindset is, it is a clean slate, why carry old mistakes forever).

Yeah but internal consulting enables you a real career into management while in external consulting all you can do is to one day go freelance or something like that.

Anyhow I just want to say from an internal, end-user viewpoint it is really going Too. Damn. Fast. now and I really wonder how to deal with it.

What would help is bringing back technical upgrades or longer support for older versions - at least back to NAV 2013.

As for external companies, I know add-on developers also find it hard to keep up. I did the NAV 2013 upgrade in 2014 started in May, and we went for the R2 of course, and the developer company of the factoring add-on released the NAV 2013 R2 version only in September! Because they too have other things to do, like projects and support, not just upgrades. And now we are only 1 year later and some poor developer there had to move it to NAV 2015 and now NAV 2016 while juggling support and projects. Hard, isn't it?

So how do you keep up with it? Again NOT from a learning viewpoint.

Verndroid

I can only speek from the Point of View of an add-on developer. For us it is not all that difficult to keep our products aligned with the newest NAV releases. We usually lag between 2 and 4 weeks behind the official release.

The Cumulative Updates though. They are a whole other kettle of fish. We have simply decided to only support 2 to 4 of the CU's per year. Nothing more. For us every CU is in matter of fact an extra version that we need our product to support and with CUs coming fast and furious we simply could not keep up with the CUs while still actually developing our add-ons further.

davmac1

Once you are on NAV2013, you can do technical upgrades to the newer releases. You could even selectively move features from new to old with a little work.
NAV2016 attempts to provide methods to make future upgrades easier

kine

Correct Source Control Management and using powershell could make all easier. Of course, upgrades from old versions than 2013 are bigger pain. But regarding the reports - there are solutions like https://www.fornav.com/. For me, today, upgrade of customer from one version to another is one day preparation and second day go live (or less). Of course, depends on how much you want to test the result...