TechEd 2006 | Tuesday update [NAV 5.0]

This Blog Article was brought forward from my old blog

Wow, I just do not know where to start.

I guess most of you guys want me to start at all of the NAV 5.0 stuff.

I won’t

Today started out real quetly. I arrived at the convention round 8. Got some breakfest and about 3 cups of coffee and atteded some SQL session about what is being new in the 2005 verison.

After that there was a session about the NAV conection with .net. Basicly just showing some stuff making timesheet posting in the job ledger entries available from outlook though a .net ADO connection, having the NAS cathing the business logic.

I might be able to update the objects in NAV as well as the .net VSTO objects in outlook to Luc to post to the download selection.

After this session I had lunch with some of the NAV crew attending at this event.

Before the 5.0 session I was able to catch a session about Sharepoint server 2007. It is realy a great product, and considering 2007 version can get data out in into a SQL database it realy opens up opportunities for a small set of customers of our NAV product not being completely sattisfied about the userinterface.

But wait until they have seen 5.0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WOWOWOWOWOW It is realy a great user interface.

NAV will be the first product running on the generic Microsoft Dynamics UX 2006.

It is a completely new inteface, rendering data given from the 2nd tier of the 3tier application NAV will be having from the 5.0 version onwards.

Just to make clear first.

NAV developing will be in C/AL in 5.0

The development environment will still be C/AL, and it will remain that way until a similar development environment has been found when it gets to easy adoptobility.

We will actualy get another objecttype, called Page, like the XML and PANE objects in 4.0. This will enable you to create the pages the NAV 5.0 client will use to render for the user interface.

All of the current forms will be available into the pages thing. And we will be able to add all kinds of fancy stuff like graphs, COM add-ons like Word, Excel, Mappoint and things like that.

One of the things realy cleared out on me when looking at the 5.0 client is the Infopanes in the 4.0 client. In the 5.0 client, they are separate things within your page enabling users to get information about the e.g. sales header or sales line records without going into the table related forms and stuff like that.

In fact, that will be the biggest change in user experience in NAV 5.0 Whereass in the ‘old’ 4.0 client you are used to go to 5 or 6 or 7 other forms to get to the detailed data, in 5.0 the detailed data is presented within the Infopanes.

This is also where the new user based model snapps in. You can define user roles and this enables you to make the application more userfriendly for the enduser not being conserned about the bits of the application they do not use.

One of the great impovements that conserns this is the removing of the tab-oriented forms. The new forms are just big forms containing all data with a kind of bar instead of the tab of which I forgotten the name from they gave to it, I’ll post the name tomorrow.

The great thing about this improvement is that you will be able to remove information from this form using the user role, lets say e.g. a user do not need to know about the purchasing part of an Item, this information is not shown at the form, rather than having to make a new form for a different user we are doing today.

Going onwards to the 3tier thingy.

In the new situation the business logic will be executed at some 2tier layer running on IIS Server. I am not realy into the technical thing whereass it conserns this subject, but maybe someone else can explain about that being good or bad.

I do not think it is the same thing as the AX programm is running on, it is specialy designed for NAV.

I think I could just go on and on about the NAV 5.0 client but I also want to catch some sleep…

The demo about the client should be available for downloading in a couple of days, or otherwise I’ll get it to be here someway.

If there are any questions about this subject, please post them so I can try to answer it.

Last thing I want to inform you about is that we had a bowling event with the whole dynamic team including GP, AX, CRM etc, and visitors invited at the TechEd. I did not realy got a high score but it was a nice event when it gets to meeting people.

That is it for today,

I hope that it is somewhat satisfactional whereass it conserns the NAV 5 thing. If you have any questions, please post.

Either I can try to answer them or any of the other mvp’s because the demo we’ve been getting today was mostly the same thing we got to see 2 months ago as part of the mvp programm, so the NDA thingy is removed from that subject. [not from the webservices thing!]

One last thing, if you want to tryout 5.0 client, just drop by our demo stand at the teched, you are allowed to play with it !!!

I think it is the you last chance, 3 days left….

I don’t know if there is a chance to play with it at the partner conference.

Best,

Mark