Upgrading to Business Central from the customer side

This is the first time (of many upgrades) where I have been on the customer and not the partner side.

It has been an interesting experience - if a little frustrating.

This is an upgrade from a very old release - NAV 4 (2009 executable) to Business Central with 100% extensions replacing a huge mess of customizations from a system that was falling apart.

The approach was to add a few new customizations instead of migrating old mods - including a balky (unnamed ISV).

Did we move too few? Probably, but this was user not developer driven. No doubt, some of the missing mods will be added later.

Some of the old Classic systems have good data, and the upgrade process is comparatively smooth. This one had millions of bad dimensions, which croaks the dimension rebuild process, so I had to fix all of these, and fix as much of the bad code causing them as practical. Since I am responsible for delivering a "clean" database, I have a set of sql routines to find and fix bad dimensions.

Also had to fix all the bad characters (returns, tabs, trailing spaces) - fortunately just one time. Used the sql replace to do this building the statements using SQL Server.

Huge number of additional cleanup tasks - units of measure cleanup, use of custom fields instead of standard fields, etc.

The new system will have clean data and will be much easier to support and maintain, and most importantly, will not require tribal knowledge to keep running.