Now I am faced with 2 ways of developing navision.
1)One is using a system with be licenses and 3 add ons, sales(basic data capturing, quotation, transferring quotation to invoice, checking customer details), sales mobility (gprs solution for sales man to go out take orders, check prices, stock availability, promotions on the fly), warehouse mobility(pda which is able to do warehousing).promotes not buying software assurance, 16% of implementation fee for vendor support
2)One is using a system with am licenses and 3 add ons, sales(same, basic data capturing, quotation, transferring quotation to invoice, checking customer details), sales mobility(mostly like a capture device cause we will be using advance warehousing modules), promotes buying software assurance, 6% of licensing fee for vendor support
I find that 2 is more sustainable than 1. If we use 1. After 5 years or so we might have to end up scraping the system. Hope to gather some views on this
You can always upgrade from business essentials to advanced management later (I think, never actually done it). But you should definitely pay your enhancement fees. It can only come back to haunt you otherwise.
“Software assurance” or “maintenance plan” amt is calculated from license cost --percentage may vary in different countries-- and gives you among other benefits free version upgrade, license only and it goes to Microsoft, not Partner. For actual upgrading process you pay to Partner as agreed.
I understood from your post, that you are offered to pay some yearly fee in addition to SA, percentage of IMPLEMENTATION cost, for continuous support/upgrade of all your AddOns and mods…
Usually such things are negotiated in your agreement with Partner - whether you pay fixed yearly fee for support, or per accident, or both (then yearly fee is minimal). This would be then the second payment you called vendor support in your post, regarding actual support / add-on maintenance / mods maintenance.
So, these are two different payments, each with different purpose. Theoretically, you may live happilly without the first, paying only the second (leaving out the second is very risky and in case of problems may cost you much more). However, its still advised to pay “software assueance”, too - if you later decide to upgrade Navision to newer version, you will need to pay this backwards + 1Year forward, and the “back” part will be with higher percentage.