Last month (23^rd – 25^th April), Claus Lundstrøm and I took to the road and drove all the way from Vedbæk to Netherlands and Belgium to meet one of our would-be TAP Partners and attend the launch of Belgian Dynamics Community respectively. The camaraderie and dedication of Dynamics enthusiasts in Belgium was exemplary and compelled me to write a blog entry here in our team blog. You can read a lot more details about it on Waldo’s blog post but I wanted to highlight some of our takeaways from this highly successful event.

Firstly I am reminded of my first ever Microsoft Windows NT Developers’ Conference back in 1992(!) here in Brussels, Belgium – anyone remember that? Belgium is an amazingly convenient place to get to, it has friendly people who speak multiple languages and are really glad to help you, to work with you and fast forward to 2008 this event was no exception! The event organizers had worked tirelessly at their own expense to put together the event, agenda, logistics and gather sponsors and by any measure the event was a sellout success. They registered over 250 participants and had over 200 show up despite traffic delays and Microsoft members being invited to Steve Ballmer 1:1 session the very same evening.

The event location was a picture perfect castle with cooperative weather despite some rain showers earlier. We got there for lunch, discussed logistics and parted ways in search of our hotel for the night stay (good thing we did that, as it took us nearly all the spare time we had before the event late evening to sort out mix-up with our booking and find the new hotel). By the time we came back, venue was transformed for the launch event, people were already arriving in hoards. The organizers provided meals, beverages, snacks, champagne, wine throughout the evening and kept all the participants happy. The keynote was presented by Marc Charlier who recently moved from SAP to lead Dynamics Marketing in Benelux region. I followed up with a high-level MBS Strategy / Roadmap presentation. A Coffee break followed where most audience were interested in future direction of NAV in relation to Managed Platform. I was very interested in hearing their opinions and surely got plentiful of it. Claus followed then with a detailed hands on demos of NAV 2009 product with focus on Page and Report design, customization and personalization. His usage of image fields to demo pages (with fact boxes) and interactive reports was extremely effective and audience were clearly impressed with the power and ease of use of NAV 2009.

Everyone seemed to know everyone else! It was very nice to see people mingling with one another, catching up on their projects, place of work, and life. Majority of attendees were Dynamics NAV enthusiasts but Dynamics CRM, & Dynamics AX had their followings too. What followed was a raffle and party where we received over-attention (signing away NAV books as stars) and a fare share of wining, dining and dancing till wee hours of the morning. If you would like to see pictures from the event follow this link.

Dynamics Community in Belgium is a shining example of what communities are all about - they are for the people, by the people who share a common interest. We at Microsoft are very thankful for this community’s interest in Dynamics NAV, it is an integral part of the entire echo system around MBS products as it helps nurture growth of our business organically by bringing like minded people together to share their experiences, ideas, & opinions, voice their concerns, collaborate on projects & network with one another. The Belgium Dynamics Community is off to a great start and I wish them successful years ahead.

- Naveen Garg

It's been a busy couple of months since I last posted a blog, and I have learned a ton.  Back then my stated near-term goal was to learn about the team, the product, partners and customers.  During that time, I've had a lot of the feedback I asked for - feedback about what you love, what you don't love, and what you wish you could love about Dynamics NAV.  I've heard it from team members, at Convergence in Orlando, at Directions EMEA in Paris, and at many other ad hoc meetings with customers and partners.  Overall, it's been a wonderful experience learning about Dynamics NAV.

The main piece of feedback that I received has been, "when can I get NAV 2009"?  The same thing has happened to the people asking this question as has happened to me.  If you went to Convergence North America this year or attended Jan's and my keynote at Directions EMEA, you've heard about our User Experience team's aspiration to make a user interface that users love.  Well, they succeeded with the Role-Tailored Client in NAV 2009.  I love it!  Not only does it capture the essence of NAV's core values - simplicity, ease-of-use, and flexibility, it has an elegance and beauty that is unparalleled in the industry.  This is by far my favorite product to demo.  As for when it will be available, we're on track to ship this fall, as I mentioned back in February.  In the meantime, as a registered partner, you can download a VPC image of a CTP3 ("customer technology preview v3") today and see the accompanying video introduction on PartnerSource. 

