Business & Technology Synergy

When we are talking about Microsoft Great Plains integrations, we recommend you to think about pushing and pulling approach and connection tools. In this small article we would like to give you the scenarios to integrate your legacy database or business application with newest version of Dynamics GP Great Plains 10.0. Interesting scenarios when you have non Microsoft legacy application: Oracle, Lotus Notes Domino, DB II, Sybase, Progress, Pervasive SQL, Ctree/Faircom, and Java applications. Microsoft Dynamics GP is SQL based ERP application, so the easiest way is to deploy SQL Server 2005 or 2000 tools:

1. Linked Server. This concept allows you to create a link to your external database. The most common scenario is ODBC, in some Java specific case it might be JDBC connector (including the simplest JDBC ODBC bridge). Please be careful about jumping immediately into Linked Server world. If your third party application has its own SDK (Software Development Kit) – first, you should research it and decide if you would like to go directly to SQL queries via ODBC connection. Linked Server allows you to create heterogeneous SQL queries, where you join cross-platform data in one select or insert statement. Linked server allows you to realize two-way integration (pull and push), however again – you have to do all the DB scripting on the low level, where you should expect a lot of debugging and QA work
 

2. eConnect. When pushing and pulling to/from Great Plains, you can obviously appeal to direct SQL scripting. However we recommend you first to analyze if eConnect is the way to go. eConnect is written in its core business logic in SQL stored procs and it resolves such complex issues as extracting, creating, modifying GP objects: master records and work transactions. All you need to do is to provide parameters to eConnect stored procedures and interpret results. eConnect doesn’t post transactions in GP, such as SOP invoices, when you need automatic posting we recommend Albaspectrum posting server
 

3. Direct SQL scripting. If you think that eConnect is too heavy for you and it is easier to do direct SQL coding, please research GP tables structure in Microsoft Dynamics GP->Tools->Resource Description->Tables. Microsoft Dynamics GP records distribution in the tables is defined by Microsoft Dexterity architecture, so don’t expect it to be too easy. Try intended transactions entries in GP and research how records flow into the tables
 

4. Great Plains Dexterity integrations. Dex is relatively difficult to learn from zero, however it has unlimited control over GP MRP. Typically you customize DYNAMICS.DIC, adding new Dex modified logic there and then extract and package it in the form of Dexterity chunk
 

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