Classic

Marketing is nice as long as it matches the reality. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, Microsoft has promised a lot of improvements, but how well does NAV 2013 stand the reality test? Apparently, outstandingly well. Over the past two days, I have intensively tested NAV 2009 and NAV 2013 through a series of five different tests that measure different aspects of NAV data handling.

Absolutely. The world needs to move ahead. The technology advances. Who doesn’t want to keep up with the progress, stays behind. That’s how it has worked since the dawn of civilization. I can’t know the exact reasons why Microsoft has decided to stop support for the Classic client with NAV “7”, but I can offer my view and position on why I believe this was absolutely necessary.

Yesterday, during a coffee break at the What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Technical for Application Consultants training in Vilnius, Lithuania (a fabulous place, by the way), a discussion arose around the destiny of the Classic (or C/SIDE) client in NAV.

I am one of those people who only use keyboard with NAV. Classic, of course. Seriously, I can keyboard my way through NAV and do literally everything—and I am dead serious about the everything part of it—with only my keyboard. With Classic, mouse is quietly resting under piles of papers.

RoleTailored client for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 was one of those things for me that looked really nice in presentations, but in real-life, I didn’t see much value there. It looked good from far, but far from good. I would dare saying it saw more runtime at conferences and presentations than in real life.

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.

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.

In on of my earlier posts here on this blog, where I was merely testing out my theories, I said that user interface is one of the biggest drivers of return on investment: a familiar, easy to navigate, non-cluttered user interface that truly allows you to focus on your work, and not spend too much…