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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV in the real world often requires you to integrate the ERP with external applications or solve complex architectural tasks in order to have a final successful project. This book will show you how to extend a Microsoft Dynamics NAV installation to the enterprise world in a practical way.
The book starts with an introduction to Microsoft Dynamics NAV architecture and then moves on to advanced topics related to implementing real-world solutions based on NAV and external applications. You will learn how an enterprise distributed architecture with NAV at the core can be implemented.
Through a series of real-world cases on every topic and every industry (sales, retail, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, and so on), you’ll see step by step how to efficiently solve a technical problem. These common problems encountered in a NAV implementation will be solved using the entire technology stack that Microsoft offers.
By the end of the book, you will have the knowledge to efficiently solve certain scenarios, you will know which is the best solution architecture to propose to a customer and how to implement it.
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Seitenzahl: 244
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Building ERP Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics NAV
Building ERP Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics NAV
Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing
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First Published: March 2017
Production reference: 1170317
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78712-308-3
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Credits
Author
Stefano Demiliani
Copy Editor
Safis Editing
Reviewer
Duilio Tacconi
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About the Author
Stefano Demiliani is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD), MCSA, MCAD, MCTS on Microsoft Dynamics NAV, MCTS on Sharepoint, MCTS on SQL Server, and an expert on other Microsoft-related technologies.
He has a master’s degree in computer engineering from Politecnico of Turin. He works as a senior project manager and Solution Developer for EID (http://www.eid.it), a company that is part of the Navlab group (http://www.navlab.it), one of the biggest Microsoft Dynamics groups in Italy (where he’s also the chief technical officer).
He has a lot of experience in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (from the first versions of the ERP). His main activity is architecting and developing enterprise solutions based on the entire stack of Microsoft technologies (Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Sharepoint, Azure, Cloud apps, and .NET applications in general and OLAP and BI solutions for data analysis) and he’s often focused on engineering distributed service-based applications.
He works as a full-time NAV consultant (with over 15 years of experience in handling international NAV projects) and is available for architecting solutions based on Microsoft’s ERP as well as for NAV database tuning and optimization (performance and locking management) and for architecting cloud solutions and applications.
He’s the author of various Microsoft Certified NAV add-ons (for example, the first cost accounting NAV add-on). He has written many articles and blogs on various Microsoft-related topics, and he’s frequently involved in consulting and teaching. He has worked with Packt Publishing for many books on Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
You can find out more about Stefano and get in touch with him by visiting http://www.demiliani.com or via Twitter (@demiliani) or LinkedIn.
This book is the result of months of work and it’s a dream that comes true. Thanks to all the wonderful staff that has worked with me in these months (Rohit, Aaron, Rahul, Duilio): your support was unbelievable.
I would like to dedicate this book to my little daughter Sara: I love you, maybe a day you will be proud of me also for this!
About the Reviewer
Duilio Tacconi is a senior Microsoft Dynamics NAV support engineer at Microsoft EMEA Customer Support and Services (CSS). He joined Microsoft in 2008 after working customer support with a focus primarily on the technical side of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. He was attracted to Microsoft Dynamics NAV starting from Microsoft Business Solution Navision 3.70 A and User Portal in 2004. Despite graduating with the highest score in Agricultural science, he is in the ERP circuit since 1998 as developer for several companies with Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies. Currently, he is a subject matter expert in the EMEA region for RDLC reports and Microsoft EMEA CSS senior reference for Managed Service for Partner (NAV PAAS). Three times IronMan competition finisher, Duilio lives in Cernusco Sul Naviglio, Italy, with his beloved wife, Laura, and his new born son, Leonardo.
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Preface
I started my professional career in the IT world many years ago as a pure developer, and I’ve spent many years of my life developing custom applications from scratch with Microsoft technologies.
When more than 12 years ago I also started working in the ERP field (and, in particular, with Microsoft Dynamics NAV), I learned that when implementing an ERP solution, there are some business tasks that you can efficiently solve using the internal ERP programming language (C/AL for Microsoft Dynamics NAV), but there are also many tasks that require the usage of other technologies to be solved in a brilliant way.
During these years, I had the chance to be involved (directly or indirectly) in many different ERP projects in different functional areas, and I’ve always seen what I call a “bad habit”: the standard ERP developer (or Microsoft Dynamics NAV developer in this case) tries to solve all development tasks using what he knows best: the C/AL programming language! He forgets that outside the ERP box, there’s a world of technologies that permit you to have a final solution that rocks, and many times, I see solutions (especially when integrating Microsoft Dynamics NAV with other applications) that are solved using old technologies or in a bad way.
A typical example is integrating Microsoft Dynamics NAV with an external application: I see very often that the NAV developer proposes to create integrations via file exchange (CSV) too if the external application supports APIs based on web services, and only because he only knows C/AL.
The main goal of this book is to open the mind of the ERP developer and help him understand how to solve integration tasks in a modern (and efficient) way.
This is my mantra: not all tasks must be solved using C/AL. Leave C/AL for the internal ERP business logic!
In this book, we’ll cover many business scenarios that you can find when implementing an ERP solution (all of them come from the real world), and we’ll see how to solve them in a modern way using “service-oriented” solutions and cloud services.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introducing Microsoft Dynamics NAV Architectures, introduces you to Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This covers the history and the evolution of this ERP solution and helps you explore the different architectures that you can have when implementing a Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP solution.
Chapter 2, Configuring Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web Services, introduces you to what Microsoft Dynamics NAV web services are and how you can publish the internal business logic to external applications using SOAP and OData web services.
