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…

A few weeks ago, I was in Copenhagen, Denmark to participate in the second Software Design Review (SDR) for NAV ‘7’.  The agenda is made up of multiple sessions where product managers and developers from Microsoft interact with select partners on functionality they plan to incorporate into future releases—a very iterative and productive process.  Unfortunately, I am unable to elaborate on the details of NAV ‘7’ , but the sessions did inspire me to write this blog.

I have been working with Dynamics NAV since version 2.6 when Dynamics NAV was marketed as “business your way.” Back then, Steve Ballmer made statements like, “I want to be Denmark.” This referenced the success of vertical solution offerings based on Dynamics NAV in Denmark, and therefore, a business model Microsoft needed to replicate worldwide.

After concluding the SDR, I really had to ask myself whether the current Microsoft Dynamics tag line of “People-Ready™” really does the NAV product line justice.  I kind of like the old messaging, as I think it better promotes the capabilities of NAV.  In fact, I predict that there is going to be an increase in the number of organizations not only using NAV as an ERP product, but adopting the underlying Dynamics NAV framework as a development platform.

Microsoft develops NAV based on these five basic values:

• Simplicity
• Productivity
• Continuously take advantage of Microsoft technology
• User experience leadership
• Rapid time-to-value

From what I could tell, NAV ‘7’ stays true to every one of these values. I look forward for when this version is available, so Serenic can continue to take advantage of the underlying NAV framework to further enhance or build new accounting software solutions for our nonprofit market.  Some really cool stuff is making its way into the underlying framework!

Until then, as a current (or future) nonprofit, NGO or public sector organization using Navigator, I might suggest that you consider expanding the vision of what this framework can do for you. Serenic and our partners have many nonprofit clients who have utilized the base Dynamics NAV framework within Serenic Navigator to incorporate functionality that displaced internally-built Microsoft Access, Excel or other 3^rd-party solutions, thereby enabling a more truly integrated overall solution—this premise being that you have a centralized development environment and can deliver a unified user experience (our most recent 2009 version made this proposition even more appealing).

I don’t know that people will be standing in line at midnight like they did when Windows 95 was released, but the future looks bright for the Dynamics NAV camp and I would suggest that any investment in the NAV framework will be supported well into the future.

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!

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.