We are in the process of installing the User Portal and are having no end of trouble with many aspects of this product… Can I get a show of hands from anyone who has this product installed, whether you are using it to provide access to Navision within your LAN or from outside (such as for mobile employees or branch offices), and just your general comments on your experience with its installation and customisation. Many thanks, Robert
Hi Robert, We have two installs of User Portal running. No two installs have been the same (at customer sites and on our internal servers). So far access has been restricted to within the LAN/WAN. Once client is accessing the UP via their WAN across North America. It seems to be running fine. Following the installation instructions to the letter is very important. We’ve also had problems getting things running depending on the version of Internet Explorer that is installed. Ask away and I’ll answer what I can. Django
Robert, we have installed that product several times for testing. A plain installation (for testing) on one machine should not be the problem at all. Follow exactly the steps in the installation manual. If you are using (or want to use) UP within a DMZ, ask your network administrator for help. We faced problems using the dashboard connecting through the internet. LAN was OK. Kind regards Walter
Django, I know you are a common user of this discussion site and have read with interest some of your comments elsewhere here concerning the UP. As an end user, it is not really my company’s role to get the UP installed and properlyworking, as this comes down to our NSC. We do of course provide assistance but after trying for over 6 months, our NSC has not managed to get the UP to work properly. I guess we are having a loss of confidence with the product and my intention in posting my first message to this tread was to identify how commonly used the UP is amongst the Navision community. The whole thing greatly surprises me … we bought the user portal to provide access to our system for branch and other remote users, so your comments regarding its normal intended use by internal users only, is of some concern. Can you point me to some Navision/MBS documentation that confirms this. Surely to have access to one’s corporate system over the internet is a common requirement and I figured that many companies would use the UP. However, by gut feel is that the product has not been taken up in great quantities. But I am of course not sure. It frustrates me enormously that my sister who runs a small business from her home and who spent about $3,000 on her accounting system, has full and easy access to her system over the internet, as a standard feature that worked from day one without a hitch. Anyway, the problems we are having are varied … some of them: … user can’t gain access … “no authority”, though all authorities have been created … inventory items with photos … can’t see the photo on the UP … or sometimes can, sometimes can’t … connect via LAN, and see one version of the welcome screen … remote login, and get a different version of the same screen … connect via LAN, and see normal screen (activity centres) … remote login for some users, but not all, most parts of the screens are blank … no entires down the left hand side (the sub menu area) and the main right hand side is missing links … user without an established UP login but with a domain login, can login (access should be denied) … printing …major restrictions here, though I have read on this site about how to add filters. However, we get page breaks part way through pages and can not get photos at all … and on it goes I’m not sure where we will go with the UP, but for now our NSC is still looking at these problems and I am just trying to gauge the product’s take up and other people’s experiences. I wonder, for example, if any of these are common problems or if the UP installation is always so problematic. If you have any comments on the above problems, I’d love to hear them. By the way, we have tried following the installation instructions to the letter but then we read elsewhere about problems with different versions of IE, for example. I think you don’t get the full guide you need in the standard install instructions. Cheers, Robert
Hi Robert, I certainly don’t want to step on any toes but I’ll certainly give you my thoughts. When you’re deciding how to handle remote access you need to consider your needs. Citrix and Terminal Server offer one set of solutions - quick and easy setup, worldwide access, access to other applications if you desire; downside is you need more expensive user licenses and need to setup your permissions properly to prevent accidents. User Portals offer Intranet access - you may find with 3.6 and 3.7 that getting through the DMZ is easier - but Microsoft isn’t going to support that version of Digital Dashboards for much longer. Doesn’t mean it won’t work - they won’t be doing more development with them. User Portals also are a toolset, if you will, that allow you to web-enable all kinds of your Navision system. Your sister’s system probably allows access to functionality x,y and z but with User Portals you can add in the rest of the ‘alphabet’, if you will. User Portals are for the Intranet and Commerce Portal is for the Internet. My understanding is that you could use Commerce Portal to do everything that User Portals do but there isn’t the same set of tools so you have to spend time on each CP page whereas with UP you ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ to enable different parts of the program without having to re-write the functionality of every page. Some advice for you and your NSC would be: 1) We found our best installation happened on a new install of Win2000 server. No service packs until User Portals were installed and running. IE 5.01 with SP3 will work just fine with User Portals. Once the user portals are installed you should take an image of the HD and then try applying service packs. At each point you need to make sure that all the necessary folders are being installed. This server will be an internal machine and so outside access shouldn’t be an issue at this point so having the latest service packs is less of an issue. 