As some of you know MS has released new and rebranded search engine Bing. I really like their instant video search. The search results were pretty good. I search for VARIABLEACTIVE, and it showed MSDN documentation and that it no longer is supported in NAV 2009. Google displayed also Mibuso thread that was a few days old. Searching for VARIABLEACTIVE mibuso showed the thread but would take me to the list of threads and not to the actual thread posting.
I tried to search for Dynamics and Bing automatically suggested search option. Here is a screenshot. Is anything wrong with the picture? Of course there is. There is no Dynamics NAV suggestion.

So I searched for Dynamics NAV and the results show MS website and details about NAV.

Notice that related Search has Dynamics GP. Next I tried to search for Dynamics GP and notice the Related Searches on left. I wonder if Bing is telling us something.

I’m sure a lot of research has gone into algorithms to find what the users are looking for. I am wondering if search engines use and monitor people using them.
For example, if 1000 people search for same word and they all click on the 3rd link, maybe that link is more relevant than the first 2. Or if they stop searching after they click on certain link. I’m sure this is not exact science, and companies/users could abuse it but for forums website where people are searching for solutions, this could help a lot. I’m sure they are researching how people are using the results. I know I do when I write programs for Nav users. I usually watch them and see how they use what I have built, and get ideas on how to make the process for them more efficient.
Overall I think Bing another option for search engines. I use firefox as default browser, and by default it opens to blank page, but after seeing the beautiful daily pictures, I’ve change bing as my default startup page. I suggest to try it for a week and see if you like it.

I saw some question on mibuso forum on how to fax from Navision. This blog is about how to fax from Navision. This is method uses Microsoft Fax Services. You can use this to fax invoices etc to customers that prefer to receive Invoices by Fax. By default it is not installed and you need to install it. To install Fax Services, you need to open control Panel. Click on Add remove programs and click on Add/Remove Windows Components. Then tick Fax Services and click OK. It may ask for windows CD to install it.

After it is installed, make sure fax service is running in windows services. The code is fairly simple. Here is a screenshot

Notice in code that I am saving it as rtf file instead of html file. The FaxDoc automation issues a print command on the file and the default program that is associated it with suppose to open the file print it and then close. I found on the internet that there are issues with print html files. So by changing the ending of the file to rtf, windows opens MS Word and prints the file. MS word is smart enough to know that it’s a html file and it renders it correctly. If the default program that opens rtf file in your OS is different than word, you might want to try with html file and see if it works or try to save the file as PDF. In 2009 you can save it as excel on service tier so you can try to print excel as well. I tried to change the html file type to open with Microsoft word but no luck.
You can monitor the fax status in fax Console. You can open it from Start->Program files->Accessories->Comunications->Fax->Fax Console. Here is a screenshot.

Before sending fax from NAV you need to click on Tools->Configure Fax and select your modem and check enable Send.

Here is the object for this. FaxExample Happy faxing.

I recently downloaded the CTP 2 for NAV 2009 NA version. There have many blogs on new features added. I wanted to talk about some of development changes. First change is that DBCS (Double Byte Character Set) is no longer part of fin.stx but rather part of the database setting. The Validate CodePage has been changed to Validate Collation and you can uncheck it to enable DBCS.

Another feature added is that when you compile multiple objects, if there are any errors in previous version it would mark the records. In SP1 a window opens with the list of objects that could not be compiled.

Object wise from 2009, there are 145 tables, 302 forms, 455 reports, 285 pages, 190 code units that been modified. In total 1377 objects have been modified. That is a very high number of objects. This means that a lot of bugs have been fixed and reports/pages have new features added.
Freddy on his blog mentioned that non windows system can now connect to web service. I tried to and used SOAPUI but no success. SOAPUI is written in java.

There are two new function added EXPORTOBJECTS(FileName, ObjectRecord [, Format]) and IMPORTOBJECTS(FileName [, Format]). You can now import and export txt and xml files for objects. A great feature would be if Navision triggered in Codeunit 1 the OnGlobalModify(RecRef : RecordRef;xRecRef : RecordRef), onGlobalInsert, etc when you modified objects. We could keep history of modified objects and do code compare for each change. Right now you need to do this through sql stored procedures, but it would be nice to do it in NAV. This gives me another blog idea; using web service to turn NAV business logic through sql stored procedure. There are many other new features added for RTC in regards to allowing custom controls to be added. New reporting features, but I won’t repeat what other blogs have already mentioned. For existing customers I suggest to wait for sp1 before doing the upgrade.