I mentioned previously that the stakeholders of this product are very passionate, something that I think really drives its overall excellence.  I'd like to elaborate on that a bit.  Last month, I was at Directions EMEA in Disneyland Paris.  (For someone who grew up in Florida, it took some time to get used to Donald Duck and Goofy saying bon jour! )  It was there that I really understood what the NAV partner community was about.  There was a buzz in the air about all the products and the companies that collectively make up the NAV ecosystem.  Walt Disney said that the secret to making dreams come true is the four C's - curiosity, confidence, constancy, and courage.  He especially admired courage.  "When you believe a thing," he said, "believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably."  That was courage to him.  To me, Directions in both North America and EMEA – how it was established and the momentum that it’s gained – is the manifestation of Disney’s definition of courage.  For all of you who have been involved in Directions, whether as founders, contributors, or attendees, thank you from the Dynamics NAV team.  In fact, the four C's have been in full force in every partner or customer meeting I’ve been in, as I suspect they are everywhere people are around the world are working on the NAV ecosystem and using the NAV products.

That goes for the team at Microsoft as well.  This team is excited about the product and can't wait to get it in your hands.  I'm not the only one who recognizes this.  In one of the videos from the "Speak Your Mind" kiosks at Convergence in March, one person said the following: "NAV offers great functionality in the product … the team shows tangible enthusiasm … they treat the audience like they were smart and significant about the business issues … Hats off to the NAV team - they were perfect!"  We gushed when we saw the video.  But we feel the same way about our customers and our partners, and I think that's why our enthusiasm is so evident.

Sincerely,

-Dan

Introduction

Dynamics NAV 2009 contains a new subsystem for dealing with Web Services. This feature has been well received by partners and customers alike. Partners have expressed interest in having web services available for earlier versions of Dynamics NAV. This feedback resulted in a technology talk at Directions2007 in Florida, where the topic was what could be done to day. The conclusion of the talk was that everything we where intending to deliver was already possible today, yes some code is needed but strictly from function/feature perspective all of it is possible, and it is not even all that ugly. Dynamics NAV 2009 will provide out-of-the-box programmatic web service access to the application and will therefore remove the need for this additional technology plumbing described here.

I have to say that the response to my talk has been tremendous. After the response to my talk on Web Services in NAV 5.0 and previous versions I decided to write this blog post and make the source files available.

This post is about how to bridge the gap between the need for web services now and the current platform, it will help you understand how you can provide Web Services directly from Dynamics NAV today, in a “simple” and flexible way, already today.

To work with the samples in this post you will need: Visual Studio 2005, Dynamics NAV 5.0 and .Net 3.0 installed on your system. This sample should work on Dynamics NAV 4.0 to but has not been tested on that version.

Architecture

The system we will build contains 4 different components/moving parts: Web Service Listener, Event Dispatcher, Codeunit Eventhandler and XMLPort for stream handling.

Web Service Consumer

Any client that understands how to communicate with Web Services; like InfoPath, Visual Studio, SharePoint or any custom application written by you.

Port

Is the physical communication port that the WCF listens to.

WCF Web Service

Defines the data contracts and service contracts for the Web Service, it also implements the concrete service and opens for listening in the WCF subsystem, it then delegates the requests to the COM Event Dispatcher component.

COM Event Dispatcher

This component provides the hookups for Dynamics NAV, both to activate the service and to register event sinks. It defines 2 IDispatch interfaces the IServiceEvents and the IWebServiceListner, as well as the concrete implementation of the IWebServiceListner in the WebServiceListner class that provides the actual code for hooking up the WCF Web Service to Dynamics NAV.

.NET

We are using the CLR runtime for writing our Web Service component and our COM plugin. Some of this blog entry is about interop between Dynamics NAV and .NET through COM.

Codeunit Event Handler

Is responsible for starting up the WCF Web Service through the COM interface, it then registered for events coming from the WCF Web Service Component. The events routed to XMLPort for processing.

XMLPorts for datastreams

It deals with the actual business logic and data coming from or going to the Web Service.

Implementation

The implementation is in 2 programming languages: C# and C/AL.

Please take a look at the provided code sample, for the rest of the information contained in the posting. It can be found here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nav/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=896

I have included comments in the code that should explain what is going on, if you feel something is missing, first look at the documentation for the WCF or post a comment to this post and I will try to answer it.

Deployment of Sample

To deploy the sample you will first have to download it, unpack it.

Then open it up with Visual Studio and compile.

Then import the codeunit.txt and xmlport.txt into your NAV installation and compile those objects, starting with the XMLPort

To run the service simply open the Object Designer in NAV, find the Codeunit that you just imported and press run.

There is no dependency on IIS or other external components. No further deployment steps should be needed.

In the Visual studio solution is a ConsoleTestApp project. After you have followed the steps above you can run that project, it will test if your install was successful, as well as provide sample on how to use the web service.

Special considerations

In this sample I’m using XMLPort to handle the XML stream that is provided.

You can take many different approaches to this, and still reuse large please of the code provided in the sample.

To use the XMLPort as handler you will have to set the encoding property to UTF-8. This is due to a null termination bug in stream handler in NAV.

