TradePoint Requirements and Recommendations

Software Requirements

Operative

• MS Windows 2003 Server, MS Windows 2000 Server.
• MS SQL Server 2000 or MS Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000) Release A or MS SQL Server Express.

Browser

• Mozilla Firefox 1.5 or 2.0
• Internet explorer 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 6.1, 7.0 on PC for users.
• Internet explorer 5.5, 6.0, 6.1, 7.0 or later on PC for administrators and editors.

MS Dynamics NAV

• MS Dynamics NAV version 3.60, 3.70A, 4.0.  (sp1, sp2, sp3), 5.0
• Navision Application Server (NAS) + 1 user license running it.
• An updated license file with the TradePoint integration module granule no. 6.041.700 clipped in

Hardware requirements

Webserver

• 1-2 XEON processors
• At least 2 gb of RAM
• At least 100mb of hard disc space. If the website will contain large number of files (images, Office documents, PDFs, etc) this should also be taken into account
• We recommend using RAID 1.

Database server

• 1-2 XEON processors
• At least 2 gb of RAM
• At least 200gb of hard disc space.
• We strongly recommend using RAID 5.

Backup

Make sure that you have a working backup system both for the SQL databases and the files at the web server.

Topology

Typical Solution

A typical solution would place the web server with the TradePoint website outside your firewall. You would have the TradePoint SQL database inside the firewall.

The NAS will benefit from running on a separate server, connecting to the Dynamics NAV database.

Combined Servers

You can run both the web server and the SQL server on the same machine. You can also replace the SQL server with the free “mini” SQL server MSDE, which comes bundled with the ScriptServer installation program. The NAS service can also run on a server that already runs other software.

Co-located web servers

ScriptServer web sites run as normal MS IIS web sites and as such they can co-exist with any other site, be it ScriptServer sites or other IIS web sites.

Multiple Companies

TradePoint can connect to multiple companies. Each company requires a separate NAS running, but they may share the same Dynamics NAV database.

Hosted web site

You can have the web site hosted at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and still keep your Dynamics NAV database at your office. This will require a VPN connection between the office and the ISP.

Communications

TradePoint communicates with the NAS using MS Message Queues, passing XML formatted messages back and forth. This is typically done over TCP but can be configured to use HTTP or HTTPS.

The recommended set up is to have one message queue on each server; the web server and the NAS server.

Message Queues makes use of port 1801.

Scaling

Scaling for different scenarios can be done in several ways:

Scaling the SQL Server

It is very uncommon that the SQL Server gets a heavy load in a ScriptServer scenario. In almost every situation you can share SQL server with other applications. One important factor when selecting hardware for your SQL Server is having lots of RAM memory and of course a good hard disc, preferably with a RAID disc configuration.

Scaling the Web Server

In cases where you get a lot of concurrent traffic it can be advised to have your ScriptServer website running alone. In most cases however, you should be able to run several websites on the same server.

Scaling the NAS Server

The NAS server handles requests one by one. So if one request is taking a lot of time, the other requests sit waiting until it completes. To remedy this, you can set up multiple NASes. Each NAS will require a separate user license.

You can even have multiple servers, running one or more NASes each, all connecting to the same Dynamics NAV server.

We can help you set up this kind of configuration if you are uncertain of how to go about doing it.

Scaling the Dynamics NAV Database server

There are a couple factors to consider when configuring your database such as:

• Table Indexes
  Perhaps the most important one, you can achieve a lot of performance simply by adjusting your table indexes.
• Code revision
  In some cases you may have a piece of code that takes a long time to execute, for example when you place an order, get a price or when you create a new customer. This might be ok when in the Dynamics NAV client but will be devastating to the performance of a website which executes these operations frequently. Consider removing these code pieces or at least side step them when TradePoint calls.

Appendix

Limitations of MSDE

The Microsoft Desktop Engine (MSDE) uses a workload governor which will slow down the database server when more than 8 current active operations are running. Each ScriptServer web site will use 12-16 threads when running.

Versions of the NAS

We strongly recommend running at least version 3.70 of NAS since earlier versions suffer badly from memory leaks.

Dynamics NAV License Update for developers

To be able to access and edit the TradePoint code units, you will need to open Dynamics NAV with a developer license which has Execute granule 6.041.690 clipped in. This can be done by contacting EOC via email: ccmbs@microsoft.com.

Message Queues

The message queues should be located on the server there are being read from. This means that the peeking/polling/reading queues will be local while write will be remote.