Upgrade to NAV 2016

jwilder

We are upgrading from NAV 2009 R2 to NAV 2016. There is a nice blog from the Dynamics NAV Team to go from NAV 2009 R2 to NAV 2015 at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/nav/2014/11/09/cumulative-update-1-for-microsoft-dynamics-nav-2015-has-been-released/
but I am looking for something similar to NAV 2016.

Does the upgrade toolkit that comes with NAV 2016, upgrade from NAV 2009 R2 or do I need to use the NAV 2015 toolkit as well.

I am aware that I need to convert the database to NAV 2013 first before then converting to NAV 2016. Any advice would be appreciated.

davmac1

unless they updated it in a newer CU, it is NAV2009 to NAV2015 then to 2016.
Use a newer NAV2013CU - you do not need to install it - run it from the folder. You may have to install the ODBC.INI from sql server tools to run the NAV2013 upgrade.

swpolo

Anyway you have 2 options here.
1)2009 to 2013, then 2013 - to 2016
2) 2009 to 2015 then 2015 to 2016

First is more prefereble on the case if database needs datacorrection.
Second variant is not good for debugging the process since it is not supported on 2015 client while datamigration.

FYI: You need prepare middle application objects between steps for 2013 or 2015.

rsaritzky

Hi Jason,

I am working on the same upgrade process. Here's a summary of what I've learned from people here on MIBUSO and the "School of hard knocks":

1. First step is running the "Step 1" process as specified in the 2009->2015 document from Microsoft - this populates some temporary tables. This step is done in the NAV2009 environment. After that step, all non-table objects have to be deleted from the database. Then you back up the database.

2. You then restore the database into NAV2013. When you open the database, the database is converted to Unicode.

3. Again, you back up the database and restore it to a NAV2015 environment. You run the second step of the 2009->2015 process (Tools/Data Upgrade). This requires you to be able to compile all your tables, so you may have to make some changes:
a. Any references to forms have to be changed to page, e.g. FORM.RUN or variables defined as Form. There is a toolkit in NAV2013 that can help with this.
b. Any other object references that are in the table code (e.g. PAGE.RUN) will have to have the corresponding page or report object imported into the database. Reports will have to be converted via the report conversion tool in 2013, then exported out of 2013 into 2015. These additional objects pages don't have to "run", but they have to compile. For us, I only merged our customizations into 2015 objects if the standard NAV 2015 objects changed. For example, table 36 has a field 8725 "Signature" that is not in 2015/2016. The only way to remove it is to use a 2015 version of the table and apply your customizations. But note that you only have to have compile-able tables - not FUNCTIONING tables. So our approach was to remove all the trigger code from this version. Then, we applied all our customizations to the "final" 2016 versions of those same objects.

4. Again, you delete all the non-table objects, back up the database, then restore it into a 2016 environment. Open the database, then import your customized 2016 objects.

There are a lot of intermediate steps, and I've discovered that there are some long-running processes that you may want to customize. If you have a large number of users (we have 400+) you may want to disable the function that updates the user fields (this step adds domain\ to each user field value). I built a SQL script to do this that takes 45 minutes instead of running for 13 hours in NAV and then failing <grin>. The Data Upgrade step also failed (for us) about a half-dozen times with data inconsistency issues. The 2009 database integrity check can find some of them, but we have many customizations that "tacked on" to standard NAV functionality (e.g. dimension tables) that caused problems.

So the document that takes you from 2009->2015 is a good one to use, except for the last step of importing all your custom objects (see 3b above). Then do a 2015->2016 upgrade.

Good luck! I'm happy to share other experiences in more detail - just let me know.

Ron Saritzky

davmac1

If you are multi company or need to drop populated fields in tables, then NAV2009 to NAV2015 is the way to go.
I used the userid script successfully on a large database, so I highly recommend it.