With this approach you can already today, incorporate web services in your projects in straightforward way.

The appropriate usage is whenever you need to give external application access to Dynamics NAV data or business process.

For any questions or comments please feel free to ask them in the comment section of this blog post.  I will answer questions to best of my ability on this post in the comments section as well.

One last thing:  This is a sample code.  It has not been tested, you should thoroughly test this code before usage.

Best regards,
Kris Rafnsson

We get a couple of questions asked quite regularly: “How can I make my ERP system SEPA compliant” and a more basic one “What is SEPA? And how does this affect my daily work?” With this blog entry I’ll try to answer these questions.

SEPA is short for Single European Payment Area – which is set up by the European Commission as a political agreement to reinforce the Economic Monetary Union. The goal is to form a single market for payment transactions within the European Economic Area. One of the ways to do this is to create a set of standards for electronic payments using ISO20022 XML format together with a set of rules and guidelines as to how Euro payments must be handled. With SEPA fully implemented, all electronic payments in Euro within the SEPA area will be regarded as domestic payments - even if they are cross-border payments.

With a common standard it will be easier to process payments, which will lead to more efficiency in the banking system and hopefully lower prices. It will also make it possible for companies that have business activities in many countries to only interact with one bank, since the cross-border payment is assumed to be the same as the domestic payment. The long term vision is that this standard can expand and also be used in other areas such as e-invoicing and e-reconciliation.

The SEPA implementation is still in its early stages. In January 2008, the SEPA instruments for Credit Transfer became available to be used. The Credit Transfer standard will be initially used for interbank relationships with regards to cross boarder euro payments within the SEPA Countries. Banks which talks about SEPA compliant refer to this fact, meaning that they are able to create these kinds of transfers. It is important to note that right now it is only required that banks can use this format when dealing with each other; it is not required that customers adhere to these standards in either customer-to-customer or customer-to-bank situations. It is also important to note that the SEPA only covers Euro transactions – not other currencies.

Looking forward it is expected that national instruments for credit transfers, direct debits and cards are replaced by the relevant SEPA instruments by 2010 and that customers will be able to use the standards for creating electronic payments.

This will affect Microsoft Dynamics NAV customers that have banking relationships within Europe. Short term there will not be a big difference – it will not be required that customers use the SEPA standard, when they interact with their bank. Furthermore it is also only a few banks that can accept the format today. It will be possible to ask the bank for a SEPA Credit Transfer, but it will be the bank that creates the file in the proper format. It is anticipated that many of the banks within the SEPA region will be able to receive a SEPA Credit Transfer in the near future, but it is expected that there will be a transition period where they accept the old electronic formats.

One thing to prepare for is that both Bank Identifier Code (BIC) and the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is a crucial part of the SEPA standard. These two identifiers are needed to process a SEPA Credit Transfer. This mean these numbers will have to be correct when an electronic payment is created and is something that the customers can prepare for by requiring that these fields are used and updated when a customer or a supplier is created or updated in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

One question that we also hear and want to comment on is “If I want to make a SEPA payment, am I required to create an ISO 20022 compliant XML file”? The answer to this is both Yes and No:

• No because all you need to make a SEPA payment, is to instruct the bank to process the payment according to the SEPA rules.  In short, this means that the payment must be in euros within the EEA and IBAN and BIC must be supplied.  There are several ways to create this payment:
1. A company or individual can make a payment using the software provided by their bank.  The necessary information can be entered via the banking software.  The bank must then process the payment according to the SEPA rules.
2. A company or individual can create a payment file and upload this to the bank for further processing.  This file may be an ISO 20022 XML file, but it is not mandatory.  A bank can offer to accept the existing payment files and process these according to SEPA rules if they are able to fill in missing information such as IBAN or BIC to fulfill the SEPA rules.  The bank is free to charge a fee for this conversion service. 
• Yes because a bank is free to demand that ISO 20022 XML files are supplied in order to process payments according to the SEPA rules – It depends on your bank.

There are many places on the internet where it is possible to get more information on what SEPA is and what it means to businesses in EU and to banks. Many banks are also aware of the changes to come and what effect it has to their customers. I hope that the points above indicate that SEPA is an interesting new standard that potentially can make it possible to make interactions between Microsoft Dynamics NAV and banks more effective. From our perspective a common standard will make it possible for us to create bank integration that can serve more than one country or one bank – given that the banks stick to one schema! In the short term the thing to keep in mind is that it is possible to prepare for this by updating the data on supplies and customers, so that the creation of a SEPA compliant credit transfer can be created when it is required.

