Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 is now available. Great – so what’s new in the latest release of our favourite ERP product?
There are several improvements behind the scenes which make our lives as consultants and developers easier. Microsoft have, however, saved some of the love to share with customers as well. One area that has received some treatment is integration between RoleTailored Client and Windows 7 – which 2009 R2 does pretty well.
Firstly, “jump lists” are now available. When you right click the RTC icon in the task bar you’ll get a list of available tasks – and you can jump to the areas of the system you use the most without having to open the client.
| The options that you see are taken from the Actions menu in your home screen.
That’s nice because any changes you make to the Actions menu are reflected in the jump list. In my example, I have got the usual tasks for my profile, Order Processor, but I’ve added the Customer option – a quick bit of design to Page 9006. Any customizations you make – adding or removing items or changing their order are shown in the list. There’s a lot of mileage in this idea. You can give your users quick links to any area of the system you want and, if you pin the RTC icon to the taskbar, the list is still available when the client isn’t running. |
Next up, if you are waiting for NAV to run something and have a dialog box, the RTC icon becomes a progress bar – so you can get on with something else and see at a glance how far through the process you are.
In RTC it can sometimes be difficult to know which database and company you are connected to – particularly if you have two clients for different companies open. So now you can optionally show some text at the top of each window to indicate where you are logged into. You can choose the Company Name, Database Name, Both (as below) or you can enter your own text to display.
In addition to that, when you hover the mouse over the RTC icon you get a preview of the screen overlaid with Company that you are logged into.
Nothing especially ground-breaking, perhaps, among those features, but they all contribute to giving a slicker feel. Fewer mouse clicks, more intuitive interface and generally more friendly. Even those of us who are veterans of classic client could be tempted into using RTC on a day-to-day basis.
If you’ve got a CustomerSource login, you can bag yourself a copy of R2 to download today. Get in touch with us for more information.