by Randy Copeland, Senior Consultant

I have worked with Navigator for seven years—five years for a VAR and the last two for Serenic Software. I had always heard great things about Explorations – our user conference:  the wonderful people you meet, the informative sessions and learning where Navigator is headed.

With my first Explorations in May 2009, I was eager to see if it could be as good as I had heard.  I was not only attending Explorations, but I was jumping in the deep end as a presenter.  Being a Serenic consultant, I have trained small and large groups my entire career.  I felt nervous trying to live up to the presentations I had heard about from previous Explorations attendees (for those who know me, not a common occurrence).  I had two sessions to present:

1. General Ledger – Views, Account Schedules and Analysis & Report Requests
2. Workflow & Approvals

All the sessions were aimed at training instead of demos of new features.  The training emphasis of the sessions and the One-on-One Sessions were what set Explorations 2009 apart from other software conferences I have attended. Based on my reviews, and the overall conference reviews, we accomplished our goal of increased knowledge.

I had a wonderful time at Explorations 2009!  Networking with Serenic users, partners and staff was extremely valuable.  It was important to be able to meet clients face to face after talking with them via GoToMeeting and other electronic tools.  I was able to spend time with our nonprofit clients, inquiring about their Navigator installation, and discussing their daily accounting challenges.  I also attended sessions where I learned new accounting software tips within Navigator.

Explorations 2009 was different from any other software conference I have attended, and Explorations 2010 looks to be even better.

The feedback from Explorations 2009 was taken to heart and I am glad we will have more Software Consultants available to troubleshoot with users in the One-on-One Sessions.  New sessions have been introduced and training will be enhanced with a consistent approach (I would reveal more but then what would be the fun in that?).  This year, I am going to teach Procurement.  In just two hours, I’ll be covering the process from requisition to purchase order to invoice.  Will be a crash course !

We at Serenic are all working to make Explorations 2010 a conference that you can say was, “the best software conference you have ever attended!” If you have not signed up it is not too late–register here. This is your chance to learn more about Navigator, where Serenic is heading, network with other users in your industry and get help with your daily challenges.  I look forward to meeting you at Explorations 2010.

Since the release of Navigator 2009, I have had on my task list the need to update our Serenic Navigator Decentralized Technical White Paper.  If you are familiar with this white paper, then you understand the implications of the new Dynamics NAV 3-tier architecture for the   decentralized deployment of Serenic Navigator.  The recent announcement of NAV R2 further reveals how Microsoft is moving Dynamics NAV into the “cloud.”  How does this impact your organization if you have already or are getting ready to deploy Navigator in a decentralized environment?

NAV R2 will basically eliminate the need for Citrix or Terminal Services.  As mentioned in the press release, “this allows for remote or roaming users to take advantage of the richness and Microsoft Office integration of the RoleTailored interface and the many integration features connected to local resources, such as the operating system and Microsoft Office.” As the underlying architecture for Serenic Navigator (Dynamics NAV) continues to evolve, the deployment options have become even more flexible.

When I first wrote the decentralized white paper three years ago, the following options were available:

• Citrix or Terminal Services to deploy the NAV classic client
• Serenic Portal Services
• Data Backbone Replicator 4.21

Today, we have multiple clients around the world that run Serenic Navigator using these options.  One particular organization can open Microsoft Excel at headquarters, hit refresh and know the accounts payable balance for their Swaziland operating company.  They can do this daily.  Since the introduction of Navigator 2009 and with the upcoming release of NAV R2, completely new and exciting options are now available:

• NAV role-tailored client deployed using Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V)
• Serenic Portal Services that now uses native NAV web services
• Excel templates utilizing web services
• RapidiOnline (formerly Data Backbone) Replicator OnDemand

Now more than ever, the technical challenges of deploying software across the world have greatly been reduced.  The toolbox has definitely expanded and we haven’t even mentioned SaaS J–yet.

Until next time…

We, at Serenic, were thrilled to once again be featured as an exhibitor during the 2010 InsideNGO Annual Meeting for finance, grants and contracts. As usual, it was a great time for us to connect with our users and attract potential clientele who shared insights and concerns about their current financial solutions.

This year’s meeting turned out to be great success across the board! Sessions for the 2010 InsideNGO included Stay Ahead of the FASB Curve, Cooking up a Sub-Award, and Indirect Cost in a Cap Environment. We also recently teamed up with InsideNGO to deliver a great webinar.  We look forward to many educational events with them again (and again!).

However, the most common obstacle faced by many of our prospective users  was the lack of integration between  financial software HQ’s and their field office solutions, who’s software often lacks multi-currency capabilities—thus, forcing organizations to use multiple applications to track their projects’ finance and awards. As you can imagine, this can be a real drag because many NGOs  end up having to duplicate their efforts, taking time away from work just to manage and sync their various software applications! Luckily, people were very responsive to our discussions about how Serenic Navigator can consolidate their efforts and overcome these challenges.

