From legacy to cloud: upgrading a Business Central sales add-on
to Business Central 25
Global Mediator’s prolific collaboration with Vasilok, our valued partner, began in 2019, while the current project has been running for a year.
Vasilok BV originally developed the Rental & Service add-on for Navision to streamline equipment rental and maintenance operations. The solution enables businesses to manage the rental of forklifts and other equipment seamlessly and includes features for tracking rental periods, managing customer contracts, and optimizing equipment availability. Committed to enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction, Vasilok desired to upgrade the add-on to the cloud.
As part of this strategic decision to migrate their solution to the cloud version of Business Central, ensuring even more customers could benefit from their sales operations add-on, Vasilok contacted Global Mediator for this latest project.
Thus, Global Mediator’s current project with Vasilok focused on smooth and thorough preparation for further cloud migration of this solution.
Challenges
Throughout the project, our development team faced and successfully addressed several key challenges:
• To boost the planned transition to the cloud: the team prioritized the solution’s preparation for a smooth migration to the most recent version of Business Central 25, cloud version.
• To complete the codebase upgrade by seamlessly taking over the project from the previous development team.
• To keep the solution current for users’ smooth performance by providing timely maintenance and support.
• To support the users of the older version while transitioning to the cloud and introduce the necessary enhancements and modifications to the BC14 version of the add-on.
Rens van Vught
Founder and owner of Vasilok BV
"What we needed was a reliable and tech-savvy partner to upgrade our BC add-on and make sure it was ready for further cloud migration. The challenge involved stepping into the project following the departure of a different development team, gliding into it, and tackling all the relevant issues on time."
Solution
The Vasilok's current add-on version was built on C/AL (BC14). Global Mediator’s main task was to upgrade the solution's code to the AL language, so it was ready to migrate to a cloud version of Business Central.
Within the cooperation process, the Global Mediator’s development team offered the following solutions to meet the partner's high expectations and business needs.
Proactive project onboarding
Originally, no relevant documentation was available on the project when Global Mediator inherited it. As no previous work details or current tasks were at hand, Global Mediator's development team analyzed the solution independently. The team’s practical approach and out-of-the-box thinking helped to smoothly transition into the project and efficiently face and solve the challenges.
Modifications and mapping
Microsoft assigns a unique object range for each add-on to avoid conflicts during migration. As part of the solution’s upgrade, the team converted the C/AL code to AL, which led to a change in the object range IDs. Thus, ensuring add-on modifications are compatible with cloud architecture, was crucial. The Global Mediator's professional meticulously mapped the objects and aligned them with the extension model specifications.
Support for latest versions
During the testing and installation phase, when the add-on’s deployment to the BC24.5/25 sandbox was set, the BC version needed an upgrade. Global Mediator’s software engineer cooperated with the partner’s team to provide essential support and update the solution to the required BC version for smooth deployment and functionality.
Parallel development and merging
To support the BC14 version users, our development team used C/AL to merge the modified objects into this version as well. In parallel, the team smoothly merged all changes into the AL-based extension to align with the requirements of the newer versions of Business Central. This step implied renumbering all objects to comply with AL standards and avoid conflicts during future migration.
Technologies behind the project
A snapshot of what we leverage to deliver best-of-breed solutions
Rens van Vught
Founder and owner of Vasilok BV
"We are completely satisfied with the results of our cooperation with Global Mediator’s team, their methods, and best practices: prompt responses and the way they resolved the tasks and proactively offered solutions are indeed impressive."
Impact
About our customer
Since its foundation in 1997 in the Netherlands, Vasilok has supported organizations’ NAV and Business Central projects with consulting, project management, and software development. Passionate for innovations, Vasilok assembles the best team for their projects to help their customers maximize the use of Business Central solutions.
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