Every time you write a line of C/AL a fluffy kitten dies.

IF <I write C/AL code> THEN

<Fluffy Kitten Dies>

[ELSE

<Fluffy Kitten Lives>]

My plea to you all in this article is to stop what you are doing. Lay down your keyboards and sit a while to contemplate. OK, no fluffy kittens are really going to suffer, but the time has come to take stock and ponder a life in which no NAV add-ons are written in C/AL. All those hundreds of applications (anyone remember when they used to print a catalogue? – throw that at a passing feline and it would feel something), all those versions to support and test and upgrade. Sometimes looking at a customer’s Object Designer screen was like visiting 9 million-range purgatory.

Microsoft has contributed fully in making add-on reality maddeningly confusing: frequently changing the licensing; changing the rules behind reselling add-ons and not telling anyone; asking you to fill in the world’s most obtuse spreadsheet in order to get your objects; printing all the instructions in Danglish. Oh, how we chuckled! In one case I know of it took over a year for a partner to get their objects, and when they finally did they realised that the number sequence issued wasn’t going to be big enough to accommodate V2  – so they had to re-apply and re-number the lot!  Such mirth! Oh, and then of course we took away forms, and reports, and matrices etc etc.

Now, I have nothing to sell here, I merely offer my observations of talking to happy and unhappy customer s and VAR’s/ ISV’s over the last six months.  Hopefully I will provoke some debate and comment. My thanks to those who have given generously of their opinions (hey, this is NAV, what did you expect), and if I plagiarise your thoughts, remember the wise words of Tom Lehrer – you say plagiarise, I say “research”.

What I look forward to is a world in which all the finest add-ons sit outside of NAV, written in C# or some such, connecting beautifully through web services and the RTC client, when that is necessary.  As time progresses (and we know that all the NAV proprietary pieces are unlikely to be developed further) NAV ISV’s are in danger of falling further behind. Look at the attempts to provide iPad apps – building from NAV tables out, and producing dull apps that nobody wants. Look at the multitude of time and expense recording systems out there – none of them as good as the industry’s best. Look at payroll – oh woe is me look at payroll. Look at procurement, demand management, workflow (!!), BI, mobile apps… I could go on.

But there is light at the end of this tunnel. Before Christmas I was in North Dakota looking at a world-class, popular and growing practice management suite being sold and developed by a NAV reseller. No kittens had been harmed in its production. NAV itself sat unmolested as the back end accounting piece. And I have seen similar in document management, demand forecasting, museum management and retail. The examples, admittedly, are few and far between, but they are growing – and here’s why. Some smart ISV’s have decided that they can no longer finance their lifestyles and ambitions from NAV alone. Times are tough, and may get tougher before they get any better.  They want AX, they want GP, they want… wait for it… SAP, and Sage, and Oracle. And, they want one code base.

Now, go to the store and buy a small stuffed  fluffy kitten that you can place on top of your monitor. I hope it has big baleful eyes (like the Puss in Boots from Shrek) – so every time you look at it there will be a little twinge of pain in your stomach.

We would like to thank Steve Farr for his article and we hope to have more articles from Steve to share with you through 2012

Steve is the founder of Cloudlight Consulting which is engaging with
the Dynamics community to ensure that customers get the best technology to
fulfil their needs. Steve was UK NAV & GP product manager for Microsoft for
7 years, and prior to that worked on global EPM and BI rollouts -