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!

By Brandon Taylor

Last year, when Serenic made the decision to join the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 6.0 SP1 TAP (technology adoption program), there was that brief moment of, what have we done? As an embedded solution, Serenic Navigator is roughly 30% larger than base Dynamics NAV.  That translates into a lot of work, and we were aware that there was a lot that we didn’t know when entering the program.

As discussed in my last posting, there ended up being three primary areas that we really needed to understand: menus for the role-tailored client, roles and activities, and pages.

Let’s break these down.

Before jumping right in, I would like to apologize as the following contains development rated material – screenshots of the NAV object designer.  So, if you haven’t had the luxury of spending much time in the NAV development environment, this is where programmers spend the majority of their time.

It turns out that menus for the role-tailored client are modeled in the exact same way as the classic menus.  The only difference is that instead of having an object number of 52, they start in the thousands, i.e. 1055.  During the transformation cycle we had a non-developer update these.  That should give you an indication of how we started to feel—piece of cake !

Next up, we needed to understand the most important framework of the role-tailored client – roles and activities.  These are the basis for the whole “Role-Tailored Experience,” so it was critical that we shipped product with roles that were relevant for the NonProfit/NGO/Public Sector market.  As with menus, Microsoft’s implementation of roles and activities fit within the NAV architecture by utilizing the new page object.  Both the role and activities each require one page.  Below are the roles and activities we shipped with Navigator 6.0.

Finally, now that we understood menus to be an extension of the classic model along with roles and activities that are really just pages, the only new thing we needed to learn were pages.  Below is a partial shot of the Fund Card page object.  If you have ever looked at XML code from a web page you will see some similarities in the layout.  In fact, the page object gets compiled into managed C# code on the service tier.

Below is how the role-tailored client renders and presents the page to the user.

All in all, it took a couple of weeks for it to become clear on what we needed to do.  It then became an exercise based on the volume of work rather than the technical unknown (although there were the typical technical hurdles associated with any early adopter program).

Hopefully, this provides a little more clarity to what’s under the hood related to the role-tailored client.  It really comes down to a new object type called a page.  As is usually the case, Microsoft has done all of the heavy lifting and we now get to build and deliver some pretty cool stuff.  But, that’s for next time…

by Brandon Taylor

I was asked a question the other day, “What makes Navigator 2009 so much different then 5.0?”

What a perfect question to spawn this blog topic about Navigator 2009 from a development perspective! Over the next couple months I am going to attempt to break down this question and provide some development insight for each of the core areas related to Navigator 2009:

1. Role-tailored experience
2. Native web services
3. New 3-tier architecture

Today, let’s look at the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) where programmers spend their time creating the role-tailored experience.

The role-tailored client, RTC as we like to refer to it, is a windows client that was developed with the goal of improving the poor user experience (UX) associated with ERP systems.  There are lots of articles and whitepapers that outline the benefits of this RoleTailored design, but I think the implementation of the IDE in 2009 deserves some discussion to help existing clients understand what type of changes Microsoft has made that impacts developers as they plan to upgrade.

As with all things Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the development mantra is “simplicity”.  If it isn’t simple, then it typically does not make it in product.  This has held true with the IDE in 2009.  At the most basic conceptual level there are only three new objects a programmer has to learn (only one of them is truly new):

• roles and activities
• menusuites for the RTC
• pages

You might ask why Microsoft didn’t release an IDE built as part of Visual Studio or replace C/AL with C# as many people predicted while 2009 was under development (believe me they researched it).  There are now over 76,000+ customers and 3,600 partners (last count) worldwide using various add-ons and verticals based on the NAV development platform.  I suspect in keeping the IDE the same and only introducing three new concepts, customers along with partners can focus on what’s important – their mission.

As an embedded Microsoft ISV (independent software vendor), we at Serenic appreciate the “simplicity” mantra and that Microsoft takes care of the underlying framework components where most of the complexity resides.  It increases our ability to empower your mission by delivering operational functionality allowing you to operate more efficiently.

Next up, I am going to do a little deeper dive on roles and activities, menusuites, and pages so we can technically understand how these work.  Stay tuned!

Brandon Taylor is Serenic’s VP of Product Development and Strategy.