NAV 2009’s Role Tailored Experience: The Glitz and the Grunt Work

Using the role-tailored user profiles that ship with NAV 2009 are supposed to be a great benefit to companies. Optimized pages are ready to go for different roles in an organization.  But as in a carefully choreographed cooking show in which the onions are diced, and the meat is trimmed before the cameras roll, so too are the user profiles of the pre-defined NAV roles a deceptively simple outcome of a series of less-than-glamorous activities.

The unceremonious chopping, measuring, cleaning, preparing and rehearsing, so to speak, of developing a role-tailored view, encompasses six types of activities, according to Microsoft’s Jesper Lachance Ræbild and Morten Holm-Petersen in a presentation at Convergence 2009:

1. Reflect processes and people
2. Pick Standard Profiles
3. Promote relevant places
4. Provide overview
5. Reduce navigation
6. Support task flow 

Donning aprons, Ræbild and Holm-Peterson demonstrated the steps to set up the right user profiles for a company’s employees. The most basic case involves only steps #2and 3; after an approved set of profiles is made available it is simply a matter of allowing users to log in, select the appropriate profile, and begin using the tools of their profile to get work done. 

But the real work begins when you need to start “slicing and dicing”.  Step 1 above involves the work of defining processes and roles that fit your organization and its own RoleCenters.  In this step, you must decide the level of granularity for setting up various roles - can many users share arole or must they be customized for each user?

According ...