What does it do? It is designed to give MS Dynamics NAV developers possibility to use TFS Source Control in one click.

How does it work? It adds two menu items to Source Control context menu that enable you to put selected files or all files in selected folder directly into NAV  from TFS Source Control. Or get them from NAV into Source Control.

Note: for plug in to work correctly NAV objects must be named in following format: VVVNNN.TXT where VVV – object type (COD for Codeunits, FOR for forms, REP for reports, TAB for tables, XML for XMLports); NNN object number. To not doing this for each object separately you can use command line utility called Separate to separate one TXT file with several objects into individual files named correctly.

Nav Integration

How many times you had to make additional mouse clicks just to do routine work. Especially when you have many objects and you do not want to put each object to separate file.

We’ve created command line tool that enable you to take or put Dynamics NAV (Navision) objects directly from or to opened Dynamics NAV (Navision) database. It works with both MS SQL and Navision Native database options and for any version of the client I’ve tried from 3.7 to 5.0 SP1. To use this tool you would need Navision developer license of course.

Thanks to author of the Søren Nielsen’s blog we can make this tool available.

Think of Your Maturity

When this tool can be very useful? Personally for me was very irritating to perform all these actions each time I had to check-in my changes to source control system. So if your company mature enough to use source control system:), and in this system you can register custom action you can register it there to be able to send or get Object during check-in or check-out. If not then you better start thinking about that quite heavily. Right now we are working on creating nice plug-in for Microsoft Team Foundation Server. This system can really drive your company projects to success and with plug-in for MS Team Foundation Server (expect the separate article about it) to Dynamics NAV (Navision) integration running projects with full control of any possible changes. Move over, this tool can be tuned to use with most of current Source Control systems.

Installation Tips

We are recommending putting our tool into folder that available through Path variable. I’ve just copied it to system32 folder (clumsy but effective ). I’ve also registered as custom action for text files in Explorer to have it to right click menu.

Command line tool download

Another exciting solution we’d like to share with you is Microsoft Dynamics NAV reports in MS Office Outlook. Which is an easy and nice way to use MS Office Outlook may be operating MS Dynamics NAV reports still working in Outlook. We investigated several possibilities to show the NAV reports in Outlook. Looking through them, we stopped on two options – SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and direct SQL data sources. For this solution we chose the SSRS as all NAV reports are to be converted to use it in very near future with releasing MS Dynamics NAV 6.0.

Technology

For the solution, we used three standard customer reports: Single Customer, Single Customer – Share of Total Item Sales, Single Customer – Item Statistics, which were taken from the MS SSRS repository. After the user has pressed the button, the solution analyses the sender’s address, finds the corresponding customer in NAV and shows the nice looking reports. So there is no need to leave your favorite Outlook to see Dynamics NAV reports.

The Single Customer Report

Single Customer – Share of Total Item Sales

Single Customer – Item Statistics

Your Banefits

Additionally, using Microsoft SQL server reporting services (SSRS) you have even more options, like save the reports in plenty of different formats, or schedule and send your report to anybody on timely basis (i.e. weekly or daily reports to your management, customers or just to yourself to send it further).

The SSRS was chosen not only because it is a new engine for NAV reports. Also, this architecture empowers you with a great tool set for working with report. You can easily apply additional filters, use zoom and export a report in a variety of different formats or just forward or reply with it (suggested feature).

With this post we are going to introduce the first family of our products for Microsoft Dynamics. We will describe several approaches and technologies that will be useful for the user in perspective of Outlook Integration/Synchronization and Microsoft Dynamics NAV CRM area.

MS Dynamics NAV Web Services or the History of Innovation

After Microsoft Convergence 2007, we were very interested in the new exciting technology from Microsoft Dynamics – web services. Having tested them, we can say that although there are some exceptions, Outlook can be integrated with any Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision) form or entity. Our team can even perform some Dynamics NAV logic from MS Office Outlook side. Unfortunately, the release for this technology has been postponed, but not our desire to share new exciting possibility.

So, we are converting our solution to work directly with MS SQL Server so that it is possible to use the integration with previous versions of Dynamics NAV (Navision).
For the MS Office Outlook side we have found two great points for the Integration: REGIONS and ADD-INS. We will talk about Add-Ins in this article. REGIONS will be the part of other solutions and corresponding article for you.

Outlook Add-In

Add-In is a classical way to extend the MS Office applications. We can extend any Outlook form class or create a new one to enhance the functionality. As for beginning, we think it should be really handy to use NAV Customers as recipients while composing a new letter in Outlook. By using the customer list panel, the user can easily find and add any customer from NAV to the recipient list.

Clicking the No. link, the user will get the requested Customer Card window opened in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision). Move over, we are planning to extent this add-in with the possibility to add the selected customers to the message body or as attachment, and to filter the customer list by different parameters.

MS Outlook compose window

MS Outlook compose window and Microsoft Dynamics NAV window displaying the requested customer card

Your Benefits

Having implemented the described functionality, you will get a new way to interact with the customers (also vendors or any other contacts) by having them in Outlook New Mail window. Find the necessary contact group using the filters and create a mail for thw whole group. Another upcoming feature is to select the range of customers to be added to the message body if the user wants to send customers’ details. Also, the user can easily open the needed customer card in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

We are glad to invite you to our new project; hoping that you would like it and would stay with us. In a short time, there will be many features here that derive from our previous experience and were thrown away or were just lost somewhere in our pasts. But now it’s time to remember everything that may be useful for you.

Please don’t even think that we are going to show you old tricks only or stuff from the past here. For quite a long time we have been having plenty ideas that we are to present to you.

So, who are them?

We are the community of enthusiasts which want to share our knowledge, innovations, and solutions with you, everything that we have for the moment. Hope you will help us to do our job better, we really hope you will leave some of your thoughts on our sites.

Your comments, complaints, suggests and especially good words are the main goal for us.

Whom we are doing this for?

First of all our beloved users should find something very fresh. And, of course, we are like to share some experience with our brothers – developers. For more information about coming innovations see our tomorrow “Coming Soon…” article and wait for more…

Yours enthusiasts from Dynamics Planet.