2) Get the user portal files (Factory and NSWebParts folders) from version 3.60 and from Improvement 8 (or 11). Those have been adjusted to work with later versions of IE and won’t have any impact if you are running version 3.10 software. As for printing. It’s not the best solution with the page breaks. You might have your NSC fiddle with the .xsl file that handles the rendering of the output for reports to remove the pagebreak HR code and let IE worry about page breaks. As for who else is using User Portals you should also lookup Digital Dashboard user groups. They won’t know what User Portals are but there are lots of companies using the DDB technology to enable all kinds or corporate content. Navision just used that technology to enable Navision. That’s all I can think of for now. I’m happy to answer where I can. PS Once they are running they’re great. You can start to add all kinds of great functionality and features that you’ll find really useful and productive. Cheers, Django
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Originally posted by DjangMan
Hi Robert, I certainly don’t want to step on any toes but I’ll certainly give you my thoughts. When you’re deciding how to handle remote access you need to consider your needs. Citrix and Terminal Server offer one set of solutions - quick and easy setup, worldwide access, access to other applications if you desire; downside is you need more expensive user licenses and need to setup your permissions properly to prevent accidents. User Portals offer Intranet access - you may find with 3.6 and 3.7 that getting through the DMZ is easier - but Microsoft isn’t going to support that version of Digital Dashboards for much longer. Doesn’t mean it won’t work - they won’t be doing more development with them. User Portals also are a toolset, if you will, that allow you to web-enable all kinds of your Navision system. Your sister’s system probably allows access to functionality x,y and z but with User Portals you can add in the rest of the ‘alphabet’, if you will. User Portals are for the Intranet and Commerce Portal is for the Internet. My understanding is that you could use Commerce Portal to do everything that User Portals do but there isn’t the same set of tools so you have to spend time on each CP page whereas with UP you ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ to enable different parts of the program without having to re-write the functionality of every page. Some advice for you and your NSC would be: 1) We found our best installation happened on a new install of Win2000 server. No service packs until User Portals were installed and running. IE 5.01 with SP3 will work just fine with User Portals. Once the user portals are installed you should take an image of the HD and then try applying service packs. At each point you need to make sure that all the necessary folders are being installed. This server will be an internal machine and so outside access shouldn’t be an issue at this point so having the latest service packs is less of an issue. 2) Get the user portal files (Factory and NSWebParts folders) from version 3.60 and from Improvement 8 (or 11). Those have been adjusted to work with later versions of IE and won’t have any impact if you are running version 3.10 software. As for printing. It’s not the best solution with the page breaks. You might have your NSC fiddle with the .xsl file that handles the rendering of the output for reports to remove the pagebreak HR code and let IE worry about page breaks. As for who else is using User Portals you should also lookup Digital Dashboard user groups. They won’t know what User Portals are but there are lots of companies using the DDB technology to enable all kinds or corporate content. Navision just used that technology to enable Navision. That’s all I can think of for now. I’m happy to answer where I can. PS Once they are running they’re great. You can start to add all kinds of great functionality and features that you’ll find really useful and productive. Cheers, Django
Dear Django I have faced many a problems with UP installation as a test with different setups. We could never find a specific document which informs the Technical person to do the best. What is this all about, where do we find the specific document for UP installation. Considering the Scenario as per Mr. Robert what is the best solution. I have a client where I thought of giving Demo on this. But, facing the problems while runnig in the office, I am really scared to go ahead with this. I hope to fing a specific document which you guide me to or some guidance by you to achive my goal with this product Thanks Chris
Django, Don’t think you need to worry about stepping on any toes, as I am sure our NSC would welcome any advice from anyone with the right experience, which sounds like you have. I will pass all your comments on to them, and perhaps they will get back to you with more specific instructions. They are doing another new install of the UP on a freshly reformmated server next week. I still think the takeup of the UP looks like its relatively low amongst Nav users, which surprises me greatly. Two final question, have you ever experienced any of the symptoms I listed as problems in my last message? Also, do you have any reference to any Nav/MBS documentation over the issue of using UP for internal access only or primarily? Many thanks for your advices todate. Robert
Fellow UP Friends, Let Me Share Our Painful Story Using This Product. The main problem with User Portal Is The Total Lack Of Commitment From Navision Side For This product (Or Is it only from our NTR?). Since We Got The UP Product CD For NA 3.6 1 1/2 Years Ago Has Nothing Happen. No One Single product Statement, Not One Single Response To Our Many, Many Questions… etc. In The Mean Time Have The World Changed And There Is No Longer A Microsoft Product Called Digital Dashboard, The Last Version Of Digital Dashboard released was for those who run MS SQL 2000 and many, many more released notes (Microsoft Technet). … NOT A SINGLE NOTE FOR USERPORTAL HAS BEEN RELEASED TO ALL THOSE CHANGES. A Very Disappointed UP Man!
