The whitepaper Whats New Developing Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV “6.0” was released late last year and gives an overview of some of the new features and how to access those new features specific to NAV 6.0.
The paper has been under development for nearly as long as the NAV 6.0 project itself. At the beginning of the Corsica project, two events occurred that drove its creation. The first was the persona model was being driven as a toolset across development teams – this is exactly the same persona model you can find here and is a fantastic tool for unifying terminology and understanding of which users we’re targeting on our feature teams. Until we had the persona model, we used use cases that merely stated “an experienced developer blah blah blah”, and now we had Simon, Isaac and Mort to target our features to.
The second event was that as the development team that created the C/AL to .NET compiler was formed and there was a request from the Testers in the team to diagram and specify how developers worked. As hard as I could, I was not able to argue that everybody already knows how developers work. The Testers insisted that if everyone knew how developers worked then it should be easy to capture it in a simplistic way.
I’m glad they argued.
So I began writing a document called Simon Goes to Work. Simon in honour of the persona closest to a classical NAV consultant/developer . In writing the use cases and drawing the diagrams for how developers move from code to compilation to deployment and from setup/installation to upgrades and from backups and restores, we identified a host of issues. Without going into details, it gave us a handle on a specific special scenario that we could theory-test against our design. It was the cause for some redesign and is generally considered a good thing that we did it.
But wait … there’s more.
After the development teams had been plugging away at this project for some time, we began to get questions from other internal MS groups. Questions about the features and how they should be described and positioned (i.e., how to sell them to our partner channel/why we consider them valuable). This is really something that happens on the tail end of projects – documenting the value of the features that we set out at the beginning of the project to achieve. At that point, it was far simpler to share the Simon document with them to answer the questions about how things worked.
In the end, we got lots of feedback from the internal teams with questions and we elaborated more and more to the Simon document until the realization occurred that this document not only answered a lot of questions for internal Microsoft Team Members, but it might also be a good read in preparing people for what is to come on NAV 6.0. Naturally you wouldn’t expect Microsoft standard naming conventions to be supportive of a whitepaper called Simon Goes to Work so after enough committees and focus groups, it eventually grew the name it has today.
We haven’t really written a paper like this before but it does fill a place answering some common questions about NAV 6.0. I hope you get a chance to look it over and hope it helps understanding another piece of the 6.0 puzzle.
Download What’s New – Developing Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV “6.0” (PartnerSource access required)