I’m Nathy, I work for a company who uses for the moment Navision 3.7 (in an 4.0 envirement).
We have been working with Navision for about 10 years and we will do an upgrade to 5.0 because 3.7 is not really supported anymore. I guess the 2009 is not available allready for Belgium and we still work with a Native dbase so 2009 would still be no option.
We have paid all these years a % of our license so we would be able to upgrade if we want. We are about to take the step right now, still I have some questions.
We have contacted a company who will be our support in this upgrade. They were with ous for about 3 days to make an analyse of the duration of this upgrade. They have budgetted at about 25 days for the complete upgrade and now I would like to have a second opinion. Those 25 days means that we will start with a new version (5.0) but we will need to start from scratch (except for some lists like customers, items,…). So at this time nothing will stop us from buying a complete new ERP system, other then Dynamics 5.0.
If we will keep our “old” dbase, it will still take more than 10 days to do the conversion.
Is this really realistic? A customer pays every year a big fee for the upgrades and still this upgrade (if you can call it an upgrade if you have to start from scratch) is really a big investment.
At first I can understand that the parts our partner programmed for us that they need to be re-programmed. But I don’t understand that there is no possibility to just install a new version and open our “old” database in this new version and get started with it, even if it is in a basic mode.
I hope someone will really post a reply to my message since we don’t want to lose all the data we have collected in 10 years.
I can do a litlle programming in Navision, but my speciallity is webdesign.
Thank you for your introduction. I would also have said welcome to the Dynamics User Group, but I see you’ve actually been a member since 2004. But welcome anyway!
Although we normally do not “accept” such specific questions in the introduction forum, then I’ll do an exception.
My first reaction was that 25 days was very optimistic, if they are doing it as a new install. But maybe you should start by reading this page:
As you can see then there are many things involved in doing such an upgrade. So without knowing your installation it is difficult to judge if the quotation you got was fair or not.
But I really don’t understand the two quotes you got already. One was for 25 days. And you say that it is a “complete upgrade”, but that only customers and items etc. is converted to the new version. Then it sure sounds like 25 days is WAY TO MUCH! Unless the 20 days are for training.
I don’t quite understand your second quote either. You say that you will keep your existing database. Does that mean that they are only upgrading the client and not the application (you can see the definitions in the link above). So if it’s only an installation of the client, then it sounds fair only if you have about 300 users that needs to have the client manually installed! It takes about 15 minutes per client when you do that many.
But we really cannot come with any better suggestion without more information. Just compare it to that you partner spend 3 days with you to come up with their estimate. There are many factors that you need to know. Again if you read the article above, then you get an idea of what is required. Why are you upgrading, what etc.?
Maybe some of the other members can recommend one of the special partners, the so-called Upgrade Centers in Belgium.