Microsoft Great Plains: Offshore Customization & Development overview for
consultant
By Andrew Karasev
Alba Spectrum Technologies
1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918
help@albaspectrum.com
When you visit department
stores and see that majority of the apparels are produced in other countries,
not US you probably do not worry about this fact. About 10 years ago, when
Clintons high tech era was at the inception we saw the signs of high tech
professionals inflow in the USA from overseas. Nowadays the trend is reversed
instead of importing high tech people, we are at the beginning of outsourcing to
them in their overseas countries the programming workload. In this small
article well concentrate on the Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains
customization specifics: Great Plains Dexterity (IDE and programming language),
SQL programming with XML in/out bound, VBA/Modifier/Continuum, Crystal Reports,
Web publishing/eCommerce
- Closed/Protected
technology. Great Plains
Dexterity serious development requires months of formal training and it also
requires access to so-called source code (DYNAMICS.DIC with scripts in it
normally scripts are stripped). This fact imposes restrictions on offshore
facility selection. This facility should be located in the country, where
Great Plains Software had former development force. To give you more clue
these are Australia and Philippines. If you are considering India we do not
know if anyone there has access to source code, at least officially they do
not have access, because source code partner program was closed many years
ago.
- Coded table names:
RM00101, SOP30200 to give you example. The reason was Dexterity design
was based on the multi-database-platform principle. From the development
standpoint it means that developer should have data fixing experience
serving real clients either remotely to US or in their local countries
- Customization
Upgrade Experience. Great Plains
Dexterity allows you to create either custom forms or place modifications to
the existing forms (SOP Entry, for example). Placing code to the existing
forms requires customization upgrade experience these forms should be
re-customized when you do upgrade to the newer GP version currently version
8.0
- Project Management.
Considering the fact that majority of Great Plains users have rather
accounting background to spec out customization or integration project
manager should have combination of functional/application and technical
consulting experience. This means that project manager should be US-based
consultant. In the case when you plan to have project managers offshore
they should be in the close time zone (Sao Paulo, Brazil is
good candidate for the place, considering large pool of educated programmers
on the market)
Good luck with
implementation, customization and integration and if you have issues or concerns
we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call
866-528-0577 or
630-961-5918!
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew is Great Plains
specialist in
Alba Spectrum Technologies (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ) Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Microsoft
CRM Partner, serving clients in California, Minnesota,
Illinois, Washington, Florida, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia,
Louisiana, Texas, Canada, UK, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Russia