Some facts around SEPA

1. The purpose with SEPA is to create standardized payment instruments that can be used within all SEPA countries. The goal is to simplify and reduce the cost of payment flows, to facilitate trade and commerce and to strengthen the competitiveness.
2. The European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB) are responsible for introducing and administrating SEPA
3. The countries involved in the SEPA agreements are: All member states in the Euro Zone incl. the EEA countries that are not part of the EU (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway) and Switzerland.
4. The SEPA Schemas defines a common set of rules, processes, service levels and timeframe for each of the payment instruments. The ISO20022 is the standard for these payment instruments.
5. Banks can adhere to the compliance requirements and thus become SEPA compliant. There is no corresponding compliance requirements for ERP solutions at the moment.
6. SEPA covers the following payment instruments
• Credit transfers
• Direct Debits
• Cards
7. Payment Service Directive (PSD) is the legal framework approved by EC and applied to all EU member states. It provides a new EU-wide licensing regime for Payment Institutions, so that non-bank payment service providers can offer their services across the eurozone. The PSD provides rules for information requirements which Payment service providers must fulfill. This applies both to SEPA and to existing national payment products.
8. Businesses are not required to make SEPA payments from January 2008. It will be possible to use both national payments standards and SEPA standards in a transfer period. SEPA payments are not anticipated to be able to replace national payment instruments until end 2010 in some of the involved countries. In some it will even be later.
• Several countries (for instance Belgium, Finland, Portugal and Spain) have committed to phase out the old payment instruments by 2010
• Some countries are committing to an extended deadline (for instance, Netherlands has committed to a deadline of 2013, France has committed to a deadline of 2010 for cards, 2011 for credit transfers and 2012 for direct debits)
• Many countries (for instance Germany, Austria and Ireland) have not indicated a migration deadline
9. A SEPA credit transfer is a payment from one company or individual to another company or individual. The payment must be in euros and it transaction must include IBAN and BIC for both parties. One important point to remember is that credit transfers should be conducted between parties by means of XML files that comply with ISO 20022 payment processing standards and the XML format as specified by the European Payments Commission.
10. SEPA Directs Debits are somewhat different from the national direct debits. The existing direct debits payments can only be done with each domestic market. It is not possible to collect a direct debit from a customer’s bank account in another country. With SEPA it will be allowed to have direct debit transactions from customer bank accounts in the EU. The adoption of SEPA direct debits requires new European legislation (the Payment Services Directive) that must be transposed by the legislatures in each of the EU Member States by 1 November 2009.

Interesting links

From the European Payment Council

http://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/content.cfm?page=sepa_vision

From the European Central Bank

http://www.ecb.int/paym/sepa/html/index.en.html

From the European Commission

http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/payments/sepa/index_en.htm

- Rikke Lassen

Help!

Greetings from the Microsoft Dynamics NAV User Education team. We are the team responsible for application and platform documentation, including online Help, the Application Designer’s Guide, and install and config manuals. You’ve made some complaints, and we’ve been listening. Your feedback says that it’s difficult to find the Help information you need, and the content that’s there is “superficial” and “inadequate.“ As the team’s new Content Architect, I have been working with UE writers, editors and managers to make sure you have a better experience with the next release. In this post, I want to share a couple of the changes we’re making to the NAV docs for the next version: to describe business and development processes, and establish better discoverability of information.

How Do I…

Internally, we’ve been calling one new topic type, “How Do I” topics, because they’re written to answer the question, “How do I perform this process?” Here’s a draft of one of these topics, which basically answers the question, “How do I create new vendor accounts?”

(click image to see larger size)

The links at the top of the topic indicate where you are in the larger process – in this case, you are creating new vendor accounts as part of the section, Configure Purchase Processes , in the Purchasing department. The content of the topic includes overview information on the general sequence of tasks you perform to achieve a business or development goal, and then the table describes and links to topics to help you complete that goal. For application documentation, the processes are based on the customer model (http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/product/familiartoyourpeople.mspx).

Walkthroughs

Walkthrough topics provide end-to-end processes comprised of two or more tasks. Using the CRONUS International Ltd. demo company, the walkthrough tasks enable you to learn the steps involved in a process before you perform them using your own data. Application walkthroughs provide the beginning-to-end steps for processes like tracking sales campaign results, or calculating work in progress for a job. Development walkthroughs step you through processes like designing a customer sales order report.

In coming weeks, we will begin sharing specific versions of these topics with you, and hope you’ll give us feedback on how well they meet your needs, and the specific content you’d like to see us develop.

Discoverability

We’ve had a lot of feedback that finding information in the NAV documentation is difficult, so we’re working on improving discoverability from several angles. In previous versions, platform documentation has been delivered in nearly 20 different manuals. We’re compiling some of the most strategic of these manuals into online Help files for development, installation, and C/SIDE reference. These logical collections reduce the number of places you have to look for information, and since they’re Help files, you get the benefit of other discoverability aids like Search, an index, and a table of contents. In addition, platform documentation is going to be published in the MSDN library, for easy online access to topics.

