3 best practices for managing Cumulative Updates in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Microsoft Dynamics NAV has evolved rapidly in the last four years. For customers and partners both, NAV has become much easier to work with, maintain, and evolve as business needs change.

Sure there are heaps of new functionality, and Microsoft is continuously improving the product in response to user needs. There has been a subtle but important shift away from new business-oriented features and towards more platform-centric improvements. They range from tighter integration with Microsoft cloud services like Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, to more robust analytics through Power BI, web and mobile client improvements, and new tools for building customizations. Quietly in the background, with much less fanfare, Microsoft introduced a powerful change in the way NAV is updated in-between major releases - Cumulative Updates.

Introducing Cumulative Updates

In the past, NAV was updated and patched and maintained through updates and hotfixes and service packs. Updates and hotfixes plug individual holes in the product. As a partner, the typical approach was to apply a hotfix or update in response to a specific issue or problem the customer was experiencing. And that usually meant a lot of troubleshooting and research. To keep the system fully patched meant applying each and every hotfix and update. Service packs would bring the entire solution up-to-date with all the relevant fixes, but they were like major versions unto themselves and the process to apply a service pack wasn't too different from upgrading.

Enter Cumulative Updates (CUs). CUs are bundles of updates packaged together, and they include all of the previously released changes as well. Thus CU 11 will include the contents of CU 10, 9, 8, 7, etc. Therefore, a key benefit is that customers do not need to install every single CU, only the latest one. And of ...