I’m an experienced ERP project manager / implementation consultant who has worked for 11 years with various other ERP systems. (BPCS, SAP and Syspro). I’m seeing a lot of demand for Microsoft ERP products in the market at present and am interesting in finding out more, as I may be interested in retraining to use these products.
Can anyone recommend a good way to get a flavour for these products as an independent consultant?
For example, are there demo versions that can be downloaded or would I have to be a customer or member of a partner organisation to really be able to find out more? I saw a downloadable file of ‘Navision Client V5 SP1’ which one poster seemed to suggest was a demo version. Is this true, and if so, is there an equivalent demo for AX?
I’m generally a person who learns most by playing with a product rather than attending sit-down classes so would like to find out as much as I can this way before trying any more formal learning route.
Thanks in advance for any help or advice to get me started !
NAV and AX are two different products. Axapta was purchased by Navision some time before MS bought Navision. They are gradually being merged into a single product line but at the moment they are totally different. AX is aimed at the larger size of company. I believe MS will be migrating internally from SAP to AX in the future - though don’t quote me on that.
Unfortunatly getting hold of a trial copy of NAV requires that you are already an MS partner.
If you have seen the download then you already have access. Other than being a partner or client I don’t know any other way of getting access to it.
To play with it you only need the client as you can use the included demo Cronus company. Nav comes with its own DB engine for shared file access so you can just double click the Cronus fdb file and open it. If you want to play with code then you will need a special license.
We were told at one of the MS presentations that the intention is to make the two products more alike - presumably so that people can switch from one to the other without too much work. I think the idea is that if the underlying apis, language, report engine and general structure are similar then a NAV consultant can switch to AX with minimal work.
How they will do this I have no idea. Personaly I’ve never even seen AX but it would seem to make sense from a support idea.
They are so different, trust me, 8 years a NAV consultant and the past 14 months as an AX consultant.
The language and report engine may become the same (SQL reporting services so does not really count), applications will be shared, and they may “look” the same, but AX might as well be Baan compared to NAV - they are very different, but AX could do with some of the useability of NAV, and NAV could do with some of the functionality of AX.
I think Project Green was killed off by Microsoft earlier this year - turning 4 revenue streams into 1 was always going to be too painful!!
hmm, curious. Couldn’t have been that long ago - we’ve only been signed up with MS for NAV for a year. Still, I heard it second hand so I’m not sure who actually said it was supposed to be going that way. Obviously someone who is not up to date.
Thanks for the links savatage, If I have some time I’ll have to try out AX just out of curiosity.
I’m not sure how it can be that different. In the end there are only so many ways to skin a cat. All ERPs have to solve similar problems and the solutions will by their nature be similar.
Different in how two cars can be different. They both have the same functionality, but go about providing it in completely different ways. The confusion out there is that many people still think that all Dynamics products will merge into one, and that is categorically not true at this point.