Chapter 3, Creating an Application Using NAV Web Services, shows you how to implement an external application using .NET and Visual Studio, which interact with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV business logic using web services.
Chapter 4, Using NAV Web Services with Power BI, explains how you can expose the ERP data by using OData web services on the Power BI platform for data analysis and reporting.
Chapter 5, Integrating NAV Web Services and External Applications, shows how you can implement a real-world interface between Microsoft Dynamics NAV and an external application (a B2B web site). In this chapter, you will learn how you can publish the ERP business logic you need, how you can create an integration layer with open communication standards such as XML or JSON, and how you can expose a RESTful service to the external application that connects it with the ERP.
Chapter 6, Extending NAV Pages with Control Add-ins, demonstrates how you can extend the ERP user interface by using custom control add-ins.
Chapter 7, Programming Universal Windows Apps with NAV and Devices, shows you how you can create a RESTful integration service (by using ASP.NET Web API) that connects your Microsoft Dynamics NAV with custom application developed using the Universal Windows Platform. We’ll see how you can implement a solution for device tracking and monitoring health data.
Chapter 8, Exploring Microsoft Azure and its Services, introduces you to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and its services. You'll get an overview of the Azure platform and learn about the main Azure concepts. You will also get an overview of the main cloud services offered by Azure that could be helpful when implementing distributed architectures based on Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Chapter 9, Working with Azure App Service and NAV, covers how you can take advantage of cloud services in order to implement a distributed and totally scalable architecture that integrates the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP to external systems.
Chapter 10, Implementing a Message-Based Architecture with Azure Service Bus and NAV, covers how you can use another interesting cloud service offered by the Azure platform (the Azure Service Bus) in order to implement a reliable message-based solution (order exchange from distributed locations) with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
What you need for this book
To successfully follow the examples described in this book, you will need the following software:
Who this book is for
The audience of this book is essentially the following:
This book assumes that you have a working knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics NAV (mainly in the developer field) and a basic knowledge of C#, Visual Studio, and web services.
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Chapter 1. Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics NAV Architectures
Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and it is part of the Microsoft Dynamics product's family.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Introducing Microsoft Dynamics NAV
Microsoft Dynamics NAV delivers integrated functionality to provide support for the following aspects:
Microsoft Dynamics NAV is considered to be one of the most versatile and agile ERPs on the market. It's very quick and affordable to customize and it has the power to be able to grow with your business needs.
With NAV you can customize every aspect of the application (from fields to business logic) and you can build new modules from scratch. You have complete access to the source code of the application and you have an integrated environment that helps you to make customizations and implementations.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV history
Microsoft Dynamics NAV was born from Navision, a suite of accounting applications which Microsoft acquired in 2002.
Navision was created at Personal Computing and Consulting (PC&C A/S), a company founded in Denmark in 1983 by three college students. This company released its first accounting package, PC Plus, in 1984 (a single-user character-based application) and then in 1987 they released the first version of Navision, a character-based client/server accounting application that works over a LAN and with more simultaneous users:
In 1990, Navision 3.0 was launched. This version introduced AL, an internal application language similar to the actual Client/server Application Language (C/AL). This was a killer feature: the new application language made it possible to customize every part of the application and this was unique on the market at that time.
The product grew and in 1995 Navision Financials 1.0 was launched based on the Microsoft Windows 32-bit client/server platform:
The product was improved in the following years by adding more features as follows:
On July 11, 2002, Navision was acquired by Microsoft and Microsoft created the Microsoft Business Solutions division. In September, 2005 Microsoft re-branded the product as Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
In November 2008, Microsoft announced Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, with a totally new architecture, as follows:
Microsoft Dynamics NAV has had continuous improvements over the years on every aspect of its technical and functional side.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 introduced the following new features:
The next main release, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2, introduced the following new features:
With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015, we saw the introduction of the following topics:
With the next release, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016, Microsoft introduced the following services:
The latest release (Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017) introduced the following new features:
Now we have a complete and full-featured enterprise platform that is appreciated all over the world, able to work on-premise and on-cloud, and on many devices as shown in the following screenshot:
Microsoft Dynamics NAV architecture
Before version 2009, Microsoft Dynamics NAV had a two-tier architecture.
In two-tier architectures (client/server data model), the data layers reside on the server and the application logic, presentation logic, and presentation layers reside on the client.
Starting from version 2009, Microsoft Dynamics NAV is composed of three major components (three-tier architecture), as follows:
In a production environment, you can obviously have multiple instances of each of the core NAV components:
The most common NAV architecture configurations that you can have in a real-world installation are as follows:
In addition to these three core components, there are other additional components that you can have on a NAV installation:
Component
Purpose
Microsoft Dynamics NAV Help Server
A website with the Help content for Microsoft Dynamics NAV in the languages that your version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV includes. You can deploy a single Help Server for all users, or customer-specific Help Servers, depending on your requirements.
Web Server Components
The components that are needed to enable Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web clients to connect with a browser.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server Administration Tool
A tool for configuring and managing the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server and Microsoft Dynamics NAV sites. It has a GUI that permits an easy way to manage all the server's features.
Development Environment (C/SIDE)
The Development Environment for creating and modifying Microsoft Dynamics NAV applications (business logic) in C/AL.
Microsoft Office Outlook Add-In and Business Inbox
A set of components for synchronizing data, such as to-dos, contacts, and tasks, between Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Outlook and using Dynamics NAV as your business Inbox in Outlook.
Automated Data Capture System
