IOS App communicating with Microsoft Dynamics NAV - ios

I'm trying to build a system for a company, which their employess use for timeschedules/payrolls.
It's supposed to take the input in the app, and post/put it to Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
I would also like to exctract information from it to, to use in the app.
MY Question
Is it possible? I'm not asking for a solution, rather a guideline or previous experience, so I know wether or not this is a project I'm willing to do.
Somehow I have the idea that it's possible through excel arks - Which I know Navision reads.

You can use Web Services in NAV 2009 R2 to connect between an external system and NAV. I'd recommend this over, say, direct SQL access or Flat File transfers.
There is some documentation on MSDN that might help you get started.
In newer versions of NAV (NAV 2013 specifically) they introduced the concept of Time Sheets, and in NAV 2016 the Phone Client. This may also give you what you need (albeit with an upgrade), without building or maintaining an external application.
Just note that there are specific licensing restrictions around "multiplexing" - e.g. building a web app to access & modify NAV data to get around licensing restrictions. Check out the NAV license terms;
In addition to the server software license, you must acquire and
assign an Access License to each user that accesses the ERP solution
directly or indirectly. You need an Access License for each user that
directly or indirectly accesses the ERP solution through a third party
application.

Using Web Services is an option or you can use 3rd Party apps like MobileNAV
and of course you can still upgrade to NAV 2016
Cheers!

Related

Business Intelligence Application for iPad

I have some experience in iPhone development. Now one client wants to develop a BI (Business Intelligence) related iPad app for their organisation.
As I have no previous experience in development of such an application, I googled a bit & learned that these BI related apps show various data present in an organisation in various chart/graphical formats to the user.
Q1) So what is the best way to pull these data from server?
Q2) Also is there any API / Framework available to do this kind of app in iPad?
If anyone has any other suggestions, please post here.
There are a TON of ways to do this. You can build it with most any technology that your organization uses. The main key is to keep a clear separation of tiers. Build a web application that queries your database and have it present the information as XML or JSON. You can then parse the data and present it in your iOS application.
For actually doing data visualization, you will want to take a look at Core-Plot. I've used it on projects and it has worked well: http://code.google.com/p/core-plot/
If your customer wants an out-of-the-box solution for getting their BI on mobile devices, take a look at Actuate/BIRT. They have a simple way to get it into mobile.

Using Google as a substitute of a web interface for an existing client server application

I am in researh mood and one of the tasks I have in my to do list is:
"Finalize the techonlogy to use for creating a web interface to my existing Client Server application".
My application is very rich and full of features. It makes sense it is has rich client UI, because it is a productivity tool. Many shortcuts, many things without any click. So I am not looking for a full replacement.
My app has some features that would be good to be used also from a web interface.
Some of them:
1) multi user calendar (every item I see in the calendar is linked to something in my app, for example "today 11:00: recall customer 'Dummy ltd'". This is not a simple memo, it is also linked to the customer), so i can see my and others tasks.
2) Confirm some task (yes I did this!)
3) see some report (some graph or some tabular report)
Of course this are not simple outputs, they can contain some logic (for example some calendar items must be readonly, some others can be edited).
This said, I was considering whether doing all this with Google would be a reasonable choice. In this way I don't have to install anything, simply interfacing with google would be enough. I can map my application users to one (or more) google users and use all the google features (calendar, charts, tasks, ....).
May you comment on this? Which are the good/bad points.
Some good points I can forsee:
1) no need to design any UI, just connect to an existing powerful and userfriendly system
2) the applicatino will automatically be compatible with google ("is it possible to export on google?" is a typical question I recieve)
3) google already provides the interface for the points I wrote above (tasks, calendar, charts, ...)
4) no deployment issues. No server hosting. just need to configure the users with some wizard.
Some bad points:
1) Which is the long term support? Will the Google APIs change every month or some of them will be stable for years?
2) How much may I push? How much is it possible to customize? I mean can I write some logic like "this item is readonly", "this item is not"? (afaik in google I can share a calendar with other people, in different ways, but there is no way to make only a part of it readonly. Of course I could do this with a trick, like having 2 calendars, one readonly and the other not. But is it possible to change the default google behaviour like for example in calendar case?)
3) of course I am limited, writing "from scratch" allows me to do everything.
Final note: my app is a Delphi client/server application. The communication will be done from an application server that will interact with the google apis.
As I understand, the API are stable, for example the Calendar API documentation says
Google periodically updates the
Calendar Data API in order to deliver
new features and to repair defects
discovered in previous versions. In
most cases, these changes will be
transparent to API developers.
However, occasionally we need to make
changes that require developers to
modify their existing applications.
So as long as the service exists I would expect only small changes. Services however can disappear from one day to the other (see Google Wave for example) so I would check the requirements of an 'exit strategy', at least a way to export the most critical information.
My application is very rich and full
of features. It makes sense it is has
rich client UI, because it is a
productivity tool
It sounds like Morfik might be a good choice for creating web interface for your application. Once you like it, you might even make the whole application in it. ;-)

