I have a customer who is running 8 companies in NAV. It a technical upgraded 3.70B => 5.0 SP1 Upgrade 2. The customer is running 8 Navision Application Servers connecting NAV to a webshop. They now wish to run automated reports creating price files, inventory files and so on during daytime. The only solution I can think of is purchasing more Application Servers in order to manage the workload. One possibility would be to purchase less than 8 and then have a rotating schedule taking the services offline.
Even if the solution is not to purchase 8 additional Application Servers there is still the issue with NAV 7. The customer is planning an upgrade 2014 and the most likely candidate would be NAV 7 at that time. It’s very hard to predict what will happen but chases are that the NAS will be ovsolete and there are questions how this will effect the license. The customer does not wish to purchase several license we the risk of them becomming obsolete. To spice things up, the customer also is planning to move the business into 1 company with departments instead when implementing the next verision of NAV.
Any thought or suggestions on how to guide the customer in this process?
The people that know the answer to your concern are not allowed to comment at this time, because most NAV ‘7’ related information is under NDA. If I were you I would not make any assumptions about whether something will be obsolete or not, and wait for the details to come out. I believe a lot of that type of information will come out at Directions EMEA at the end of April.
With the potential direction for future versions, I would tend to drive the solution toward web services and away from NAS. SInce it’s a known fact that support for the classic client is going away, and NAS is, for all practical purposes, the classic client.
Thank you for the feedback. It’s a tricky situation since the customer is in need of a solution right now but is aware of the fact that they are running on an old version and that there are new possibilites in current version 2009 R2 with webservices, .NET integration an so forth. I guess that it’s no use in trying to anticipate what’s coming next. If the customer is not willing to invest in new licenses right now based on plans they making 2 years down the road it will have to be there decision. Right now the solution is to use a NAS. Possiblity making a rotating schedule for the service, hour 1 = company 1, hour 2 = company 2 and so on with all the consequenses it will have.
You are making assumptions about whether NAS will be supported, and making recommendation based on those assumptions. You should really know better than that.
If you are working on a new solution, and you can use web services, then by all means, use web services. BUT I would certainly not advise customers to stay away from NAS, and rounding up NAS customers and advising them to invest in an alternative, would be a big mistake because that would be based on assumptions that are not based in any factual information that is out there.
Again, do NOT make any assumptions about whether something will be obsolete or not. I would suggest waiting until more details come out about NAV ‘7’, wait until you KNOW and THEN make a decision.