As it turned out, this year’s Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference happened to coincide with the InsideNGO Annual Meeting, giving top Serenic executives, like Randy Keith (President and CEO) and Chris Stevenson (VP of Sales), as well as members of Serenic’s Africa-based partner, TechnoBrain, to come out and press the flesh with InsideNGO attendees.

One of the attendees, Denise Graves, Budgeting Administrator at Jhpiego, actually won the $80 Visa Gift Card in our raffle—congrats, Denise! Use it wisely

All in all, the 2010 InsideNGO Meeting was a huge success. Thank you to everyone who attended the sessions, shared their experiences and discussed with us at Serenic their specific needs. It is through these kinds of constructive exchanges that we are able to improve our products in order to better serve you, the clientele.

Brooke and Ryan holding down the Serenic Software booth!

Brooke with Tanya Johnson, Finance Manager at Family Health International

The gentlemen from TechnoBrain, Ltd, our Africa-based partner! Left to Right: Thomas Cullen (VP, US Sales & Marketing), Manoj Shanker (Group CEO), Mahesh Patel (Chairman), Clint Cuny (CEO, USA)

By James Duplinski, Senior Implementation Consultant

After working with Serenic Navigator over the years, I’ve noticed that there can be several approaches to starting a new implementation. Some people immediately jump into the software and have the user start entering setup data. Others take an approach of defining exactly what should be setup by spending months defining business processes and mapping work flows. In my experience, the best approach lies somewhere in the middle of these two models.

When I first started working with software about 10 years ago, I’ll admit I used the approach that would have the users immediately go into the software, and I would explain to them every little setup option and how to enter data once they decided how they wanted the system to work. This would typically involve going over all the options with a handful of users for several days as I tried to impart everything the user needed to know to make an informed decision. While on the surface this seems logical, I found when I followed up with them in our next session, very little setup had been done.

The reason the setup was incomplete wasn’t due to a lack of effort from the users. Rather, it was the fact that there are many setup options in Serenic Navigator and proper consultation on which direction to go can be of great help. Serenic Navigator is highly configurable and can be set up many ways. This is great, but can be a double-edged sword. There are hundreds of ways to setup it up incorrectly and only a few ways to set it up correctly for individual needs!

After experiencing this result several times, I modified how I approached the initial kickoff meeting. Now, I spend our first meeting with the key users talking about their business practices and issues, and I don’t even display the software during that initial kickoff. As part of standard Serenic practice, I also fill out a Concept Document, which touches on all of the major factors when setting up a database. This document serves as the agreement between me and the client as to how their business works, and the client signs off on this document as acknowledging that we are both on the same page.

After this initial meeting and signing of the Concept Document, I take all I have learned about their business and set up a database for them. I can generally return it to them within 1-2 weeks with all the basic setup completed. This gives the users the chance to play around with this configured database, check the results of their transaction entries, and verify whether I have set it up correctly or not. After practicing in the database and confirming that the transactions are posting correctly, I can then go back through the setup options I chose for the client. Here, I explain why I made those choices and how they affect the system. This approach has proved to be the most successful. I get a better understanding of their business, and the client can more narrowly focus on their test and setup efforts.

The only time I do get comments about this approach is in that first meeting, and it is generally from users who just want to jump right into the software and start clicking on buttons. I understand that people can be anxious to jump right in and it does seem like I am holding a holiday present in front of them, but telling them they can’t open it until after the New Year! I like the fact that they are interested in jumping in, but I still have to convey that this is an important step. Not only do I get them a test database more quickly with this approach, I also learn about their business and can ask more informed questions about their business practices, ultimately providing the best configuration possible. That is why I say that the accounting software implementation doesn’t begin with the software; it starts with conversations about how the custom install of YOUR Serenic Navigator will fit your nonprofit needs and empower your mission.

We are excited to share some photos and information from our very first international conference, thanks to Isabelle Bourquin, our Channel Sales Manager based in Europe!  Isabelle was happy to attend the CFDG along with Matthew Dredge, Director of Sales, Touchstone NAV. Ltd. —our new partner based in the UK. Matthew has years of expertise with Navision solutions in the UK, and both Matthew and Isabelle had the pleasure to meet with various charitable organizations during the exhibition.  We are looking forward to our first round meetings with each organization and empowering their missions with accounting software built specifically for nonprofits and NGOs.

The challenging part of the event was setting up our stand and fixing the banner. Luckily, Matthew came to our rescue!

Matthew putting the finishing touches on our sharp looking booth.

