The Real Reasons You Don't Want to Lean on Your Partner's License When Launching Microsoft Dynamics NAV

The partner organization implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV for you may postpone the actual purchase of your license until the project is fairly close to go-live. In the meantime, it does the development and the testing on-site (or off-site) using its own partner license.

Consultants have many arguments (or better: excuses) to justify this practice, but as end-user of the system, you have many benefits in having the license available early in the project, and many risks if you wait until the latest. So, when should your consultant actually order the NAV license for you?

Well, regardless of the fact that 1) the consultant is contractually obliged to purchase the license for you at the first moment you get in touch with the solution (which is fairly early in the project), and the fact that 2) they are violating their licensing agreement with Microsoft if they deploy their partner license on third party's infrastructure, there is 3) a fairly compelling technical reason why you don't want them to even try doing any project work with their partner license instead of with yours.

The first two reasons above are about the legally binding agreement between you, your consultant and Microsoft, and it's pointless arguing whether it is right or not. It's just the way it is.

However, one compelling reason why you are far better off purchasing your customer license immediately, before the project commences, is testing.

Let's say your consultant is testing all functionality on its partner license and finds everything to be working exactly as expected. The moment it deploys the solution into production with its license, the solution might just go dead-suddenly you might find out that a lot of functions that used to work now just don't, and the system ...