We want to take some areas of Attain and put them on the web: We have – Attain 3.01b with the native database (not SQL). Size is 2GB now but will grow to 4+ in the next 6 months. We have also made a very large number of customizations and modifications to Navision Objects (But then again, everyone has – that’s why you buy it!). Here is what we want to do: 1. Put our customer service system on the web and allow users to access only their accounts and view invoice, credit memo and payment history. This would be a read only real-time requirement. We would be showing data from the Customer Table and the Customer Ledger Entry Table. 2. We would want new customers and partners to be able to enroll in our service. This means that customers can enter their information and it will update on the customer card. Also they can track the status of their enrollment. (view of customer card data). In looking at Navision Application Server it appears that putting data from Navision to a SQL database is pretty straight forward. This solves any real-time read only requirements by just building ASP pages to look at the SQL data. Looks pretty easy to me if you’ve done ASP. >>>Are the above statements true? What is good about NAS? What’s not so good? In looking at Commerce Portal, my impression is it’s alot of work to get pages built to message back to Navision and to build custom asp pages to accomodate a great number of custom fields and tables we have put into navision. The good part is that the Navision Triggers and Validations are available when using CP. >>>Are the above statements true? What is good about CP? What’s not so good? What if we switch to SQL as our Navision Database instead of the internal database? How does that effect performance (for 100 concurrent users)? Does that make web interfaces easier? Finally, are their any easier ways to view and post data from the Web to and from Navision? We like RAD tools to cut down on development time and maintenance. I would also be concerned about what user or seat licensing is required for any other solutions you may propose. I know this is a big request but any help would be greatly appreciated. ps. (I’ll do better on helping those people with programming questions in exchange 
) Yours in Software, /m
Web-interfacing is easier when running SQL, as a lot of the standard tools for database connections can be used. Retrieving data onto webpages can be then done with JSP, ASP, PHP, Perl, XML/XHTML - whatever suits you best. It’s also possible to connect to the native database over C/ODBC, but it’s a little less flexible and not all functions are available. If not true real-time is required, you can make combinations by replicating data from/to Navision to/from a separate web-database (i.e. MySQL). Performance on a generic database system (what SQL is, after all) will always be less than a dedicated system offers. Navision’s own C/SIDE database is extremely fast, as it could be optimized for its task. Nevertheless, SQL can be having an excellent performance too, but may need to be fine-tuned for your purposes. Never do a simple transfer from native to SQL - although it may look highly similar in functionality, there are several crucial things “under the hood” which needs to be looked at. John
Mike, you may want to refer to thread ‘Web Shop’. You may find an idea from there.