The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009

For customers looking to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, the known and unknown organizational risks can appear as daunting as any technical complexity in the project.

According to Greg Kaupp from Dynamics NAV solution provider ArcherPoint, one of the complaints he's heard over the last 10 years working with Dynamics NAV is that if customers aren't careful, their upgrades become open-ended projects and can even become budget sinkholes.

One of the customer concerns that keeps cropping up about upgrading to Dynamics NAV 2009, Kaupp explained during a recent online meeting of the Dynamics NAV User Group, is that the cost of the upgrade is going to be double what was expected. But a lot of that comes from a misunderstanding around what it takes to get to the role tailored client, he said.

Done right, Kaupp says, an upgrade should be a nonevent.

"It shouldn't interrupt business, but it can't just be a creative process," he said. "Upgrades are very much a rote exercise. That means you need to have a well-defined process for how you go through that and you need to do lots of them."

Kaupp said that this planning and process definition was especially important, because Microsoft doesn't do upgrades.

"You're really relying on partners to work with you to do that upgrade," he said. "So it becomes incumbent on you as clients to make sure that the partner you chose to work with you in the upgrade has done a lot of them; and that they have a well-defined process and a knowledge base with previous upgrades. We'd like to believe that the tools and the data transformation tool kit that Microsoft ...