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The company I work for is using NAV 5.0 2008. I'm wondering about a possible upgrade to NAV 2013. Would everything we have transfer seamlessly to the newer version? Is NAV 2013 as user friendly as Microsoft's website would suggest? Would it be better to also change to Office 365 on the cloud than keeping everything on our SQL server in-house?
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Happy to help
Thanks for all your help Neville!
Also spotted the bit on hosting providers
Microsoft has a datacentre option
There are also other providers, my suggestion would be to:
Find a provider in your country or pretty close, too far and you increase the latency and decrease the user experience
Make sure you pick a provider big enough to have the support you need
Make sure you spec enough resources, the base offerings from the various companies are good to get an idea of price but no where near good enough to handle a company of people
And something that has caused me untold pain over the years, check your printer drivers are terminal server compliant, i personally wont bring a multifunction printer anywhere near a terminal server
Hope this helps, shout if you have any other questions
Cheers
Nev
Hi
Again this is a really big topic so it is pretty hard to put so much content into a small post
The simplest way to describe it is:
Published Application
This is when (To the user) the application seems to be running on their desktop, however it is actually being pushed from the server, they don't have access to the desktop of the terminal server, it is just pushing an application to them
Published Desktop
This is terminal services as most people know it, the user logs into the server and a new (server) desktop opens up, they can run programs on that server as they have been allowed to, you may decide to put some or all of the programs they use on the server and have them work in the terminal window, or they might only run some things and switch back to their local machines for some things
A full terminal server setup may have some users working on "Dumb" terminals (PC's with no local capability, they load up and directly into the terminal) and some users no whatever PC's the company still has
However everything is done on the server, they store their files there, run their applications, office email, everything, nothing is done on their desktop
This full terminal environment has great benefits if you have the server power to support all the users and the connectivity for the users to be able to work speedily
Cheers
Nev
Neville,
When you say, "...the users actually work on a desktop in the cloud and everything stays there..." does this mean that if we had NAV on the cloud, users could log in and update whatever manutacturing there was for the day, as if they were doing the process from the business server we have now? Also, with NAV we can export reports to excel or word. If it were on the cloud, when you export, does it open those reports on excel in the cloud or through excel on an individual's desktop?
I hope these questions aren't too trivial. I just want to get the best understanding before we proceed. Our company really wants to put NAV on a cloud server, but we just want to make sure ahead of time that we know what we're getting into before taking this next steps. Since cloud technology seems so new, we do not know much at all about it. Also, what cloud companies would you recommend to host NAV?
The cloud is a pretty big concept
You can have an application only pushed from the cloud, so to the users it seems lie only NAV opens but it is in fact running from the cloud, in that environment they will not be saving anything to the server in the cloud
The second option is to have a terminal server environment in the cloud, with this setup the users actually work on a desktop in the cloud and everything stays there, this can become more expensive and your local internet must be fast enough so that it is not to slow for the users, but has some great benefits
Microsoft Azure offers both of these options
Specifically the office offering could also be a local offering or a purely in the cloud application, again your choice here is dependent on how good your office internet is, cost and benefits to having someone else (in the cloud) keep it all working for you
Cheers
Nev
Neville,
Thank you for the information. It is good to know that NAV 2013 works is compatible with Office 2010 (since only 2 employees here have 2013 and the other have 2010). I'm still researching the benefit to Office 365 on the cloud. I have one additional question regarding the cloud, can you run programs on it or is it strictly for backup database, file storage, etc?
So couple of parts to this answer:
From version 5 the 2013 upgrade would be recommended, there are documents pages long on the improvements and fixes in the new version, it is better integrated with SQL, Office, 64bit service, etc...
The seamlessly bit depends on how customized your current system is, each customization needs to be reviewed and a call made
- Is it still required
- Can it be done in standard now
The developments that pass the test need to be transferred into the new system
The other big part will be the reporting, the reporting aspects have been redone in NAV 2009 RTC and up so that you may end up having to redo some of your custom reports, however you now are able to directly PDF and send to Excel from the reporting client so there is real benefit
The conversion to the cloud will depend on your business requirement, local servers will almost always be faster than cloud servers, but there is a backup, redundancy & maintenance benefit to having the server sit with people who specialize in servers, also if your business is distributed across multiple sites having it it the cloud will give a lot of benefit as the hosting provider will have better bandwidth
I haven't run NAV with office 365 yet, but can confirm that NAV 2013 runs fine with Office 2010 as that is what our clients all currently use
Hope this helps
Nev
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