A little recap

Ok let’s make a little stop here and talk about the changes.

Dynamics NAV is an wonderful tool, if you start to work with NAV from the old days, you see that you can change, modify and adjust almost all the application or create new modules or functions just because your customer asks for it.

There was a time when everybody modified forms, tables and codeunits, later, if your developers were smart enough, they started to avoid biggest modifications and prefer to create new objects and only make some calls or changes to the original NAV objects.

Why I’m talking about this?

Well, there is going to be two principal scenarios with NAV, on premise and cloud. You can work as the old days changing and modifying the NAV core objects according your expertise and the business needs gathered in the analysis sessions with your customer. This path is going to drive you to a scenario where your customer relies on you and your code making the upgrades very painful and time consuming.

Oh, I forgot, and your customer only can be in the cloud if you create a private cloud with a NAV specific deployment for him with all the related costs. Don’t even think about subscription model.

The second model is little bit more complicated because you need to develop extensions and those extensions needs to be controlled in its reach’s. You need to deploy to tenants and take care that your customer can purchase more extensions for other developers or partners without your knowledge and the mix can be explosive for your code.

Here is the big change, you need to change your approach, you need to change your design mind model, you cannot take NAV and make the changes as you need (even on premise deployment).

Maybe you are thinking, what’s going to happened with all my team knowledge? All those years of experience and code are going to the trash can? Maybe you develop a repeatable model of some of your modules, what is going to happened with that?

You can make the change, you just consider the next points:

• You must use events.
• You must design around Nav, not modify the core application.
• You must preserve NAV´s way of work.

With these points in mind, what can we do?

Take all the knowledge in your company and start to check which parts of your solutions can be repeatable and general business oriented, try to isolate the core of that solutions and make an extension related to that need.

The withholding that we are analyzing is a functionality that almost every company in Mexico needs. If you check the code, we are only adding some fields in the extension tables, and later, when we check the codeunit, you can see that we need to attach to an event to have the extension running.

• Can this extension run in On Premise? Yes.
• Can this extension run in Dynamics 365? Yes.  (ok, we need an special object number range).

This is the new path to follow, try to guide your customer into the NAV ways, if you can’t because the requirement is complex, develop around NAV, not inside (again, extension).

The people who works with NAV was used to give solutions with creativity. So, take this new paradigm and change your ways, I think this can be a great new market.