The final product!

Some words on CFDG:

The Charity Finance Directors’ Group is an umbrella charity aiming to advance public education and promote improved standards of management in charities. The CFDG vision is a transparent and efficiently managed charity sector that engenders public confidence and trust.  CFDG delivers services to its charity members and the sector at large, which enable those with financial responsibility in the charity sector to develop and adopt best practice.

Founded in 1987, CFDG today is a dynamic network of professionals in charity finance. Started initially by a group of finance directors of large charities who felt they would benefit from sharing information and cooperating in some areas, the organization has grown to currently over 1,500 members and as of February 2009, CFDG’s membership manages a total of over £14 billion of charity income.

Thanks again to the team, and to all who attended for helping this great event come to fruition!

We are excited to share some inside information on the start of our very first International Training this week!  While we’ve gone on-site in the past to teach our courses to new partners, this particular training session is the very first classroom presentation done internationally—with both partners and clients.  Serenic’s very own, Zac, is presenting our new RTC Financial Management course (in W1 version) in Chertsey, which is close to the Heathrow Airport in London.  Courses are being held at the Microsoft facilities in Culverdon House—a very generous thanks to Microsoft, as they are letting us use their facilities at no cost!  Could it get any better?

As I mentioned above, course attendees consist of both partners and clients, which allows for some great discussion and insight on different situations.  Some of the attendees for this week’s course include:  Monier with Tectura Switzerland, and Stéphane and Manos with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

From Left to Right: Manos, Herve, & Stéphane!

Now any first event is never complete without some sort of technical difficulty; while we sent several emails with instructions to prepare laptops loaded with  Navigator 2009 in Classic and RTC, we had an early morning challenge with SQL loaded in Greek! Obviously, Zac said this was not compatible and after a three hour download, his class was finally on its way.  Rough first day, but the first day is almost over now!

Although Zac is leading sessions, he is definitely not the only Serenic staff, as well as 3rd party staff, helping put this event together.  Our first international training event was a huge team effort, with kudos going to Baris and Isabelle for working abroad with our clients and partners to bring in registrations; and to Donna, Rhonda, Quiana and Zac for working stateside to prepare course materials in RTC for W1.  Last but not least, Microsoft was essential in providing the facilities, our catering order (a European version), training room requirements and available hotels.

With such great help and initial success, onward we go—AwardVision is scheduled for June 14-15 and DonorVision is scheduled for June 16-18 at the same location.

Thanks to everyone who has been apart of the planning, execution, attendance, as well as all the readers who tuned into this post!

It’s looking like a busy next few months for Serenic—but we’re not complaining!  Below is a list of trade shows, conferences and annual meetings where you can see the financial management and business operations software options provided by Serenic.  Check if Serenic will be coming to a town near you!

Charity Finance Director’s Group

May 18, 2010
London

• Covers key strategic and operational issues you will face, as well as innovative strategies that other charities have adopted in order to position themselves optimally on the long road out of recession.

Directions EMEA 2010

May 19 – 21, 2010
Prague, Czech Republic

• Focuses on strengthening and enhancing Dynamics NAV channel community, including NAV Partner communications & the relationship with Microsoft.

InterAction Forum 2010

June 2 – 4, 2010
Washington, DC

• Connect, Influence and Engage with hundreds of professionals, organizations and peers representing the international non-profit community, government, corporate and philanthropic sectors.

AICPA National Not-For-Profit Industry Conference

June 17 – 18, 2010
Washington, DC

• Provides critical training and the latest updates on auditing, accounting, tax, management, operational analysis and new strategies to enable the Not-for-Profit community to survive in this economic climate.

InsideNGO

July 12 – 16, 2010
Washington, DC

• Three separate NGO events covering: 1. Finance, Grants & Contracts 2. Cross Operations and Technology 3. Human Resources

AZA CFO Seminar

August 25 – 27, 2010
Seattle, WA

Association of Independent Research Institutes (AIRI)

September 26 – 29, 2010
Washington, DC

• An opportunity for AIRI members to network and get in touch with the top decision-makers at non-profit research institutes across the country.

Diocesan Fiscal Management Conference (DFMC)

September 26 – 27, 2010
New Orleans, LA

• More information coming soon!

Directions 2010

October 3 – 6, 2010
San Diego, CA

• Focused 100% on “Charting the Future” with Microsoft Dynamics NAV and its partners. Content created on partner feedback, providing best practices as well as interaction with peers.

A lot of information to take note of, but we will keep you updated as each trade show approaches!  Either bookmark this post, our follow us on Twitter and/or our Facebook Page—hope to see you there

As we kick-off the development effort for our improvement on the release of Navigator 2009, I thought it would be a good time to recap some of the cool stuff we’ve recently released in our latest critical update.