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Anyway, the problems we are having are varied … some of them: … user can’t gain access … “no authority”, though all authorities have been created
Depending on how the security is setup in the system, the IIS security can have an impact. On my system (and I’ll preface this with what works for me might not work for you) I don’t allow anonymous access, do not use basic authentication and do use integrated access.
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… inventory items with photos … can’t see the photo on the UP … or sometimes can, sometimes can’t
In the User Portal Application Designer’s guide is a second on how to debug problems with photos. It might help.
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… connect via LAN, and see one version of the welcome screen … remote login, and get a different version of the same screen
Try deleting the user’s folder under c:\inetpub\wwwroot\dashboards\users That where each user’s individual preferences are stored. This is the only folder that needs to be read/write. The folders are re-created automatically as a user accesses parts of the user portal - unless you have the problem that we’ve had where the UP is not able to create sub-folders - you have to go to an activity center and get a 404 error. Then shutdown IE, restart it and go to the acitivity center and presto it works. Then click on another activity center and get the 404 error. Supposedly a later improvement fixes this up as it is related to IE6 but the fix didn’t work for me.
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… connect via LAN, and see normal screen (activity centres) … remote login for some users, but not all, most parts of the screens are blank … no entires down the left hand side (the sub menu area) and the main right hand side is missing links
Upgrade the ‘client’ machines to IE6 SP1. They should be able to see all the links after that. It’s the server that you want to be very careful about upgrading the IE on.
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… user without an established UP login but with a domain login, can login (access should be denied)
There is an option to set up a default user in UP setup. The default user could have no activity centers and therefore not access (unless they know the URL to type)
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… printing …major restrictions here, though I have read on this site about how to add filters. However, we get page breaks part way through pages and can not get photos at all
I’ve been fortunate in that we haven’t needed to do any pictures. Our UP solution is for Project Management and Time Entry so no pictures are needed. The biggest problem that I’ve encountered with User Portals is getting the individual parts and forms installed properly The installdashboards.js is designed to save me time from having to install each part and form manually (which can be done I an lead to believe). Once I’ve got that part working properly and the dashboardsconst.inc file configured things seem to run just fine. (knock on wood). My advice to anyone setting up user portals is to turn on the debugging options until you’re just about to go live. They do help with trying to figure out what’s going on. Something else to add is that IE sometimes doesn’t wait for Navision to send updated data before refreshing the screen. For example if you have a large sales order (lots of detail lines) and click delete on the first or second detail line quickly (and have a hand on the keyboard to press ‘Y’ to confirm the deletion) you can make Navision delete the line but IE doesn’t delete it from your display - thus you try to delete the line and get an error (‘line number 130000 doesn’t exist’). Press F5 to refresh IE and the line is gone. Django
Django, Thanks for all your advice on the various problems. In conjunction with our NSC we are going through the issues and applying your suggestions and any other variations we can think of that make sense. I beleive we’ve had some success with overcoming some printing restrictions, but getting photos on reports is still so far out of the question. The bottom line from our experience and from comments on this and other BB’s is the user portal is not easy to setup and seems to fall short of what I would think were common corporate functionality requirements. It also doesn’t seem to be commonly used. I just sincerely hope that with Microsoft at the helm, that someone will recognise the potential hole this leaves in the Attain product’s functionality and that they manage to get it filled with some haste. Thanks again for all your responses on this thread. Robert
Hm, short question (may be we have had this discussion, but I can’t remember… getting old…) Does Microsoft still supports Digital Dashboard? At least with their newest 2003 Server suite?
Hi Walter, Support is supposed to be going away as per an announcement from Microsoft:
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Overview Microsoft® Business Solutions - Business Portal will be released by the end of April, 2003. The HRM and KPI components for Business Portal will be release by the end of June, 2003. Business Portal has the same functionality that is currently available with Digital Dashboard Webpart plus a whole lot more. Microsoft Business Solutions is discontinuing support for Digital Dashboard Webparts on June 30th, 2003 and recommending the use of Business Portal as a replacement.
