September 2010

Design is one of a kind. Other phases in Sure Step are understood and accepted as good and necessary. But design, do we really do that? Is it really necessary? Who’s going to pay for it? Does the customer really need all those documents? Instead of writing documents, you could have it developed in the same, or less time.

Are you aware of the Special Offers on Microsoft Learning Products ? Well, you should be: Microsoft Learning website offers many fantastic bargains. There are two specific offers I’d like you to check, which are going to be there for a limited time only.

We old dogs really have to learn new tricks with RTC (RoleTailored Client), as I found out couple of days ago. A customer of mine asked me for a quick report. I don’t typically do reports, but I thought— “not a big deal, it’s just a report” —so I fixed it, tested it, made sure it worked, then deployed it to production.

“Perfect is the enemy of good” , a smart person said once. Another one said: “If it works, don’t mess with it.” So, I messed with it. I was trying to make it perfect. Over past couple of weeks, you might have experienced downtimes, or even errors such as 403 Access Forbidden or similar here on my blog.

While designing a custom functionality for a customer, there was an issue with posting groups: the way the custom functionality was designed would result in value entries being always posted to a single posting group, resulting in inventory balances always going to the same inventory account.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV comes packed with a set of predefined roles for many tasks such as editing or posting journals, creating sales orders, editing fixed assets, etc. It also comes packed with a SUPER role, which can do just about anything it wants. There are two problems with the SUPER role.

So I would guess that was it. I’m just returning to Kristiansand, my Norwegian base, after delivering the “Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Development Best Practices” course to a partner, my first custom-developed training ever. My impression is—mission accomplished. I was not sure at first how this would turn out.

I have this client who operates in very specific conditions: majority of their vendors are foreign companies which invoice them in a foreign currency (USD) and almost invariably ask for at least 50% prepayment. NAV can handle prepayments and foreign currencies like a charm—the issue lies elsewhere: the fluctuations of currency exchange rate can easily cause real and tangible losses.

“Best practices” is one of those beloved and hated concepts. There are people who just embrace “best” practices for the sake of their bestness . And there are people who just shun them for the very same reason—those know-it-alls who have opinion on everything and know it better before even learning about it.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Classic client has some features which are simply unbeatable when it comes to productivity and speed, one of them being primary-key filtering. When you set a single-value filter on primary key fields in a table, and then insert a new record in the same table, primary key fields are automatically populated with values from the filter.