Gustav Brock
gustav at cactus.dk
Mon Jun 7 11:25:35 CDT 2004
Hi John Navision (brand name) Attain (product name) is Danish. With a handful of other products like Concorde XAL and Axapta they were bought by MS a couple of years ago - after Great Plains. However, MS has not yet published a full plan for outphasing these and replacing them with the new monster ERP system MS is rumored to have ready in five years time. Contrary to the Concorde products which always have exploited strange behaviour, the Navision products run rock steady. The db engine is proprietary but is very fast and is known for essentially impossible to crash - certainly a nice feature. The user interface visual design is very neat and strict but extremely boring, and the logic in the user interface can be hard to follow and to learn. A high level of customization of the user interface is normally required at a cost which at least equals the license cost ... out of the box the product is simply non-comprehensible for the average user. Programming these animals is a full time job; Attain uses a Pascal-like language, Axapta a Java-like, and XAL its very own language. Worse yet, obtaining a developer license is extremely expensive (in the EUR 15.000 range), thus only dedicated and very expensive developers (but not always very good) exist. APIs hardly exist and ODBC drivers cost a fortune. Quite expensive system - right now a bargain on Attain is offered at around EUR 2.000 per user license ... Navision compares in no way to SAP R/3 but somewhat to SAP Business One. However, SAP B1 costs a fraction and it features a full API which allows people like you and me to modify and expand it. As for programming Navision, my best advice is to forget it - sit down and be the nice guy and watch the consultants play - you will by sure learn their names while they "play" a lot at your client's expense at excessive hour rates! You have been warned. /gustav > I have a company that wanted some temporary Access work form me but the > final goal was the company was migrating all their ERP and databse stuff to > Navision. > Anyone have any experince with this. I'm curious if it's a good MS product. > I think it's supposed to be MS's answwer to SAP? Maybe it something worth > learning. > Any thoughts? > Thanks, > John Skolits