Over the last few years, Microsoft has been evolving their products around a strategy of bringing together structured (ERP, CRM) and unstructured (Excel, Word, e-mail) data.  This is how one Microsoft employee outlined a real life practical example—(keep in mind, I am paraphrasing!):

Let’s say you are sitting in your office and you need to requisition a new chair.  You fill out the paperwork, or log into the system to enter a purchase requisition.  At last count, there are over 400 million users around the world using Microsoft Outlook every day.  Wouldn’t it be nice to pick the chair you want, embed a picture, send off an email and be done with it?  Do you really need to know what a fund is , who has to approve this purchase, and what fund/dimensions need to be input for the accounting department to correctly record this purchase?

You probably understand the underlying complexity needed to make it that simple,  and this would more than likely be the most viewed Serenic blog post ever if I outlined how to do just that.  Unfortunately, evolution takes time, but as we all know, Microsoft has a pretty good track record for reaching the top of the food chain.  Serenic is evolving along with Microsoft and the latest critical update release shows how Serenic is leveraging the underlying Microsoft technology stack to deliver functionality that blends these two worlds.  Let’s take a look.

First: Twitter Factbox

You have a very important dinner meeting with a potential donor and want to quickly come up to speed on their latest interactions with your organization and current events.  Any contributions they have made, individuals related to the donor, and structured profiling defined by your organization is easily attained from within DonorVision.  How do you determine current events related to this donor?  Most likely you open a web browser and Google their name and then proceed to filter through the numerous links.  To avoid this, we now include a factbox for Twitter on the Constituent card.  Once you populate the “twitter username,” the system brings in (through web services) the latest tweets the organization has posted through Twitter.  The last tweet would most likely lead to a very deep dinner conversation.

Next:  File Attachment

When we shipped the initial release of Navigator 2009, File Attachment provided organizations the ability to attach documents to certain entities and store them in the database. In the latest release, we have introduced a new File Attachment factbox that gives users the ability to drag-and-drop documents directly onto the entity! Notice in the screen shot below that an email message was dropped onto this record and is now permanently stored as part of the record.

Imagine dragging an Outlook contact into DonorVision and having it create and populate all of the appropriate constituent field data so you can now start to process contributions, or initiating the contribution directly in Outlook or your CRM application.

Lastly:  SerenicSource

We at Serenic are focused on ensuing that our user community has a very high satisfaction level in the overall use and experience with our solutions.  We believe that collaboration assists in that endeavor, directly with Serenic or one of our partners, but mainly when customers can talk to other customers and share their experiences and best practices.  With the launch of SerenicSource, see Dave Abel’s post, we now have a mechanism to provide this collaboration and have included a SerenicSource factbox in the latest release.   Users can now subscribe and collaborate with all Serenic Navigator users based on their unique needs.

As I have stated in previous posts, Navigator 2009 is truly a foundational release that is centered on a completely new 3-tier architecture supporting web services with rich extensibility.  Hopefully, these latest improvements illustrate the possibilities of bringing together both structured and unstructured data into a unified user experience.  I look forward to future posts as we start finalizing functionality planned for Navigator 2009 Improvement 1!

NGO Connection Day was an awesome chance for nonprofit organizations to come together and learn more about nonprofit technology.  We were able to interact with many other organizations and participants, making new connections and partnerships throughout the conference!  The best part about this nonprofit summit was—of course—the sneak-peaks from Microsoft and other technology solutions; being able to discuss technology trends in the not for profit industry allowed for awesome networking and sharing of best practices.

Our very own, Lisa Ramsey, happened to get interviewed by Matt Rothman from Tech-Tips about Serenic and our services.  Check out what she had to say—and what he had to say about her accent —in the video below:

Hope everyone enjoyed this nonprofit summit—let us know your thoughts by commenting below!

An event that we attend every year is Microsoft Convergence.  This year, a few of our staff members, Lisa Ramsey and Bill Wilson, will be joining one of our partners, AVF Consulting, in Atlanta from April 24th-27^th.  Convergence gives us the opportunity to share ideas, knowledge, and network with Microsoft and its partners—as well as users of Microsoft Dynamics products.  If you are planning on going, come say hi—we’ll be in booth 421 .

We’re excited to showcase the new technology innovations in Serenic Navigator 2009—especially the new system navigation and task management tools!  This may sound like the standard new look and feel, but it really helps fuel employee productivity.  Personalized Role-Centers show specific information based on your job function, while helping you easily prioritize tasks and quickly make informed business decisions.

Come check it, and us, out and say hello—booth 421!  Mention you saw this blog post and receive a special give-away !

Matt Thayer "pulling our tail" as always!