Other discoverability improvements include:

• Role-based link pages that provide links to topics relevant to about 15 of the most common user roles.
• Table of Contents remodel to incorporate all topics (except for field Help) into the table of contents, organized around the processes the topics support. This way, the TOC provides at-a-glance information about where you are in a process, and other information related to the topic you’re reading.
• New overview topics like the one pictured above that provide navigation to high-level process topics, and link to the topics that support them.
• Major index overhaul to make the index easier to use and a lot more robust. This includes adding keywords for business terms to help bridge the gap between NAV functionality and the terms you more commonly use for your tasks.

Again, we welcome any suggestions, concerns, hopes, and fears you have regarding these plans or on the documentation as a whole. You can contact us directly at nav-olh@microsoft.com. And if you are traveling to Convergence next week, please attend the User Education sessions we are running, on enabling partners to extend NAV Help, and on transforming forms for use in the RoleTailored client. Specific details are below.

NAV Help Extensibility
Tuesday, March 11, 12:30-1:30
Room W311E

NAV 2009 Form Transformation
Thursday, March 13, 12:30-1:30
Room W311E

- Michelle Fredette

As you may have heard, last week the MBS team announced that Darren Laybourn will be taking a new position as General Manager of the Outlook Mobile team at Microsoft.  We also announced that I would become the new General Manager for Dynamics NAV and Mobility and continue to report to Hal Howard, who will now run all of MBS ERP R & D.  As a part of my new role, my family and I will relocate from Seattle to Copenhagen, where I will work at the Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC).  In this blog post, I want to introduce myself and invite your questions or comments about these changes.

Before I do that, however, I want to thank Darren for his contribution to MBS, Dynamics NAV, and Dynamics Mobility.  Darren is a true veteran of this business, having been with the combination of Great Plains Software and Microsoft Business Solutions for over 15 years.  He's had an incredible, positive impact on our customers, and he's been a mentor for me through most of my career at Microsoft.

Let me start my introduction with a very brief bio.  I've been with Microsoft for about six years, working on the Microsoft Business Framework, Project Fenway, and Dynamics AX.  Before joining Microsoft in 2002, I ran the R & D group for a Silicon Valley start-up called Bistro that built workflow-based business applications (including financials management) for small-to-medium sized businesses.  The rest of my career has been in IT consulting for large companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Ryder, Diners Club, and American Express.  In short, I've worked on business applications my entire career and am no stranger to metadata, journal posting, and complex business value chains, on which our customers' success is predicated.

Nonetheless, I'm new to NAV and have a lot of learning to do.  But one of the first things that I've learned is just how passionate all the stakeholders of this product are, whether they are customers, partners, or employees.  It's people like you, the readers of this blog, that are making this product and the customers that use it, a success.  Thank you for your support, and I hope I get a chance to meet you, work with you, and learn about the things you love, don't love, or wish you could love about NAV.

In the meantime, the NAV organization will continue moving forward according to our current roadmap, including NAV 5.0 SP1 this March and NAV 6.0 at the end of the calendar year.  Our priorities haven't changed, and our commitment to the NAV product is as strong as ever.  I’m excited by the future that lies ahead for NAV customers, NAV partners, and the NAV team itself!

I look forward to hearing your questions and comments about the changes.

Sincerely,

- Dan Brown

One of the top customer questions we receive in the Fixed Assets area is about starting to use Fixed Assests instead of General Ledger.

For example, a company wants to start using the Fixed Assets module from the 1^st of January 2002. Acquisitions and depreciations have been posted in the general ledger until the 31^st of December 2001. Fixed assets are created in the following way:

1. Disable the General Ledger integration. This is done on the Depreciation Book Card.
2. Create a card and a depreciation profile for each fixed asset. If a fixed asset has been depreciated using the Straight-Line method until now and the company wants to continue to depreciate the fixed asset by exactly the same amount, the yearly depreciation amount can be entered in the field Fixed Depr. Amount. This is done on the fixed asset card and its lines.
3. Create and post 2 lines for each fixed asset in the Fixed Asset Journal. One line with the fixed asset’s acquisition cost; FA Posting Date should be the fixed asset’s original acquisition date. And one line with the fixed asset’s accumulated depreciation as posted in the general ledger; for this line the FA Posting Date must be the 31^st of December 2001. Instead of one line with the fixed asset’s accumulated depreciations, you can create and post one line with the depreciations for each year the fixed asset has been depreciated, but the last line must have the 31^st of December 2006 as FA Depreciation Date.
   Having the 31^st of December 2001 as FA Depreciation Date for the last entry is important, because only then can the batch job Calculate Depreciation calculate the correct depreciation for 2002.
4. If a fixed asset has been appreciated, enter and post a line in the Fixed Asset Journal. FA Posting Type must be Appreciation and the FA Posting Date should be the original appreciation date.
   If a fixed asset has been written down, enter and post a line in the Fixed Asset Journal. FA Posting Type must be Write-Down and the FA Posting Date should be the date of the original write down.
5. Check that the book value is correct for all fixed assets.
6. Enable the General Ledger integration and make all future postings in the Fixed Asset G/L Journal.

