Business Central: Can we migrate from NAV to Business Central Online directly?

Hello,

I’ve seen this question popping everywhere so I thought of penning it down here.

Ever since the advent of Business central online there are have been  questions and doubts on the community portal about the upgrade. Many customers desire to migrate to Business central online (latest version). Business central Online does provide various benefits especially hassle free upgrade. So coming back to our question…

Can we upgrade customisation from NAV to Business central Online?

Yes. We can upgrade to Business Central online from supported versions of Dynamics NAV on-premises, provided that our application customization is handled by extensions.

Can we upgrade data from NAV to Business central Online?

No. Any data from tables with code customizations cannot be carried forward from Dynamics NAV

Upgrading from Dynamics NAV to Business Central online is only partially supported.

Hence, the upgrade path from NAV to Business Central Online is to first upgrade to the latest Business central on-premise versions then to Business central Online.

We can upgrade NAV 2015,2016,2017,2018 Business Central October 2018 version to latest version of Business central on-premise directly.

Other lower versions need to be upgraded to the latest NAV 2018 version then to latest version of Business central On-premise.

Upgrade from NAV to Business Central online process consists of three parts:

• Upgrade from Dynamics NAV to Business Central using the tools described in Upgrading to Business Central on-premises.
• Convert non-standard functionality and customizations to apps and per-tenant extensions. For more information, see Deploying a Tenant Customization.
• Enable replication to a cloud tenant as described in Connect to the intelligent cloud, and then switch to use the Business Central online tenant going forward.

How to upgrade to Business Central On-premises

Upgrade directly to the latest version of Business Central by following these tasks:

• Upgrade the Application Code
• Upgrade the Data

Deploying a Tenant Customisation and Connect to the Intelligent cloud will be covered in my next blog.

Coming up blog August 2020 : Upgrade process from Business central On-premise to Business Central Online

Thanks for reading!  Please view the Microsoft article for more details.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/upgrade/upgrade-considerations#upgrading-from–to–online