Now I’ve heard that the Business Portal is built using DDB 2.01 technology. Go figure. Perhaps it was built based on DDB 2.01 technology - SharePoint is the successor to DDB - so I’m told… Can’t help you with your Server '03. But IE 6 on the IIS serving up the user portal pages is a bad combination - can you get IE 5.5 for Server '03…[?] Django
I have a question for anyone. I am in the middle of setting up our testing machine here and have run into an error in the Posting Sales Order process in UP. First problem is I’m not a xml developer so I’m trying to do this with html and c/al language knowledge. The error states that "The operating system cannot find the drive and directory specified for the file . Please check that the drive, directory and file names are correct. " I am using the standard objects from the cd (3.60A)and am out of luck with finding a resolution to this issue. I have tried to copy over all the xml, xsl, ddb, and dwp files and ran the InstallDashboard.js file to update it, multiple times. Is there something that someone can help out with this problem. Also, in the InstallDashboard.js I added the script WScript.Echo with a beginning and ending message to let me know when the process has finished. This is very helpful instead of the recommended “watch the hard drive light until it isn’t blinking”. In case anyone wanted to know.
Ps for anyone who’s reading. We’ve just upgraded one site to 3.60 and are doing database authentication to allow Internet access to the User Portal. So far so good. Django
Also to anyone who is still listening, we have suspended work on our UP installation due to various ongoing problems, in favour of investigating remote access via Terminal Services. In vast contrast to the UP, I can say about Terminal Services after just 3 days: 1. The installation notes are a breeze to follow 2. No specific new software to be pre-loaded on the client PC 3. The product worked first time 4. The product has continued to work perfectly since 5. Remote user response times even over dial-up lines are very good 6. We can also get local printing at the remote users site 7. We have built a different main menu for all remote users, only showing the limited range of functions we want them to access … its like their own personal welcome screen, similar to the standard UP Welcome screen Although we haven’t finished testing yet, and admitting that remote users will need more training than UP users would ever have needed, we are far more confident over this technique of web access, and I regret the months of perserverance with the UP. The only real downside of using TS, is that users need full Navision licenses, which are about double the cost of UP user licenses, but our overall maintenance time and development time has just been massively cut. Bottom line … if you are considering a solution for remote users, I strongly recommend you take a serious look at Terminal Services until MBS come up with a better product than the UP for internet-based access to Navision. Cheers, Robert Killeen
I appologize, in advance, for cross-posting. I wrote this in response to a message regarding pictures in User Portals and thought that my comments may well apply here as some of my comments address technical reasons why implementing User Portals is difficult at best and impossible at worst. — SNIP — If I may offer a suggestion though, in my experience, behind-the-scenes operating system changes (like security patches or service pack installations) can be cause for User Portals pictures to discontinue working. The reason for this is that User Portals does not use the latest version fo Digital Dashboards which supports more recent changes to the XML and XSL standards, and, though it is supposedly supported by Microsoft, I wish you luck getting any. It does not appear that updating User Portals to use the latest version of Digital Dashboards is even on any priority list at Microsoft. As well, the largest problem with User Portals is not the development. It is the rigid control over user licenses for any User Portals product. For each User Portals user you must have a Windows CAL license. This is because it requires Windows Authentication instead of database authentication. As well, the cost of Web User license for User Portals is, put midly, an attrocity; rendering any product developed for it virtually unsellable. In light of this, it would be more worthwhile investigating developing yor own web portal using automation objects (IMHO). You’ll save yourself time as well as headaches from developing a product for user portals. Don’t get me wrong, It’s easy to develop applications for User Portals and the premise is great. The user licensing issues associated with it make it not worthwhile developing anything for this platform. — END SNIP — In addition, the implementation of newer versions of Microsoft Internet Exporer (beyond 5.5) on the server machine, will be one such situation where you will find that behind-the-scenes changes to the operating system will not allow User Portals to function at peak efficiency, if at all. Though, if you are a technical junkie and have a lot of time to play around with it, you could write a patch to the business logic component(s) that cause these problems, I would recommend investigating other potential solutions. Technical issues aside, the lack of interest in updating the product to use newer versions of even Microsoft products in the framework (read Digital Dashboards), and user licensing issues, make this technology, though flashy and attractive and a great idea, relatively unuseable for its intended purpose except in the most controlled of situations. As mentioned above, don’t get me wrong, this technology shows great possibility and RAD is definitely attainable (no pun intended) under this framework. Microsoft (Navision) has seemed to simply drop the ball on this one.
I am so glad we did not even try UP. Our Terminal Services solution works fine!