- Henrik Sonne

In an effort to continue to provide our customers and partners with a stronger set of tools for their businesses, the Jobs area of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 was redesigned and many new features were added to the module.  Some really exciting functionality to help with productivity and flexibility such as an entire new budget structure and features like fixed item pricing, foreign currency functionality, copy job, calculate remaining usage, journal improvements and better integration with item tracking, costing and service management have been very well received. 

However, it’s been brought to our attention that some customers and partners are having an issue with the new functionality.  In Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0, the purchasing process is initiated in the purchase invoice when some customers business processes dictate that they start the process in the purchase order.  Technically there is little change in the underlying functionality between releases – in both 4.0 and 5.0 ledger entries for the job were not created until the invoice is posted.  This said, we can completely understand the issue and a fix allowing users to start the process in the purchase order will be in Microsoft Dynamics NAV "6.0" and we are currently investigating the issue with 5.0.  For the time being, if you upgrade 5.0 and are dependent on purchase order functionality with the Jobs area, you will experience an issue.

Some customers have also had an issue with dimensions on WIP (work in progress) in the Jobs module in 5.0.  A fix for job WIP dimensions will be shipped in SP1 and is already included in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV "6.0" code.

We are making a site on both Partner and CustomerSource that will link you to a short whitepaper outlining the change in functionality from 4.0 to 5.0 in more detail.  I will post again when I have links are available to these sites.

- Selena Breann Jensen

The whitepaper Whats New Developing Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV "6.0" was released late last year and gives an overview of some of the new features and how to access those new features specific to NAV 6.0.

The paper has been under development for nearly as long as the NAV 6.0 project itself.   At the beginning of the Corsica project, two events occurred that drove its creation. The first was the persona model was being driven as a toolset across development teams – this is exactly the same persona model you can find here and is a fantastic tool for unifying terminology and understanding of which users we’re targeting on our feature teams.  Until we had the persona model, we used use cases that merely stated “an experienced developer blah blah blah”, and now we had Simon, Isaac and Mort to target our features to.

The second event was that as the development team that created the C/AL to .NET compiler was formed and there was a request from the Testers in the team to diagram and specify how developers worked.  As hard as I could, I was not able to argue that everybody already knows how developers work. The Testers insisted that if everyone knew how developers worked then it should be easy to capture it in a simplistic way.

I’m glad they argued.

So I began writing a document called Simon Goes to Work.  Simon in honour of the persona closest to a classical NAV consultant/developer .  In writing the use cases and drawing the diagrams for how developers move from code to compilation to deployment and from setup/installation to upgrades and from backups and restores, we identified a host of issues.  Without going into details, it gave us a handle on a specific special scenario that we could theory-test against our design.   It was the cause for some redesign and is generally considered a good thing that we did it.

But wait … there’s more.

After the development teams had been plugging away at this project for some time, we began to get questions from other internal MS groups.  Questions about the features and how they should be described and positioned (i.e., how to sell them to our partner channel/why we consider them valuable).  This is really something that happens on the tail end of projects – documenting the value of the features that we set out at the beginning of the project to achieve.  At that point, it was far simpler to share the Simon document with them to answer the questions about how things worked.

In the end, we got lots of feedback from the internal teams with questions and we elaborated more and more to the Simon document until the realization occurred that this document not only answered a lot of questions for internal Microsoft Team Members, but it might also be a good read in preparing people for what is to come on NAV 6.0.  Naturally you wouldn’t expect Microsoft standard naming conventions to be supportive of a whitepaper called Simon Goes to Work so after enough committees and focus groups, it eventually grew the name it has today.

We haven’t really written a paper like this before but it does fill a place answering some common questions about NAV 6.0.  I hope you get a chance to look it over and hope it helps understanding another piece of the 6.0 puzzle.

Download What's New - Developing Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV "6.0" (PartnerSource access required)

- Stuart Glasson

One of the top customer questions we receive in the Fixed Assets area is about correcting Acquisition Cost Errors.

For example, an acquisition cost has by mistake been posted the 1^st of May 2002 instead of the 1^st of May 2001. The mistake is corrected by removing the entry with the function Cancel Entries and then posting the acquisition with the correct date. The function Cancel Entries is on the FA Ledger Entries form.