Reporting Service for Amazon RDS?

I'm curious if anyone has any leads for me on this:
I have a business app that we're building, that could benefit from some out of the box reporting services. Looking for reports that can be created and customized by the end user, without (too much) developer support. Think crystal reports / MS Access reports, but better and all web based interface.
Ideally, this would be a SAAS that I could buy, and that could hook directly up to my Amazon RDS instance. Then I would create frames around it within my business app for the end users.
I don't want to write my own reporting system - but I need it to be in the cloud to work with my system. Or be something I could install on a rails app.
So far, all I've found are brochure pages for services I've never heard of or developer solutions for rails on github. (meaning they have great report creation tools, but no front-ends for users.)
If anyone has any leads, or experience in this, I'd be happy to hear it.
Thanks
Docmosis.com
This is a cloud based reporting system developed for exactly this problem. It uses either Word or Open Office templates that can be edited and maintained by the end user with little or no developer support. There is a front end interface for the user to manage and upload their templates. Changes to the templates are reflected in report output instantly. Once deployed, your application simply calls the web service with the data to inject into the report (JSON, XML) which is then delivered back in a variety of formats including pdf, doc, html.
We have used this in the education sector for some time and found that it saves us a lot of time because the business owners can take on the task of developing the report formats in familiar MS Word and they prefer it that way.
I also know of a developer who has built an iPad app over it too. Docmosis streams pdfs back to the device and emails a copy to a specified email address. You can integrate it from most environments.

Create new calendar system support in Exchange OWA

Since Exchange doesn't provide support for all local calendar types in OWA, I need to create one, using Microsoft.Net's support of calendars, but where should I start?
If I understand correct what you want, the usage of Exchange Server Web Services would be the best way for you. EWS gives you full set of API for appointments and they can be used in .NET very easy. You can use Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Web Services SDK (EWS SDK) with Exchange Server 2007 SP1 (you should just use ExchangeService constructor with ExchangeVersion.Exchange2007_SP1 parameter).
I recommend you to watch video http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB46/. I find this video as the best starting point.
Other 6 videos from
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032427565&Culture=en-US can gives you more additional information. In two last videos from there you can learn some optimization tricks like retrieving only the properties which you need and paging of results. Using of custom extended properties in appointments is also explained in both of this video sources.
Some small examples how to work with with calendar items (appointment) with respect of EWS SDK you will find here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd633702.aspx.
On http://blogs.msdn.com/exchangedev/ you will find more interesting information, links and some good examples.

How do I create an Active X control for use in Internet Explorer 7+?

I'm using Delphi 2007 and I am looking for some resources and best practices for writing an ActiveX control for embedding within Internet Explorer 7.0 (and higher).
My goal with this ActiveX control is to be able to retrieve information about which websites the user is visiting, and the type of connection (e.g. HTTPS, HTTP, FTP, etc). I'm not looking to sniff traffic, just for reviewing the addresses they are visiting.
Or, if it would be easier, I would ideally like to write a toolbar similar to AVG Anti-Virus' free toolbar that it installs in IE that "verifies" links on pages as safe links. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.
Regards.
If you create a new project, you can choose several options, one of them is an ActiveX control.
I have done that in the past (delphi 7) and used it on a web page without problems.

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