NAVmobile/AXmobile - 2011 Q4 roadmap

I was quite out of the blogging business for a while. I am still following the latest technical and business trends in the IT area, but I am mostly focused over the development of Mobile Affiars and our product NAVmobile/AXmobile.
We're trying to stay in touch with our partners and giving them as much as possible information about the product roadmap and the expacted product changes. This information is shared through our partner channel resources, but I decided to share some informarion in public in order to reach potential partners, current customers and other interested parties.

I will discuss some of the main platform-wide functional areas , which we're digging into. I will miss the various improvements in the standard Sales/Warehouse scenarios that we support. So, here come the main areas:

• Device Agent Improvements
• Barcode management improvements
• Graphical UI for deployment process tailoring
• Off-line working mode in Warehouse management. ( IT.Warehouse )
  
• Support for more mobile platforms

Device Agent

NAVmobile/AXmobile introduced a concept for a device agent few months ago. It is a background service working on the device and performing different activities behind the scene. It is extremely nice to have feature in scenarios, where the mobile user is not supposed to manually perform device synchronization. The on-line Warehouse Management scenario is a good example. The Device agent is performing activities like:

• caching and resending of failed synchronization packets
  The network connectivity may have poor quality in larger warehouse areas or experience connection droppings, when netowork roming takes place.
  
  
• sending of device system information and logs
  The Device agent performs collection of event logs and device system information and sends them to the server, when connection is available.
  
• downloading of system settings from the server
  if new settings are published on the server, the Device agent will automatically extract the settings from the server and they will affect the device behaviour immediately. The agent is capable to execute device provisioning "scripts" in order to configure different aspects of the underline mobile OS.
  
  
• downloading mobile software updates
  if new mobile software version is published on the server, the agent will automatically download and install the software without user interaction, making sure that the user will not lose any unsaved work.
  
  
• alerting device user for custom messages
  ERP users and administrators can send messages to devices or device roles ( group of devices). These messages are handled and displayed/alerted on the device by the Device agent.
  

We are working over a number of additional device agent features, which will be announced in the next public release

• Location data collection and GIS integration
  The Device Agent will collect GPS data on the device and will be able to send the GPS log to the Mobile Sync Server. The administrators will be able to analyze the collected location data through the web administrative console or exporting the data to third party GIS.
  
  
• User task management
  The ERP users will be able to create tasks for the mobile users ,wich will be sent to the device and displayed in a customized splash screen. The splash screen will allow users to launch spefiic task from their list by taping over it. Initially the customized task management splash screen will be introduced in our standard Warehouse module , but partners will be able to integrate the task management approach in their own customizations.
  

Barcode management
NAVmobile/AXmobile had a platform-wide barcode management support from the begining. Our partners are able to easily introduce support for additional barcode scanners/imagers by implementing a simple barcode "drivers" using CF.NET and delivering them through the standard OTA(over-the-air) infrastructure.

Our next release will introduce new barcode pattern based management features. Partners will be able to specify the various barcode types and masks and their content ( like item-numbers, quantities, lots, bins and more ) and the system will automatically parse the barcode conten and automatically extract encoded quantities, numbersm bins , etc. Barcode patterns configurtion will be deployed on the devices by using the same server-side provisioning approach,


Graphical UI for deployment process tailoring
NAVmobile/AXmobile allows partners to tailor the automatic OTA deployment process. They can "instruct" the server to perform various additional activites during the initial mobile application deployment. It allows partners to deploy additional apps ( like keyboard layouts for example ) or provision the mobile OS on deployment. This is done (right now ) by writing instruction in a dedicated xml file (Deploy.manifest ) . In the next release we will introduce dedicated UI in the Web Administrative Console to make the deployment tailoring even easier.


Off-line working mode in Warehouse management. ( IT.Warehouse )
Our standard warehouse module was developed as on-line solution intially. We introduced failed sync packet resending features to minimize the on-line requirement impact, but it turns out that there is a big demand to support the warehouse scenarios in complete off-line mode.
Or next public release will allow organizations to select between off-line and on-line mode with a simple setup and even mix off-line and on-line warehouse workers in a single deployment.

Support for more mobile platforms



Microsoft announced the extended support for Windows Mobile based devices and event longer support for the rebranded Windows Embedded Handheld and Windows Compact editions. We will keep introducing more features on these platforms as this is the most popular mobile OS for rugged devices these days.
However, the IT area is very dynamic and forces us to introduce support for additional mobile platforms and form factors. We will incrementally introduce support for all of the major mobile operting systems starting with Android near the end of the year. The new platform will support complete off-line mode through native mobile apps and on-line mode through a modern web browser.
We will introduce new cross-platform mobile development environment to allow our partners to write once and distribute their ERP connected mobile apps to various mobile platforms.
We will also incrementally introduce all features and mobile modules supported on Windows Mobile to the new platofm. Partners/Customers will be able to "host" and manage Windows Mobile and all supported modern mobile devices in a single deployment with the same skills and knowledge.


