Microsoft Small Business Manager eCommerce overview
By Andrew Karasev
Alba Spectrum Technologies
USA:
1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918,
Deutschland
(0177) 8349 806,
help@albaspectrum.com
Microsoft Business
Solutions Small Business Manager is scaled down Great Plains Dexterity based
version of Microsoft Great Plains or former Great Plains Dynamics/eEnterprise.
Small Business Manager first release 7.0 and all the following version was
available on MSDE (MS SQL Server 2000 with limited usage and database size 2GB
maximum). It is nice situation on the market in eCommerce niche we see huge
number of customers, who have purchased and implemented SBM for their small and
mid-size businesses and then realized that customization options for Small
Business Manager are very limited: in comparison to Great Plains SBM doesnt
have VBA/Modifier, it has very restricted version of Integration Manager. These
restrictions lead you, eCommerce developer to direct SQL programming. Again
being scaled down version of Microsoft Great Plains Small Business Manager has
a legacy of relatively complex tables structure.
tom stored procedures way
here:
- Tables Structure.
Small Business Manager has
similar to Great Plains structure and similar System DYNAMICS database and the
company. As you could see tables structure in Resource description in Great
Plains so you do in SBM
- Stored Procs.
Yes we can go ahead and create
stored proc in DYNAMICS and companies databases or Small Business Manager.
Now there is one issue. Technically Small Business Manager comes with MSDE
and MSDE doesnt have lovely tool SQL Server Enterprise Manager with Query
Analyzer, etc. So somehow you should deal with this. If you have consulting
programmer she or he can connect to your MSDE installation, using MS SQL
Server Enterprise Manager, installed on consultants laptop
- Visual Studio.Net.
This is the development tools to use because you will need a lot
of web-debugging, considering complicated tables structure and records
workflow. Some developers might suggest to use VS.Net data designer to link
to Great Plains tables this idea is rather very difficult to realize,
because of the simultaneous population of multiple tables, while creating
internet orders: Order Header, Order Lines, Order Comments, Customer Master,
Customer Address Master to name a few. So we would recommend sticking to
stored proc.
- SOP.
Sales Order Processing. Usually eCommerce
solution works around Sales Order Processing tables. The reason is it works
with Inventoried items and typical eCommerce is ordering specific items off
the internet. Look at SOP10100, SOP10200 and other tables with SOP prefix.
Also you should know that SOP1XXX are so called working tables and you
populate mostly these, when orders are transformed to invoices, order record
goes to SOP3XXX tables these are called historical
- RM.
Receivables Management Module When Sales Order Processing Invoices are
posted they create record in Accounts Receivables or Receivables Management
Module. RM has RMXXXX tables and the ones you are interested to know are
RM00101 customer master and RM00102 customer address master
- Batch Processing.
We recommend you consider just order creation via web interface. Then these
orders should be processed by operator in Small Business Manager
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
1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577!
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew is Great Plains
specialist in
Alba Spectrum Technologies (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ) USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM
customization company, serving clients in Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix,
New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, New Orleans, Toronto,
Montreal and having locations in multiple states and internationally