Convergence Diary: Tips & Tips for an Microsoft Dynamics NAV Administrator

Mauro Marinilli and Tom Loyal will be covering some topics about "End User productivity" and "System Administration". Lots of tips, lots of tricks to expect.

First the End User Productivity-part in NAV 2009 (could be the upcoming SP1 - Mauro was showing this in his Sp1, so I don't know for sure …).

First thing is Handling Focus:

• To move between Area's, the magic key is F6. You switch from action pane to navigation pane, to task panes, to fact boxes, … .
• To move between fields, use enter or tab. Enter is a little bit smarter then tab. Tab stops everywhere, enter only on editable textboxes… .

What you should get familiar with, is the fact that every main "thing" (for which I don't find a word for) is assigned to one major F-key. For everything that has to do with a "Menu", the key is F10:

• CTRL+F10 = Key Tips
• ALT+F10 = menu of the selected area
• F10 = menu on top

Everything that has to do with "Search" is under F3. To Quick Filter data, you need Shift+F3.
These were the ones that he talked about… .

Furthermore there is a new possibility in searching and filtering when entering data. Just begin to type, it automatically opens a list, filtered on the data you've been entering (beginning of the field). When you press the arrow to the right, it takes the same filter data and is going to filter the selected column with that same filter. Cool feature, but I have some doubts on performance. It is too comparable with "find as you type", which is a performance killer!

That's it for user productivity. Over to Tips and Tricks for System Administrators.

In NAV 2009 there is complete renewed documentation available, like basic walkthroughs and how-to information. Nice to know is that the latest help files and documentation can be found in the MSDN library, and updated Microsoft developer and IT pro help can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center (I don't have the link available here, but you can find it on my blog's "platform updates" section).

Next. Some security changes in the installer. The security is automatically configured during the installation for the user doing the install. Enhanced security is defined by default for use with SQL. The default role is "BASIC", but be careful here:

• The ALL role does not provide RoleTailored client permission
• The BASIC role must be imported separately

Furthermore in the installer, you can use a configuration file to automate your install. Great!

Next a demo about the installer. You might have been playing around with this. He showed how to do a setup, save the setup's config as XML so you can quickly install it on multiple clients… .

Next, the 3 tier environment. It changes how clients connect to the server. He explained it using an example. Mary is logging in. Then, the NAV Server service impersonates Mary when requesting SQL information, so the account running the service must be trusted for delegation… .

One more tip is to use SetSPN (which come by default in Win2008) for your SPN stuff. I don't know exactly how to explain, but I suggest you dive into in the documentation of NAV. To troubleshoot SPN, you can use ADSIEdit and/or Kerbtray.exe . Common problems are a duplicate SPNs or mistyped SPNs.

Next, backup. Is it necessary to take backups? Is that a stupid question? Which one, the first, second or third question? (waldooo, hush …):

For the Classic client and db server, you got three options:

• Client based backup
• Hotcopy
• File backup - stop the service & backup

But we must be honest, the backup-possibilities in SQL Server are much better. It's managed from SQL Management Studio and is flexible and very easy to schedule… .

Last few words are about Virtualization … actually just the statement that Dynamics NAV is supported on Hyper-V, but also runs on VMWare and XenServer… .

That was it!