Tuesday, 2 December 2008

NAV 2009 Released

NAV 2009 has been released in the 'wave 1' counties.  This means some things that we have been waiting for a couple of years for are finally available.

There are still some gaps and the new client will take some getting used to but the addition of web-services out of the box and the new architecture is a great leap forwards.

I have posted before about web-services and since then I have been trying a few different things. In one demo from Microsoft they showed an example of them by adding a 'E#dit in Excel' button to a page that launched Excel, pushed the currently filtered data over and then allowed a user to modify it and update back into NAV.

Another interesting example has been posted by Dave 'Gaspode' Roys. In his example he is using an infopath form to get NAV data, edit it and submit it back to the system. Take a look here.

I am also trying a few things using the new client as well. Generally I 'learn' better when I have a project that needs a solution, fortunately I have a pet NAV project to play with. In our office we have a snack club that I current run, while its overkill really I keep track of it all in NAV. This gives me a chance to try to solve the minor problems that come along, and play with the new cool stuff.

This weeks project was a migration from NAV5.0 to NAV2009. As the basis of the system was fairly standard this was a straight forward exercise, adding a few new fields to tables and the doing a NAV backup and restore to a W2k8 server with SQL2k8 and NAV2009. Then I went through and rebuilt the few special bits of code that I needed.

Next up will be the addition of some RS reports and a simple app that the team can use to record what they are taking and set up their bills, a task that is currently done in a book. Once I have it figured out I'll post some examples.