LS Retail vs. Info Store

I had a couple of general questions about these two products. In the end it all comes down to upgrading from Info Store to LS Retain, and “When will LS Retail be available on 5.00 W1”.

Firstly I know the principle advantage of LS Retail is that separate tables are used instead of the standard Navision tables, whihc means less problems with integration, and also it means less locking and other issues with posting. But what are the other issues.

Has anyone done an upgrade, how big a job is this? We are looking at a 300+ Gig database, so I am not expecting this to be a minor task.

Are there some official announcements about the availability of LS Retail on 5.00?

What is the future of the product going forward, have they made any announcements about 5.1 and the three tier environment.

Sorry I know there is no real question here, I am just trying to get a feel for LS Retail vs Info Store.

And the big question, what about other retail solutions for Dynamics NAV, is anyone running anything other than LS Retail or Info Store on a DB this size?

LS Retail 5.0 has been released. I believe last week.

The locking issue with posting is handled multiple ways. You have to option to just record the sale and not update inventory. You would post the statement at the end of the day that will then record the transaction. You can schedule that automatically through LS scheduler with NAS.

I believe Info Store, at least the version I worked in 3.1, created sales invoice. So there wasn’t Transaction Header table that you have in LS Retail.

There is that 2 year gap in which they’ve merged the two products. Looking at the code, It’s not polished code. Sometimes I feel as though didn’t follow or know navision well. But the product works if you go through the pain of learning all those issues.

As far as 5.1 concerned, I asked them about it and the response that I got wasn’t satisfying. The basically said when it comes out we will role out our solution on top of it.

Since the classic client is still present, they will initially just create the Pages for all the forms, but not the POS related forms. Those will probably run on classic client.

It make sense, It will be a lot easier to role out. I wouldn’t want to use th 3 tierd client in store. I mean there are so many things you have to install to get that thing rolling (specially for offline stand alone store)

The 3 tierd client has the functionality to display external component, For example the outlook Email Inbox. I’m sure you build other visual controls. Such as a POS Front End.

I hope when LS retail builds it. They at least clean up the POS code. The way I see it. 80 Percent of the LS retail features are added because of some client asked for it. So they built it for the client.

During the class i attended 1.5 years ago for LS retail. All I could hear as they were explain what the fields in setup were for. The Trainer would say. “this field does this, and the would go on telling a story on which client run into a problem, and they added this button for that scenario”.

I have no experience with LS Retail, but I have with a Belgian Add-On: NaviPos. I wouldn’t recommend this on 300+ databases though. For Info Store, I know that rather big companies in Belgium is using this (Fun, Pizza Hut, Kvik). As far as I know, LS Retail is not very common in Belgium.

As I will be going to the WPC in Denver in a few weeks, I was planning to have some kind of meeting with the LS Retail guys. Just give me the details on what you want to know, and I’ll try to figure it out.

Thanks Ahmed for the detailed reply, its exaclty what I needed [:D] (maybe not what I WANTED to hear though [;)] ).

The big issue in Info store is exactly as you say, creating a sales order for every POS sale, which is just insane. Tables 112 and 113 are huge, without any reason. Its disappointing that after 2 years of merging, that the code is still not polished. And I really don’t like it when specific customer needs are driving the final product, that often tends to indicate a “R and D in the field” type approach.

Either way though, it looks like LS Retail is going to be much better than Info Store. Though I am curious as to what happens to all that data during the data conversion.

Hey Eric, the big question is “how are they going to address 5.1” I can see 2 tier as a short term solution, but what are their long term plans?

I would look at the documents for upgrade toolkit from LS-Retail. They have some routines translate them to Transaction Header, Trans. sales entry, Trans. payment entry.
BTW those tables have more keys than 112 and 113. so You’ll end up with bigger table. Unless in 5.0 they’ve changed the keys for sql.

If they haven’t, it wouldn’t be hard to do it.

This is highjacking this thread a bit, but anyway… The LS transaction tables has more keys, more complex keys, with more SIFT levels than you can imagine… very clearly developed for C/SIDE. I would like to know if they are addressing SQL Server performance.

LS Retail transaction table size before index tuning: 75 GB

LS Retail transaction table size after index tuning: 12 GB

All we did was eliminate duplicate SIFT levels, and turn off the most obviously unselective keys.

I wouldn’t call it hijacking, actually is exactly what I need to know. And definitely its better to have that data in those tables, than in 112 and 113.

Store scenarios exists where you need BOM, special orders, offers, tracking and similar functionality on the POS in which case a POS based on a sales header/lines would give you a lot of standard code up front.