Dynamics NAV 2009 Reporting Book

Let me first start by saying that I’m not a fan of doing book reviews. In my very humble opinion, most books about Dynamics NAV that are released, although a good read and provides some valuable information, does not bring much INCREMENTAL value to the NAV professional. What do I mean by Incremental value? It’s the money and most importantly time and attention, that you spend reading the books verses what you get out of it.

Most information written can be obtained for free on the Customersource or Partnersource website. In fact, the training materials that can be downloaded for free goes into greater detail than what’s covered in the books. Well, not exactly free. I’m assuming if you can access Customersource, you’re a customer that’s current on the Enhancement Plan, or if you can access Partnersource, you’ve bought a Partner Plan.

To be a good NAV professional, I don’t think there’s a good substitute than what’s on those training manuals or even on the Application Designer’s Guide that comes with your product installation disk.

Reading the training manuals is, personally, where I get the most incremental value on becoming a good technical and applications person.

In addition, there are Navision forums such as http://www,mibuso.com and dynamicsuser.net that frequently has contributors to give you ideas on a particular problem you’re having.

My general feeling is, why pay for something when you can get the better stuff that you’ve already paid for (Customersource) or for free (online forums)?

Having said that, recently, I’ve been granted a sneak peek as a reviewer at a book that a fellow NAV colleague, Steven Render, has been writing. The book is titled Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 for Professional Reporting. You can find the book here:

http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-dynamics-nav-2009-for-professional-reporting/book

From my previous blog posts, I’ve been pretty disappointed at the lack of documentation and training material available for the NAV 2009 RDLC reporting feature. The only document released by Microsoft is the training manual #80146 and the information that you can gather from NAV blogs.

Training manual #80146 is pretty good at going through the RDLC for Navision, but that’s about it. By moving to SQL, it really opens a whole new world of reporting possibilities, other than the RDLC. What this book does is that it goes through and explains the different options out there and shows you how to go about creating reports based on these different options.

I understand that there are books out there about RDLC and SQL Reporting Services, but most of the information on those books does not apply to me as a Navision professional. This is why this book appealled to me because it was a Navision book that talked about reports.

I highly recommend this book, until Microsoft can release additional resources for download on Customersource on reporting and truly take advantage of the “Microsoft Stack”.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.