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If you read our previous blog post on a Phased transition to Business Central SaaS (if you haven’t yet, you really should read it😊) you would have noticed that we refer to Dynamics 365 Business Central in the Cloud (Microsoft’s Software as a Service solution or ‘SaaS’ for short) as to the Eldorado, or destination of gold and eternal bliss. However, if your current version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is very outdated, you may wind up in a Sisyphean whereabouts, rather than Eldorado. In this blog post, I’ll share the best upgrade approach for very outdated Dynamics 365 Business Central solutions so that they can effectively move to the latest version. We call this upgrade concept a - “Clean Start”, aka clearing the path to Eldorado…

Today, Microsoft Dynamics NAV/365 Business Central On-Premises customers see Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) as the Eldorado (a destination of gold and eternal bliss). Therefore, the biggest consideration is discerning how to successfully move customers from Microsoft Dynamics NAV (any version) or Dynamics Business Central On-Premises to Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS smoothly, timely and safely.

Historically, Microsoft NAV Upgrades have been painful and time-consuming projects.  It is not surprising many Microsoft Dynamics NAV Partners preferred to perform new Dynamics NAV installation projects over existing Dynamics NAV upgrade projects.

The dawn of the new Microsoft Dynamic NAV upgrade tools has spelled relief for many Partners upgrading solutions from Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 and later versions. The introduction of these new tools, like Powershell, has allowed major upgrade obstacles to be removed and in some cases even automated.

When Dynamics NAV 2016 was launched, Extensions were introduced as the new way to build Add-Ons. At that time, Extensions had too many restrictions, so developers were playing around with them, but only the brave actually started developing real Extensions implementations.

With NAV 2017, the number of restrictions have significantly decreased. Now the Extensions Marketplace (App Source) is growing at a rapid pace.

Following 1ClickFactory‘s vision, all companies will someday run on the latest version(s) of their software(s), 1ClickFactory‘s NAV developers commenced several Extension development projects to make it easier to upgrade Add-Ons.  Through this work, a couple of peculiarities surfaced that you may want to make note of for your own Extensions development.

In my previous blog post,  I gave a short overview of RapidStart Upgrade Tools and how these tools can help simplify the upgrade journey for Dynamics NAV Partners. In this blog post, I’ll dive deeper into the merge using RapidStart Tools topic. Let’s get started…

Microsoft has made it easier to move from version-to-version for Dynamics NAV customers and their Partners. Upgrades have become much simpler and more affordable for customers with RapidStart Upgrade Tools released with NAV 2015, shipping important features more frequently having a minimum impact on the existing solution and the introduction of the cumulative updates option that doesn’t require the installation of each service pack for every cumulative update.

When the Upgrade Subscription Service is added to these improvements, it becomes much easier for customers to keep their ERP on the latest version and enjoy benefits that the newest technology provides. 

In this series of blog posts, we would like to share our insights on new merge and data migration possibilities introduced with RapidStart Upgrade Tools and Powershell, explaining how it will effect upgrades for Dynamics Partners and their customers.