It would be inappropriate to use the function Reverse Transactions. The function Cancel Entries removes the entries from the FA Ledger Entries form and transfers them to the form FA Error Ledger Entries, whereas the function Reverse Transactions posts an entry with the opposite sign. Therefore, the batch job Calculate Depreciation cannot depreciate the fixed asset until the 1^st of May 2002 if the function Reverse Transactions is used.

Note that Cancel Entries is a function specifically made for the fixed asset functional area whereas Reverse Transactions is a more general function for all general ledger postings.

- Henrik Sonne.

Convergence 2008 is on the horizon - March 11-14 in Orlando, Florida.

The preliminary agenda only showed a few Dynamics NAV sessions, but has recently been updated revealing the full glory of NAV-iness at the Conference.  This year's Convergence will have more sessions than ever before: currently 3 partner sessions, 1 customer general session, 28 breakouts and 10 interactive discussion sessions.  See the session catalog for details.

Register here. 

(Early Bird Registration finishes today, so move fast if you want to take advantage of that.)

Convergence is a great event for anyone involved with Dynamics products.  We hope to see you in Orlando!

- Ilana Smith

One of the most important features (if not the most important) of Dynamics NAV ‘6.0’ is the innovative RoleTailored user experience (UX). As the name indicates, the aim of this is to make the content and layout of the screens fit the needs of the various roles of an organization, so there is one UI for the Order Processor, one for the Bookkeeper, one for the Warehouse Worker etc.

But hey, you might think, if I’m an NAV user, how would anyone know exactly which information or tasks I want or need to be available on the various screens I’m using? The answer to that is obviously not, only the user knows exactly what he or she really needs. This is why we made end user personalization a priority when we planned NAV ‘6.0’. The idea is that both when the system originally is implemented the various Roles and pages of ‘6.0’ will be customized to fit the needs of the customer - you could say that it is RoleTailored for the organization. But when each individual user begins using the system they will have their own preferences as to what is displayed and how it is displayed. And for each page in the system, each user can make their own changes and theses changes are being kept in the database so they will travel with the user from PC to PC.

So what can the user change? Well let’s take the Sales Order page as an example:

(click image to see larger size)

Action Pane

The blue area on the top it what we call the ActionPane and the purpose of this is to give 1-click access to actions or other menu items that are relevant and frequently used while editing or viewing the Sales Order. The user can add or remove actions from a list of relevant actions and can furthermore change the size of the icons to make the most frequently used more accessible. In case the user for some reason doesn’t want the ActionPane visible it can also be removed from the page.

FastTabs

If we move down we come to the FastTabs, and as you can see we have made some significant changes to the layout. By the new design we have made it possible to have more than one tab visible at the same time but we have also made it possible to have selected fields visible even if a FastTab is collapsed.

The personalization of the FastTabs is very rich. The user can decide which FastTabs to have visible, which fields are visible both when it is expanded and when it is collapsed, and as a supplement additional fields can be added that only are visible if the user expands the FastTab.

On the Lines you can obviously choose columns and their order, but we have also added a little nifty feature so you can freeze selected columns to the left which is really helpful when scrolling. (and in case you were wondering, YES it will be possible to have more than one line in the header by the time we release J)

FactBoxes

Moving to the right we have the area with the FactBoxes that display information that is related to the content that has focus on the page, but also allows you to drill down to the details of that related information. So you could have a FactBox with additional information for the item with focus on the Lines and from there drill down to investigate substitution items etc.

Here the user can chose which FactBoxes are visible and for each FactBox which fields are shown. Also here the FactBoxes can be removed completely in case the user should want this.

Following personalization the Sales Order page could look like this:

(click image to see larger size)

Very different content but clearly still the Sales Order page, but now with the “Personal Touch”.

With this rich personalization functionality we believe that we will enable not only a RoleTailoring of the NAV UI but actually a “UserTailoring”, that truly will allow each individual user to create the work environment and become more productive and effective than with a more traditional UI.

Kim Ibfelt
Director, Program Management

RFID technology simply put will someday become just as universal as barcodes are today bringing fully automated inventory management, asset tracking, retail checkouts benefits for all of us as consumers, retailers, distributors, shippers, manufacturers, suppliers, shippers or any other entity in the entire product life-cycle.

In Dynamics NAV group, we started discussing how best to bring forward a RFID solution for our partners and customers quite some time ago. It was however always difficult to find enough resource in the group to justify significant investment compared to other competing priorities (delivering NAV 5.0, making progress on NAV 6.0, service pack…). However we simply could not ignore the importance of RFID.

