Category: Install

With the new Server Administration Tool for NAV 2013, adding a Service Tier is ridiculously easy.

In the good old Navision days, setting up multiple databases was a piece of cake. Every developer, tech support person, consultant, CFO, or resident ‘computer guy’ with just a little bit of technical skills wouldn’t break a sweat to create a new database for testing purposes, for training, or development. When NAV 2009 came out, things became a heck of a lot more difficult as the new RTC setup required you to also set up a Service Tier. Although there is a large number of blogs, forum posts and other online content available to help and guide you through this process, it remained painfully difficult and complex. In a 75 step process you better not skip crucial step number 32, which you didn’t realize until after irreversible step 58, and you had to uninstall everything, wipe clean the server, and start all the way from scratch. I don’t think it will be a surprise to hear that only the truly geeky NAV professionals enjoyed installing the service tier, and the complaints were always very loud when I listened to people at events like Convergence.

Lucky for us, the NAV team at Microsoft cares a great deal about the users, and it was very important for them to provide a set of tools that is easy to use, not just for technical people but also for admin type people. At the heart of it all is a set of PowerShell commands. These commands can be used separately in a PowerShell Session, and they can be scripted for unattended installation and scheduled maintenance purposes. For people that do not like to write “code-like” commands, there is also a new Windows Management Console snap-in for managing Server Instances. To start the Management Console, click on Start, Run, enter “MMC” and click OK. The NAV Server Management Tool can be added there.

The online help has a lot of information about the Server Administration Tool, which can be found by clicking this link.

When I needed to set up a worldwide NAV 2013 database, I decided to add this under a new Service Tier instance in my existing VM (in which I had a US database already installed), and record my progress to share with you. This video was not scripted ahead of time, I just recorded myself as I went along. It did go wrong along the way, and I had to do some troubleshooting to make it work right. See if you can find the mistake that I did not catch until after I was done editing wink. I hope that you will enjoy this video, and maybe even gather enough courage to try setting up multiple instances of the Service Tier.

First published June 4, 2012

Finally, NDA has been lifted, and I can FINALLY start sharing what I know about the new version of the product that we all know and love. Well most of us actually DON’T know it, which is why I love sharing this with you :). I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity to attend some TAP events in Copenhagen, and get access to early CTP versions of the new version of Dynamics NAV. As I was attending these events, I was getting VERY excited about the new technologies. The reason is that the NAV team has worked incredibly hard to address all of the painpoints that we feel in the current version of the product.

Not only that, they have also completed development for the new Sharepoint client, which provides almost all of the standard functionality to Sharepoint. Not only that, they have also completed development for the new Web Client, in which almost all standard NAV functionality is now available through a regular web browser. Not only that, NAV is the first Microsoft ERP system that can be deployed in the cloud on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. Not only that, we now also have a way to expose regular SOAP webservices as well as OData webservices. Not only that, we now have a host of new technological capabilities, such as a solid RTC debugger that we can actually modify ourselves, such as a new Query object that will allow us to define SQL queries as an NAV object type. Not to mention the new testability feature, which gives us the ability to completely automate testing. Not to mention a completely redeveloped data stack. I could go on, but hopefully you are getting my point :). It’s been a long time coming, but personally I think it is absolutely worth the wait. I am absolutely convinced that NAV 2013 has taken a HUGE step forward in maturity for our product, and I think it will provide a LOT of benefits for existing customers as well as new customers.

My plan is to create many YouTube clips to show you as many features as I can, and the first one is where I recorded the installion of the NAV 2013 Beta version into a Virtual Machine. In this video I talk about some of the prerequisites, the various components of a regular RTC installation, and I show you some of the features. It covers the RTC, the development environment, and I quickly go into the server management console. Enjoy and please leave your feedback in a comment.

First published May 17, 2012

If you have made heavy investments in automated solutions that run in NAS you can breathe easy, because chances are that it still works in NAV 2013!!

When Microsoft first came out with the news that the Classic Client was history, and that a number of object types were going to be discontinued, there was a LOT of speculation in the NAV world. Most of this speculation was based on unverified rumors, baseless “common sense” applied to unverified assumptions. One of these assumptions was “the Classic Client will be gone, so therefore NAS will be gone too”. Technically, these people were right of course. With a few minor restrictions (no forms, no dataports, no user input, no dialog boxes), NAS was nothing but a Classic Client without a user interface that runs as a Windows Service. Because the Classic Client no longer exists, NAS as we knew it is indeed gone.

What many of these people don’t realize is that the NAV team actually cares a great deal about making the life of the NAV partner channel easier. Everyone that knows about NAS knows how many products are built around it, even standard NAV functionality is implemented through the use of NAS (Job Queue, ADCS, to name a couple). It was in everyone’s interest to have a good alternative for NAS, and I believe the result is a very solid way to provide the ability to automate just about any user task in NAV. Coupled with the ability to create NAV sessions programatically, I believe that there are even more possibilities.

One aspect of your existing NAS implementation may cause some difficulties, and that is the fact that COM is no longer supported in NAV 2013. For instance, the “CP Timer” no longer works, the “Bus Adapters” no longer exist, and many other automation components will no longer work. For every use of COM you will need to find an alternative, whether this is .NET interoperability or whether you will need to find an alternative component. If you have existing NAS solutions, and you are thinking about upgrading to NAV 2013, please get in touch with your partner and start investigating what needs to happen (if anything) to keep your NAS solution running.

For a long time I’ve known about NAS on the Service Tier, and I’ve been looking forward to the time that I would finally be able to share this information. So sit back and relax, grab a cup of coffee and start the video. I’ll explain how to set up an instance of the Service Tier for NAS Services, and I’ll show you a number of ways that you can implement NAS on the Service Tier.

First published August 8, 2012