MS Dynamics NAV thoughts/experiences & Office Licencing

Roady · 23 Mar 2017 at 14:43

In the middle of a large company project where we're moving away from a 15 years+ old on-premises bespoke ERP solution (MySQL hosted on Linux) to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 cloud hosted (possibly Azure).

We currently use OEM Windows/Office licencing and the change in ERP will also involve replacing around 40% of our PC's so we're also looking at volume licencing Office. 365 is looking much more cost effective but will probably mean moving to a hosted Exchange solution so we don't need a mailserver on-site. Sharepoint has been touted as a replacement of local 'group shares' for internal use, but I'm very sceptical at the moment.

Just wondered if anyone had been involved in a similar project? I'm also looking/asking for power/super users/administrators with experience of NAV implementation and asking how they found the experience (we're working with a Solutions provider but I'll be one of the few 'superusers' on site supporting users).

Django x2 · 23 Mar 2017 at 15:46

Group Shares? What do you mean exactly.

Enterprise E5 O365, when broken down, offers:

Office Pro Plus
Teams (which is like Slack (open channel chat)
Planner (a low key version of Project where users can create plans and DLs and use them for milestone work)
Dynamics 365 (are you sure this won't be enough for you)
Exchange
SharePoint
Skype for Business

If you go with Azure Dynamics, you'll need Azure AD (AAD) to sync your directory with Azure (and O365 if you want Single Sign On).

O365 always looks cost effective, and often is, but when you add in the associated cost of Azure, it can soon cost against you unless you are intent on removing all on-prem IT.

Roady · 23 Mar 2017 at 16:43

Well we're currently using Samba (on Ubuntu) on premises with a few large group shares, for some reason Sharepoint has been touted as a replacement if we move away from having servers on premises. The little I understand of Sharepoint it doesn't sound like it'll do what we want (general document 'dumping' area for all users within a department for sharing data). It's not large data volumes (around 1.5TB total). I'm of the opinion that a simple NAS box or keep the local Workgroup (Fileserver) for storing these files would be much easier, cheaper and 'better' (but I've been asked to justify why!).

Single Sign On with O365 has been mentioned, just the Azure solution at the moment sounds like it'll not do everything we want (quite a lot of bespoking), the provider instead will do a 'private' cloud type solution (VM's) including Dynamics for us in their Data Centre instead.

The annual costs of hosting/NAV far outweigh the costs of O365, we really wanted to go ahead with Volume Licencing to standardise our setup, but costs were so high it's put everyone off (so we're back to O365 being the 'solution'). But when pricing things up OEM again looks very appealing (just we'll be left with the same problem in future of having multiple different versions of Office). :rolleyes:

Django x2 · 24 Mar 2017 at 20:01

SharePoint is probably overkill then, unless you want the ease of federating and sharing externally. It comes with O365 E3 plans but you'll need E5 if you plan to use Azure for any identity piece. You also have peace of mind that the data is away from prem and therefore less likely to get deleted or fail, although some organisations are scared of that prospect of all their data being in the cloud. If you've found a good SaaS or PaaS offering, then go for it, but they won't be able to offer you the O365 piece of the puzzle without it relying on their "Private Cloud" (such a stupid term).

The new NCSC is entirely cloud based, so consider strongly if a mix of Azure and AWS is not suitable before paying someone else to use their hardware when it's offered by Azure and AWS

Caged · 25 Mar 2017 at 19:12

SharePoint is not a file server replacement, anybody telling you otherwise without going into a lot of detail is probably trying to get a quick buck for importing a folder structure into a document library and then running away.

Roady · 29 Mar 2017 at 10:48

Django x2 said:
SharePoint is probably overkill then, unless you want the ease of federating and sharing externally.

Caged said:
SharePoint is not a file server replacement

That's what I'm concerned about. We do minor 'outside' sharing, 99% of our shared-document-storage will be for local users. From what I've read and my understanding of Sharepoint it'll add a largely unnecessary level of complexity to just 'saving a document to the department share' without any benefit for 99% of the day. The only problem is it nicely answers the problem of moving away from on premises servers/storage to cloud based. I've been unable to find much information about the time wasted with the additional complexity which also mentions the additional latency of storing everything there. I can see how using something like Onedrive for Business would be a solution, but not how Sharepoint is.

Bandwidth is not a problem, 30mb leased line on a 100mb bearer, costs to increase to 100mb line are marginal (~£150 month). Remote sites are 2x Fibre (15-30mb) and 2x (20-25mb) ADSL, but they're production based so very low requirements with 2-4 users each.

Django x2 said:
It comes with O365 E3 plans but you'll need E5 if you plan to use Azure for any identity piece. You also have peace of mind that the data is away from prem and therefore less likely to get deleted or fail, although some organisations are scared of that prospect of all their data being in the cloud. If you've found a good SaaS or PaaS offering, then go for it, but they won't be able to offer you the O365 piece of the puzzle without it relying on their "Private Cloud" (such a stupid term).

The new NCSC is entirely cloud based, so consider strongly if a mix of Azure and AWS is not suitable before paying someone else to use their hardware when it's offered by Azure and AWS

I don't think we even need to go the E3 route at the moment, it seems overkill for 40-50 of our users with features they won't use or need. Maybe useful for 10 or so Salesmen. We're not scared of 'The Cloud', the majority of our users won't even understand (Wholesale Horticulture!). We have a good daily/weekly physical backup routine, we would at least continue/consider the same moving forwards.

Hate the cloud buzzwords but speaking to vendors there's no way to avoid them! :rolleyes:

We're pretty sure of our SaaS/PaaS as it'll be determined by the vendor/provider of NAV, using our requirements and supported by them. The Office software 'plugin' to that we want to get right as it'll be purchased separately & implemented around a PC rollout which will mostly happen before the NAV rollout. Probably before we've even implemented AD with any tied in authentication (single sign on etc, not a huge requirement really).

Django x2 said:
The new NCSC is entirely cloud based, so consider strongly if a mix of Azure and AWS is not suitable before paying someone else to use their hardware when it's offered by Azure and AWS

Which NCSC? We know the 'vanilla' Azure offering the provider has won't fulfil some of our main requirements and isn't aimed at an organisation our size (even though it would scale up) so think that's off, doing our own Azure offering has been mentioned but no real benefit over their 'private cloud' offering. The cost differences involved are marginal, anything saved would soon vanish into the additional configuration costs.