First of all, my deepest respects to all experts, consultants and MVPs participating in these forums.
I think that Navision 2009 is a great product, The 3-tiered-architecture is a huge step forwards in the future of this ERP product. The Role-tailored-client has a really nice Look&Feel and provides easy navigation and data manipulation.
I see several problems though, the biggest one - the overall performace of the product. My own impression is that the each next version of Navision is a little bit slower. The RTC looks also slower than the classic client, the 3-tiered architecture causes (probably) additional delay. I’m not quite sure about the performance in multi-user environment (with many many users) and with large databases.
Also, a missing part as to me is a full-featured web version of the Role Tailored Client. I think that the combination of a faster application-server and web-server would make Navision a really modern “cloud” service and #1 in ERP-solutions.
I would like to kindly ask the here-participating consultants, experts and especially MVPs and MS-Dynamics managers or product-consultant to share their opinions about:
the need of a faster NAV-server?
the need of a full-featured web-client of Navision?
whether all this could be provided as add-ons or should be an integral part of the product?
I think that the Microsoft’s approval for such add-ons (in form of support, documentation or development-partnership) is needed in all cases. Is that so?
I can not measure the subjectivity level of my thought, but this is my opinion;
The RTC is just another front-end, and it’s not better than Classic client. Instead, it gives more hassles and additional burden to the database, by adding more objects, Pages. This will be way much better to be replaced with a full featured web-interface. A real web interface that can be accessed through common web browser, it’s fine even there will be web-plugins required.
ERP users are mostly works inside the office. The servers are located physically inside office location, and users access the application using their computer. So far, the Classic client has satisfied users in this working environment. On shifting into 3 Tier application, client-side application still can derived from the model of classic client.
RTC is more to a rich-internet-application, that contain forms without business logic, and pass all parameters to 2nd tier, which is the application server. With this light processing in the front-end, it can fall into a thin-client (web/internet) application. Many thin-client application are deployed on a web application. This can serve the other issue on remote users or mobile users, where users are working remotely, while mobile, or when out of office with limited connectivity.
I also still cannot understand why the RTC was designed as a standalone desktop client or why the page-objects were needed at all (instead of extending the forms and reports properties), but there is a good point in it - a better and simplified role-tailored view to the complex ERP-functionality of Navision. A full-featured web variant of the RTC would be probably much more appreciated by the end users and would require no or very little client-side installations. All updates to the web client would require only server-side changes by the Navision-administrator and would become instantly available to the end users.
Apart of that I think that the web client would reduce the internal network traffic and this way decrease the time of response, resp. increase the web client overall performance. Dont to forget, that a combination of a more productive server and a thin web-client would make it possible Navision to become a real “cloud” service for the interested providers.
Let me explain a bit further, why we would need such information from the experts and consultants. We need to make a web client for our client. It is not urgent, so we have time to think, design and develop it. The question is whether to make it custom (asp pages emulating the needed pages from RTC) or more general - a full-featured web version of RTC. The latter, as everybody would guess, would be far more complex if possible at all, but could be of use to many other consultants or Nav-implementors (as we guess). So, the question is which way to go.