Microsoft Dynamics GP/Great Plains Customization – eConnect with Automatic
Posting
By Andrew Karasev
Alba Spectrum Technologies
866-528-0577,
1-630-961-5918
help@albaspectrum.com
With this small technical
article we continue our Microsoft Business Solutions products customization
rubric. To introduce the actualization of the topic, we need to mention, that
the developer tool of choice for Microsoft Great Plains eCommerce, legacy
ongoing integration (Oracle, DB2, Btrieve/Pervasive, Ctree, mySQL, MS Access,
Unidata, IBM Lotus Notes Domino, SAP R/3 or mySAP), EDI is eConnect. With MS
Dynamics GP 9.0 and newer versions eConnect is and will be more exposed to MS
Visual Studio C# and VB developer through XML web services, but up to now (2006)
– eConnect is compliant to Great Plains Dexterity processes workflow, when
transaction has three stages of its life: work, open (when you post it) and
historical (until you purge it). eConnect can create work transactions as the
rule. You can purchase multiple extensions to eConnect, allowing you to post
transactions, created with eConnect through stored procedures. Our approach is
different and in our opinion is more elegant – we use Microsoft Dexterity engine
to post transactions.
- Posting Technology.
It is very similar to native Dexterity posting process. When batch is market
for posting (in all Great Plains modules: SOP, POP, AR, AP, Inventory,
Payroll, GL and others) - Dexterity engine checks its status (to be good to go
and be posted) and uses DYNAMICS.DIC business rules to post the batch.
- ‘Bug-Free’
Customization. If you are
customer or MBS VAR, who had to subcontract Dexterity or SQL developers to
customize Dynamics, eEnterprise, Microsoft Great Plains and now Microsoft
Dynamics GP – you probably know that bugs are kind of inevitable and very
annoying. The nicety of our approach based on the fact, that we do not
program posting itself – we deploy posting engine of Great Plains Dexterity
DYNAMICS.DIC – we just ‘submit’ the set of transactions or the batch (in the
language of GP) for posting.
- Any problem? Well – you should understand that if we deploy Dexterity to do
the job – you should have Microsoft Great Plains workstation with our custom
ad-on to be running and ‘posting’ on behalf of your eConnect customization.
If you do not see the problem here – we’ll give you a hint – you should have
one (or multiple, if you are large corporation) additional GP user license –
to support 24x7 running GP workstation
- User Licenses.
As we mentioned above – you need
at least one additional license (however you can deploy scenarios, when you
post your eConnect originated transactions tonight, when nobody uses the
system). Great Plains has so-called concurrent users licensing base.
- Technological
Highlights. Microsoft Dynamics
GP has several options for the end users to work with the system. The most
common one is so-called ‘fat client’ (Microsoft Dexterity), plus you can use
Microsoft Business Portal or custom web interface to enable data entry and
query. Microsoft Dexterity, also referred as Great Plains Dexterity is
programming language and development environment, architectured in 1990th
to be graphical platform and database ‘independent’: the drawbacks are – it
doesn’t support Unicode (Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc)
- Microsoft Dynamics
GP Worldwide. Microsoft Great
Plains is commonly supported in English speaking countries (USA, UK, India,
Philippines, Middle East, Egypt, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand,
Oceania) plus Latin
America (Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, Argentina, Chili, Uruguay, Peru,
Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador) and Quebec. Great Plains is also available in
France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, however the last version for
these countries will be version 9.0. For all the other countries you should
be looking for Microsoft Navision/Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Microsoft Axapta/Microsoft
Dynamics AX.
Please do not hesitate to
call or email us: USA 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer
at Alba Spectrum Technologies (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ) - Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains,
Navision, Axapta MS CRM, Oracle Financials and IBM Lotus Domino Partner, serving
corporate customers in the following industries: Aerospace & Defense, Medical &
Healthcare, Distribution & Logistics, Hospitality, Banking & Finance, Wholesale
& Retail, Chemicals, Oil & Gas, Placement & Recruiting, Advertising &
Publishing, Textile, Pharmaceutical, Non-Profit, Beverages, Conglomerates,
Apparels, Durables, Manufacturing and having locations in multiple states and
internationally.
We are serving USA Nationwide: CA, IL, NY,
FL, AZ, CO, TX, WI, WA, MI, MA, MO, LA, NM, MN, Europe: Germany, France,
Belgium, Poland, Russia, Middle East (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, OAE, Bahrain), Asia:
China, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, South & Central America: Mexico, Peru,
Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Chili, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina,
Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico