Explorations 2010 is soon approaching, and if you are deciding whether or not to attend, we hope a preview to some of the training tracks below will sway you in the right direction . A popular topic of this event definitely focuses on reporting, which we will dive further into below!

The Power of Data—Need Reporting Tips or Help Creating Reports?

Back by popular demand!  More reporting sessions designed to help you present data critical for confident planning and decision-making:

• Basic Financial Reports - Create basic reports using the most popular and useful out-of-the-box financial reports.
• Dashboards with Microsoft Technology – Technical users can learn the steps necessary to create dashboards in SharePoint with real-time connection to Navigator’s SQL Server database.
• JET Reporting – Learn the fundamentals of Jet & begin using the Jet Designer functions under Excel to produce your own reports.
• JET Reporting Advanced – Learn advanced features like graphs, nested functions and arrays.
• Reporting Voice of the Client - Identify your reporting pain points and prioritize your needs in this interactive VOC session for reporting.
• SQL Reporting Services – Create different Navigator reports in both tabular and graphical displays.  Experience with report writers recommended.

With a focus on training, networking and enhancing your investment in Navigator, this event will put you miles ahead in achieving more for your mission. Plan on participating in one or more of the following training tracks:

• Financial Management & Beyond
• Maximizing Your Investment
• Data, Metrics and Reports
• Lab and Consultation

View the preliminary agenda. We hope to see you there!

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)

A great post in our SerenicSource forum that we had to share with the rest of you. Thanks, Jeremy, for such great insight!

One of the features that used to really get folks pretty excited when I would be rolling out a Navigator install was the ability to have emails hit their inbox when things needed Approval, either due to business process or for budget control. We’d spec out who got which notifications, all the nuances. One to two weeks later, they’d have it disabled.

Why? For a small array of reasons, but the two biggest reasons were: “I have to open up Navigator to approve it anyway, so why should the trigger be in my mail box?” and “I got 120 emails this morning alone!”

Starting in Serenic Navigator 5.0 Improvement 2, E-Mail Approvals got an overhaul of dramatic proportions:

• Approval and Budget emails can now be batched into regularly scheduled digests, so you can minimize Inbox insanity
• The Merge Field logic used in Email Templates was updated. Remember “%3 = Document No.”? Now you won’t have to. It supports “[Document No.]” instead. Out of the box, the Merge logic can pull in values from the Line Distribution Buffer of the transaction, the Approval Processing Line, and the Email Ledger Entry, allowing you to really add all the details you might need to see at a glance.
• If using the new “Combine Lines in Approval Processing” functionality of Approval and Budget Rules, Email Templates can have separate headers and lines, making it clear what is the whole document, and still providing line by line detail
• The email handling system was updated, so that it’s easier to deploy in non-Exchange based environments
• The ability to link directly to the Approval Portal was added to the Email Engine

That last one sounds unimportant, but in reality, has some pretty big implications. If you setup the Approval Portal, from an email, a user can process approvals without ever opening Navigator. This means that if your organization requires the approval of department heads, team leaders, and others who may not need access to Navigator, you can deploy the Approval Portal and still allow them access to approve documents. This allows you to extend the control of Navigator into parts of your organization that it may never have gone before.

There are still licensing implications, so make sure to talk to your Serenic Partner about Approval Portal and Portal User costs.
_________________
JEREMY VYSKA
SMALL SQUARE SERVICES

Thanks again for the post!

By Donna Smiley

Here’s the first confession—I’m in the last year of being able to say ‘I’m forty-something’ and I’m only six months away from being an empty-nester.  So, naturally, I decided to take a moment to assess my life!  I found myself wondering how someone who started out wanting to be a pharmacist earned a degree, instead, in Environmental Science, and then ends up in software product management.

Almost all of the product managers I know appear to have an innate need to break down the complex into simple, individual components.  In fact, they are almost annoying with the need to get at the root of everything and I’ve concluded that their need to understand how something works and to look for ways to improve it is just a fundamental part of their DNA.  It’s very likely that there were signs of this behavior even at an early age.  Maybe a future PM took apart their Mom’s sewing machine because the mystery surrounding how the movement of the needle and the bobbin resulted in the stitches in the fabric was just too great to ignore.  By the way, my brother took the fall for that incident so let’s just keep that confession between us!

