[Miryam Peterson]

Hi we are embarking on an upgrade, we have been using 2009 for the last 10 years and we are upgrading to NAV 2018.  We use Pebblestone, I love to hear from your experiences, what to expect, training materials that you found useful,
how did you handle reports and forms. 
How to prepare your staff 
thank you

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Miryam Peterson
VP Operations
Clothworks Textiles, Inc.
Seattle WA
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[Naveen Jain]

Hi Miryam,

Were you on 2009 Classic or RTC?

Question: have you considered fresh implementation of NAV 2018 with limited changes and limited data bring over from your NAV2009? If you are converting from classic, then it is a big swing in terms of working environment in NAV. 

There are big changes between NAV 2009 and NAV 2018 and I would advise you to carefully review all the customization made in NAV 2009 and see if you really need them in NAV 2018. Also make sure any customization bring them as Extensions.

Any forms changes will need to brought over manually and also all custom Reports will need to re-create in NAV 2018 as it is a complete change in layout and how the reports are built. 

I do not have much experience with PebbleStone add-on but NAV 2017 onwards they added the Item Attributes for basic configurations. I am sure PebbleStone add-on will have a upgrade path. 

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Naveen Jain
Director of IT
Symbex Companies
Santa Fe Springs CA
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[Franz Kalchmair]

reports: in most cases they must be recreated from scratch as rdlc reports. part of the code can be reused. alternativly you can switch to e.g. fornav reports. fornav provides a report converter. 

forms: same thing. recreation from scratch, reuse of code.

staff: moving from nav2009 classic to windows client is quite hard for most perople. the windows client is slower, behavior is different, shortcuts are very different. but advantage: more possibilities to customize personal layout, layout for groups/departments (profile). to get the staff “into the upgrade boat”, i normally implement a support task addon in the new nav test db (a small issue tracker): creating support tasks in the new nav shows the people, that their input is recognized and processed AND they work/train with the new system, loose their fears.

important: especially, if there were many customizations in the old nav you have to choose to upgrade all that stuff or check, if the new nav provides alternatives instead.

training material: base docs you can find on msdn. on youtube you’ll find many tutorial videos. there are nearly no books anymore about new nav versions. 

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Franz Kalchmair
Microsoft MVP
Senior Consultant
Vienna, Austria, Europe
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[Ramin Marghi]

Hi Miryam,

By and large the biggest shift is the interface — just to add one consideration on top of all the great advice on here thusfar, if your users heavily used “Shortcuts” (I know I did when I was an end-user on Classic), the following two posts I wrote might help understand the new interface paradigm and give you some ideas for transitioning over to the Role-Tailored Client:

Customize the Navigation Pane in NAV 2013 and Beyond
No Shortcuts? No Problem: How to Customize the Ribbon in NAV

Thanks!

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Ramin Marghi , CPA, CGA
CPA, CGA | ERP Consultant
Catapult ERP
VANCOUVER BC
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