Just had a quick look at what is covered by the various hotfixes post 4.03 SP3 and the incorrect calculation of SIFT values could potentially be a big issue for us, although we have to say we have never experienced the problem. At what point do you decide it is a problem though, once you have suffered the painful consequences or should you try to pre-empt this?
We will consider the latest hotfixes, but performing a technical upgrade is a huge pain in the backside. In the past we have seen some right shockers like margin problems on reports, crashing clients and performance issues, so these days we tend to tred very carefully. I am interested in hearing how other companies deal with this issue though. Generally the problem is that once you have converted the DB to the latest version, all your users are locked out until you upgrade their client as well. So, how do you guys minimize downtime and how do you roll out the updates? SMS, batch scripts, or perhaps you use Citrix?
In my opinion one of two things should happen:
MS should integrate Navision with Windows Update Services, so if you control upgrades centrally you can push out an upgrade quickly.
Navision should recognise the DB has been upgraded and offer to upgrade the client for the user (possible problem because the user might not be a local admin)
Either way, for most companies that fall in between being very small (easy to run around and upgrade clients for everybody) and very big (likely to have something like SMS in place to roll out updates easily) technical upgrades must be a huge pain in the backside? Interested in hearing views of how other companies cope with this.
Regards
Meint
P.S. upgrading is bad, but when you then discover a huge bug and need to roll back, you are in a real world of pain. Yes, you should have tested better, but still
I agree with you, but it has one problem. Navision has a licensing similar to a subscription model. User must have a valid engagement plan to get the latest hotfixes. Not all customers have it, so will be difficult to integrate it in Windows Update.
If we just say “it’s difficult” and leave it as is, the world would be a terrible place to live. It can be done, but I don’t think that this is at the top of MSFT’s priority.
No I don’t think so either. It’s too bad though, because I think with some more thought, it could be a lot more user friendly. At the very least there should be a ‘check for updates’ selection, so that users can check it themselves, and ask their partner for the latest updates.
I’m not saying the information is not there, it’s not very easy to get to. I just think it could be more user friendly to get update information. As we all know, partnersource and customersource is not the easiest place to find information, and I think it would be a good service to NAV if there would be an ‘easy button’ to find out what the most current version is, and how they can get there.
Thought I had posted on this before and sure enough, there it was in my post history. We still don’t really have an easy solution so thought I would give my own thread a shameless bump to see if anybody else has suggestions. With 4.03 there are now 9 hotfixes for update 6 which would all need to be applied to 150 workstations. How do you all deploy this as quickly and consistently as possible, whilst keeping in mind that after the DB is converted clients are locked out until they are upgraded? Also, surely MS now have enough material to release 4.04?
A quick answer for this is to install NAV on a server and let the clients run it from there. Then upgrades are very easy to maintain (1 instead of 150).
