Greetings,
I joined NAVUG pretty long ago. I have not been active in the community nor in the group although NAV has been 40 percent of my work week for more than a decade.
I started working in Navision 1.x in 1998. I was certified in 2.1 after attending Navision Academy in Norcross, Georgia in 1999. I have remained certified in Navision/NAV up to and including 2009. I plan to sit for the 2013 certification sometime in the near future (when I can schedule an afternoon off).
I now work as a contractor/consultant in systems and business automation, usually for NAV end users. The distinction in my contracting and consulting work derives from my very strong .NET, SQL Server, services, browser, data warehousing, business analytics, and integration work. I spend a majority of my time in ASP.NET MVC using SQL Server (and that includes SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS) to support integration, presentation, integration, and automation of business processes that are – and should remain – outside of the NAV implementation.
Of all the things I like to do, I like to build secure data integration with NAV implementations so other enterprise systems can exchange data and derive benefit from the NAV data and business logic while still retaining autonomy from NAV. The same is true of NAV deriving data and business logic from outside systems. This is especially true for reporting and data analysis.
I still work a great deal in C/AL; customizing and modifying implementations but find the majority of my clients prefer that very complex or unique business components that are to be newly created be done outside of NAV. The services exposed by NAV (as well as the job queue in older versions) allow me the flexibility to exchange data and keep NAV logic inside of NAV and non-financial business logic in the most appropriate platform: be that SQL, web services, Windows services, stand-alone applications, or significant enterprise applications extant alongside NAV.
I have very strong views so like to pretend I’m shielding a bit of my own identity. So I will just sign off as
George