Disclaimer: The NAVmobile/AXmobile features are subject of change witout notice. We will do our best effort to inform our partners and customers in advance if changes in the roadmap are comming in response to changes in the dynamic business environment.

NAVmobile HowTo: Consuming Business Objects

I had recently several requests on writing a little bit more about the NAVmobile customization approach from a dev point of view. So I decided to make a short how-to serie in order to illustrate some of the concepts. Most of it can be found in the documentation, but I hope that I will clarify some of the missing points.

NAVmobile provides the mobile developers with mobile object relational mapping API. It can be used by the developers to consume data stored on the device or data stored on remote storage.
The ORM implementation found in NAVmobile is very useful when dealing with standart CRUD operations over local and remote data in terms of business objects. It has certain limiations mainly because of the resource-related limitations found on the mobile devices these days.
It is not intended to provide complete replacement of the standart ADO .NET implementation found in .NET Compct Framework. However, it gives clean and quick way to deal with the CRUD operations and the various logical and tehcnical challenges related to the synchronization of the data. Each CURD operation through the NAVmobile ORM API performs certain behind-the-scene operations over the locally stored data, which allows later the synchronization engine to properly propagate the changes to the remote side ( the ERP ).
The developer can easily go down to the pure SQL level and deal directly with the mobile storage to perform even advanced data operations.

Local Business Objects
NAVmobile provides framework for bi-directrional data synchronization between the device and virtually any remote data storage ( ussually ERPs like Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Microsoft Dynamics AX ). The existnce of local mobile storage allows the application to be used in occatioanlly connected environments where the data is stored on the device and then synchronized when a connection exists. The developer only needs to declare the business objects and then the NAVmobile framework is taking care of the initial mobile storage provisioning, synchronization and other low level technical tasks.
The business objects must be declared in the NAVmobile business object descriptor file (described in the documentation ) and then a correpsonding .NET Compact Framework class must be created.
Let's pretend we have the following business object declaration:

public class Customer:BusinessObjectBase
{
public string No;
public string Title;
public double CreditBalance;
public double CreditLimit;
}

If we need to fetch all customers with positive credit blance , we can use the following code:

IList customers = BusinessObjectBase.FetchAll("CreditBalance>0");
foreach(Customer customer in customers)
{
...
}

Creating new customer object is easy as:

Customer customer = new Customer();
customer.No="567";
customer.Title="My first customer";
customer.Add();

and then fetching only one customer by primary key can be done like this:

Customer customer = BusinessObjectBase.Fetch("567");
MessageBox.Show(customer.Title);

Updating a customer:

customer.Title="This is not my first customer";
customer.Update();

...and then deleting it:

customer.Delete();

Using this approach the developer can quicky perform CRUD operations over the business objects stored on the mobile device.

Each CRUD operation over the business objects is propagated later through the sync engine to the remote storage ( the ERP ) during the device synchronization session.

Remote Business Objects
Remote business objects can be consumed by using the NAVmobile LiveLinkEngine, which serves as an on-line connection media between the mobile device and the remote storge ( ERP, Microsoft SQL Server , etc. ). This functionality requires the existance of TCP/IP connection between the device and the NAVmobile Services.

Assuming we need to use the same Customer business object from a remote storage , we can use the following code in order to fetch all ther customers:

IList customers = LiveDataLinkService.FetchAll("CreditBalance>0");
foreach(Customer customer in customers)
{
....
}

The FetchAll method will causes the NAVmobile framework to perform invocation of the NAVmobile Services LiveDataLink Web Service in order to fetch the data from the remote sotrage. The data will be dehydrated into the Customer business object collection and ready for local processing.

Addin a new remote customer is easy too:

Customer customer = new Customer();
customer.No="567";
customer.Title="My first customer";
LiveDataLinkService.Add(customer);

The Add method will send the customer business object to the server where it will be stored.
We can use similiar approach to fetch one customer:

Customer customer = LiveDataLinkService.Fetch("567");
MessageBox.Show(customer.Title);

and then to change and update it:

customer.Title="here somes a new name";
LiveDataLinkDataService.Update(customer);

Deleting the customer is also easy:

LiveDataLinkDataService.Delete(customer);

The ORM module can be used also in the NAVmobile templating engine to quickly build mobile reports diplsayed and printed on the device. Local and remote data can be mixed together in a single report. More on this subject later.


Links:

NAVmobile/AXmobile web site