In my early days with-in the group, I had naïvely assumed that RFID was only relevant to large retailers such as Walmart who could invest heavily for technology adoption in the early days. But then I saw the technology in action in the recently renovated Seattle public libraries, where I could check out a whole stack of books just by putting them at a small pad (seeing all the Titles pop-up on the screen automatically was quite a thrill for a tech geek! – see related story here.), I was a convert on its global adoption at all scales and sizes. Also I was reminded by my team member Stuart that RFID adoption will most likely follow the similar route to Bar Codes.

As industry big-wigs start mandating RFID tags from their partners on their inventory items, partners in turn will look for outsourcing RFID tags printing and stamping work to dedicated suppliers who will invest in RFID printing solutions. And thus every manufacturer, distributer from large to small will easily be able to outsource RFID labeling of their merchandise just as they did so for bar codes in the beginning creating a viable marketplace for RFID enabled tags and scanners in a very short span of time.

Now it was left for us to how to provide a solution in a timely manner that our partners and customers could benefit from. To begin with we chose Microsoft BizTalk RFID technology that provides a device independent platform for integrating various RFID scanners, printers and solutions. This technology platform coupled with power of Dynamics NAV gave us ample opportunity to build a showcase implementation.

We narrowed down scope of our efforts primarily based on available resources, time to market and partner considerations.  The end result is a white paper, coupled together with a sample implementation that helps our partners quickly get up to speed on Microsoft BizTalk RFID technology and build their own solutions using native extensibility and integration features of Dynamics NAV as they already know today. Note this sample itself is not a customer ready implementation, as it not only uses the sample RFID emulator device but also it uses a COM+ based events listener that is not ideal for production systems. Partners have already built numerous solutions using MSMQ or Microsoft SQL Server based integration solutions for Dynamics NAV and those will be better suited for production RFID systems.

Download the Dynamics NAV RFID Whitepaper and Sample Implementation (PartnerSource access required)

- Naveen Garg

In a lot of business contracts, you’ll find that payment either in full or partial has to be made before the order is handed over to fulfillment. Like in ordering imported items, made-to-order items, or simply when a customer has no previous record with the selling company.

On way of creating the proper documents for this is to create an invoice for the advance payment, and then remember to deduct it when the order is fulfilled and final invoicing is taking place. Common practice, but also one that relies heavily on the user tracking all the documents to an order, relies on someone to check if payments are received before order fulfillment, and one that is prone to errors when the advance payments is deducted on the final invoice.

In 5.0 we’re addressed the advance payment issue with the Prepayments feature. It allows the creation of Prepayment Invoices and it keeps track of the Prepayment Invoices so correct and full deduction can be automatically applied to the final invoice.

Many scenarios can be thought of in relation to advance payments so NAV 5.0 has functionality that allows the user to create a very diverse set of prepayments invoicing scenarios for both sales and purchase orders, including among others setting prepayments % or amounts for individual lines, setting a fixed prepayment amount, and controlling how the prepayment amount(s) are deducted as the order is fulfilled, e.g. when partially invoicing – all aiming at giving the user flexibility enough to accommodate the most common current business practices.

For a first release of a new feature it of course comes with limitations – some due to initial requirements, some due to time and resource scarcity in a release. Some are already being considered for improvement in coming versions. Three of the limitations are:

• The VAT setup relies on G/L account setup; this was due to the fact that this was intended more as a replacement for doing a manual extra invoice for any advance payments. Requests are that this be modified so it follows the items, e.g. prepayment VAT accounting is based on the specific content of the order.
• Invoice discounts are not included in the prepayment calculations, due to complexity when tracking multiple prepayment invoices, e.g. when updating an order and sending new prepayment invoice. This limits the scenarios with 100% prepayments combined with invoice discounts.
• Installments-like prepayments are not possible. There is no planning tool for issuing fixed interval prepayments, e.g. for larger order you could have fixed dates for multiple future advance payments. The Prepayment invoices must be created one by one.

Improvements on this limitation will happen as we gather feedback from market.

Brian Nielsen

Nobody ever wants to miss a commitment that they make, and with the move of our delivery date from H1 to H2 of 2008, that is the situation we as a Dynamics NAV R&D team find ourselves in right now.  This reality is very disappointing for all of us, and definitely not what we hoped for , but I have to say that I am as excited as I have ever been about the product we are building and I am confident that you will find that the product will definitely be worth the additional wait.

With our next version of Dynamics NAV we are making incredible leaps forward on the user experience and technology platform of the product. It was important that the market, our partners, and our customers understand the magnitude of this advance, thus we have updated the code name for this version from 5.1 to “6.0”. It is at minimum a full version worth of progress. The advances we have made include:

Darren Laybourn