In addition to providing a less destructive way to employ my analytical skills, I also found that product management presented me with a creative outlet. Envisioning and designing a solution requires me to mold and sculpt the ideas swimming around in my head until they come together in what I think of as a piece of software art.

So, having an instinctive need to analyze processes and the ability to apply a creative lens to the work certainly helped to build a foundation for becoming a product manager.  But, the real turning point for me was—and continues to be—the moment when the person using the software smiles and tells me “That’s it—you get it!  This is going to make it so much easier to do my job.” It is in that moment that I realize how much I love my profession because what we build at Serenic really does impact people’s lives.

Which leads me to my final confession—in my 20 years of working with software solutions, I have never worked with a more exciting product than Navigator 2009.  So even though the sign says, “Keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times,” I say throw your arms up because it feels like you’re flying!

Please watch for my future confessions (from a PM’s perspective) about Navigator 2009 and all the software art being created at Serenic.

by Brandon Taylor

Having a hard time understanding exactly what Web services are?  As an important piece of the new Navigator 2009 product, here’s an explanation from Brandon Taylor – VP Product Strategy & Development.

What are Web Services?

Web services are a combination of frameworks, specifications and protocols used to support integration from one application to another. They are standardized, widely understood, supported by a lot of tools and most importantly, now supported in Serenic Navigator 2009.

A more detailed description can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_services.

So what does this really mean for Navigator 2009 now and in the future? To use the old adage, “a picture is better than a thousand words.”  With a web service interface between Navigator 2009 and Microsoft Excel®, the screen shot below shows how it is possible to read and update vendor data directly in Excel.

How does Excel know how to do this?  It doesn’t. Through code, we make a call using the Dynamics NAV WS (Web Service) service to connect to the Navigator database and request that it return all of the vendor records. Excel is just the client that displays the results. You could just have well used any client that supports web services to request the same vendor data. In the next screen shot we use the same Excel call, but this time the data is displayed in Internet Explorer. You get the idea. Web services are the framework that standardizes how this is accomplished.

Does this mean any client application can update vendor data in the Navigator database with invalid data? No, if coded correctly, the business logic that validates data input now resides on the service tier under the new 3 tier architecture. This means that the role tailored client (RTC) and any other application (Excel in this example) executes the same business logic. For example, if you attempted to update a vendor record with an incorrect fund number, when Excel requests to update the record through web services, the server would return (through web services) an error that the fund is invalid. This is the same error message that you would receive in the RTC as it is executing the exact same business logic.

The real power of web services is that any client application that supports the correct framework and protocol can access Navigator 2009. The same is true in reverse. The RTC has built in client extensibility to integrate with other applications utilizing the same web service protocols. Below is an example of a weather control incorporated directly into the Navigator RTC.

Web services integration provides endless capabilities. If in doubt, Google, “Microsoft Dynamics NAV web services.” I like to use the analogy of iPhone apps. As Microsoft continues to evolve support for additional industry standard specifications and protocols, integrating with Navigator will continue to get easier and easier. This initial release is truly foundational for all good things to come.

Here are some additional references. I highly recommend the NAV blog.

http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2002/02/12/webservicefaqs.html

http://blogs.msdn.com/nav/

If you haven’t heard, Serenic Navigator 2009—fund accounting software for nonprofits, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the public sector—has just been released!   Our newest release is built on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 platform, and enables quick adoption for increased productivity throughout nonprofit organizations.  Navigator 2009 users will enjoy a new User Interface (UI) and greatly enhanced User Experience (UX).

New product features and functionality include:

• A RoleTailored Client: provides employees with personalized Role Centers that give a comprehensive overview of information and tasks most relevant to their jobs right on their desktops. This simplifies the overall user experience and leads to faster adoption among users.

• A Three-Tier Architecture and built-in support for Web services: makes it easy to connect to other applications and share data, while helping maintain data integrity and security.

• Tight Integration with Microsoft Office: enables employees to access Outlook, Excel and Word directly from their Role Centers.

Serenic President and CEO Randy Keith let us in on his thoughts, adding, “It provides the power of an ERP system without the typical complexity, because users can personalize the system based on their specific roles and responsibilities.”

For more information, check out our fact sheet or case study.  And if you’re a user, let us know what you think—good, bad and ugly—we want to hear it!