In the end of September Rue de Net Reykjavik moved their offices from Vesturgata 3 to Vesturgata 2a (just across the street). The new office-space is considerably larger than the old space and serves the needs of the company a lot better.

The new space is on the top floor of the newly renovated Ziemsen house located in the Grofartorg square in the center of Reykjavik. The Ziemsen house is over 120 years old, but was built as two joint houses in 1883 and 1889.

The house was part of the Tomsen-Magasin commerce houses but later in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th it was used as a packaging house for sea products.

Originally it stood at Hafnarstraeti 21 but in 2006 it was moved and has been renovated since; it is now in its new location in Grófartorg. When it was being moved to its current location Hordur Larusson took a set of photos that you can also take a look.

Rue de Net Reykjavik has appointed Mr. Gudmundur Thor Petursson as its new General Manager. Gudmundur is an engineer with a broad experience of the IT market from both abroad and within Iceland. During the last few years, Gudmundur has been the IT manager of Vordur, one of Iceland's insurance companies. During the rapid growth of Vordur, Gudmundur has had the challenge of growing the IT infrastructure of the company to accommodate its growing demand for information. Adalsteinn Valdimarsson expressed, "We are happy to announce Gudmundur Thor Petursson as our new General Manager, bringing with him expertise and experience to grow our business and boost our customer service in Iceland. Rue de Net Reykjavik has built a solid reputation and established presence over the past years that we want to build upon and it is going to help us to have Gudmundur on board with us. He now faces the challenges that come with overseeing all of Rue de Net Reykjavik's marketing, sales and customer relations activities, in addition to leading our strong team and grow our business in the current difficult economic environment that we are all experiencing at the moment".

The Mibuso mission statement is "to provide a platform for users and developers of products from the Microsoft Dynamics product family (NAV, CRM, AX, GP, SL, ... ) to exchange ideas, tools, routines, and to find business partners and products". Rue de Net sponsored the Mibuso website a few years back and is now doing it again this year. Rue de Net considers Mibuso as a superb resource
for all Microsoft Dynamics NAV professionals and expects a lot from its sponsorship.

Rue de Net employees recently attended three brilliant lectures given by David Platt. The presentation about "Why Software Sucks" was one of the best presentation we have seen in a long time. That lecture is based on David Platt's excellent book "Why Software Sucks ... And What You Can Do About It" (http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/). One on the most memorable points from his lectures was Platt's first, last and only law of user experience design: "Know Thy User For He Is Not Thee". One of the arguments David used to prove that point was stating that geeks like to drive stick shift cars. We at Rue de Net admit that we prefer stick shift cars and according to Platt's argument that must mean that we are closer to being geeks that typical computer users. We will therefore strive to know our users for they are not us! Here you can see David Platt talk about the difference between developers and users ...

Late 2007, Rue de Net Reykjavík signed up with Vörður to web-enable its insurance sales system used by external sales force. On 28th of February 2008 Veftryggur went live and since then it has proposed over 10.000 insurance quotes to potential customers of Vörður. Veftryggur is an insurance sales system using NETConductor to web-enable the insurance system Vörður uses in Dynamics Nav. Vörður no longer needs to re-enter any information into its system or worry about mismatches in its database or the data version the sales force is using. Document handling is much better and the performance of sales has improved. Congratulations Vörður!

Our own Gudmundur Gudnason graduated from the University of Reykjavik as a computer scientist this January. There transpired 20 years between his first courses and date of graduation. Of course this is extraordinary and was therefore discussed in the last Sunday issue of the most circulated newspaper in Iceland, Morgunbladid. Especially because he completed his graduation project 18 years before graduation. Gudmundur has obviously taken many pauses in his education for pure business reasons but never gave up on his education all together. Congratulations from Rue de Net.

Rue de Net would like to welcome its latest member,
Guðmundur Þór Péturrson. He is an engineer from the University of Iceland (HÍ). Guðmundur Þór knows everything about insurance companies, even more about Navision and has many years of experience in the business. At work he enjoys a good afternoon water cooler chat and also has a Ph. d. in Jokery which has brought even more laughter in our already fun-filled offices. In his free-time Guðmundur is a big family man but also spends much time around the badminton pitch and lounging with his fellow scouters (an adult member of the Boy Scouts movement).

During the month of November 2008 Rue de Net was the partner of choice when it came to upgrading 15 shops of the largest retailar in Iceland, Hagar. The project involved the merger of two companies Ishofn and RES, and the 15 shops are located in the two largest shopping malls of Iceland, Smaralind and Kringlan. The shops upgraded include All Saints, Warehouse, Karen Millen, Day, Top Shop, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Oasis, Coast and Jane Norman. Before the upgrade the shops were using versions 2.60 and 3.70 of Microsoft Dynamics NAV but now they are all using 5.0SP1. In addition they were using NaviPlus Retail 2.60 and InfoStore in 3.70, which have now been upgraded to a uniform LS Retail 5.05. Congratulations on a very successful upgrade to all of the shops from all of us here at Rue de Net!

For the last two weeks Rue de Net has been working hard for the new owners of BT, Iceland's most famous computer accessories stores. The job was to get their retail system up and running so that the stores could be reopened as soon as possible. Today BT opened their stores again and the first customers filled the shops both in Iceland's largest shopping mall, Smáratorg, as well as in Iceland's second largest city of Akureyri. Congratulations from Rue de Net to the new owner, Hagar, and BT themselves.

Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 is released and available for partners to download. The essentials of this new version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV are enhanced personal productivity, web services, tighter integration with other Microsoft technologies, sophisticated BI capabilities, new SQL database layer, support for SharePoint services and support for more programming languages in addition to the traditional C/SIDE. As the biggest Microsoft business solutions event of the year, Microsoft Convergence 2008, Copenhagen, is coming up next week. And then we wait for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 to get released to customers and then we wait for the Icelandic country version.