Author Archives: Vaidhy Mohan

Extender for GP 2013 – Release Postponed

Posted on by

This is, to some extent, bad news for me at least. I was planning for an early upgrade to GP 2013 for my GP production environment. As 40% of my customisation depend on Extender, it feels so bad that I cannot get Extender for GP 2013 till Early to Mid February 2013. This news has been confirmed by eOne Solutions on their official blog.

Original post here: Delivery Date.

I am disappointed to say the least. But considering the issues that eOne developers are going thru’, especially due to a very late announcement from Microsoft to detach Extender from their OEM arrangements, I empathise with them on their most gruelling time to get things streamlined and meet customers’ expectations.

I shall await their official announcement on Extender’s availability for GP 2013.

VAIDY

GP2013 Module Homepage Redesigned

Posted on by

Another important and notable change that we have in GP 2013 is the module homepage being amazingly redesigned, much to users’ delight.

GP2013 Module Homepage Redesigned

 

As compared to previous versions of GP (from 9), what you will see here is the complete menu without any collapse/expand functionality, but with a scrolling option within that small rectangle frame; which means you don’t have to scroll to the bottom of GP itself, but just scroll down within that frame, so you don’t have to scroll up/down to access other frames.

If you are trying to open Receivables Batches, I just have to scroll down on Transactions frame. When I am done, I won’t have to scroll up/down again to reach out to open Receivables Statements.

Cool, isn’t it? If you are heavy user of modules homepage for your day-to-day tasks, this is going to increase your productivity most certainly.

VAIDY

GP 2013 Company Selection Screen – Uncluttered

Posted on by

The moment you cross Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Login window and reach Company Selection window, you would realise that it is now uncluttered with Password field being removed.

GP2013 Company Selection

 

Looks pretty and clean to me. How about you all?

VAIDY

Extender Customers Opt-In Process

Posted on by

Much has been written, discussed and thought about Microsoft’s strategy on moving Extender licensing and support to it’s original developer, eOne Solutions, from GP 2013.

It was first highlighted by Victoria Yudin on her blog; Big announcement for Microsoft Dynamics GP’s Extender module. It was soon followed by several posts from all GP community. Having said and done all, eOne has clarified an important thing to all customers and partners.

If you wish to Opt-In (explanation of what it is all about is there on the post), please read this post from eOne Solutions: Opt-In eXtender Customers. This is a very important post for all those use Extender and time to get it done if you are planning your GP 2013 upgrade in near future.

VAIDY

OFF-TOPIC: MacBook, Mac OS & Wired Memory

Posted on by

I got a new MacBook Pro couple of days back and needless to say, I am more than excited to use it.

I have been a Mac OS user for the past 1 year, as I had already replaced my personal computing machine from an old warrior named Lenovo N300 to an amazing MacBook Air. Been driven by that experience, I had always been yearning for my work computer to get changed to a MacBook too.

This topic is more about how Mac OS utilises the System Memory (RAM) to it’s fullest advantage and how it keeps any MacBook machine highly efficient. When we look at the Activity Monitor (equivalent to Task Manager on Windows OS), you would find something like below:

Screen Shot 2013-01-15 at 5.48.57 AM

 

I was so intrigued by the term Wired Memory as all other terms made some sense to my H/W & OS expertise. Checked with my friend (who else but Google), and he as usual returned several results. One post stood out from all other.

A post written by Alex on his blog Bits about Bytes shed some light on this. Read the post here: Is my Mac using too much memory???

It’s a very old post (posted precisely in the year 2007), but an amazing post about the topic which I was interested in. In case some people like me, who has shifted to Mac OS (or going to shift), I thought this post would be for them and would be useful to know about your Mac.

Happy “Mac”ing.

VAIDY

My Blog Theme Experiments

Posted on by

I have been testing and trying a lot of themes for my blog. For the past one month, I would have changed almost 10 themes. All of that is purely because of keeping my blog plain and simple to read.

I request all my blog readers to bear with me till I finalise a theme soon. If someone do not like any theme or like any one, please immediately contact me with your feedback using “Contact” form on my blog.

Thank you so much all for your continued support and interest on my blog.

VAIDY

Move Expired SOP Quotes To History – Leslie Vail

Posted on by

Leslie Vail has posted an article at a time when I am currently working on closing down thousands and thousands of SOP quotes which users failed to close down. It’s about a SQL Script which moves all expired SOP quotes to history.

(Some really lame) reasons I use to hear for not closing down quotes:

1. We don’t know when that quote would be materialised.

Seriously? Gotta be kidding me. If it’s a quote of age 2+ years and you still don’t know whether it would get materialised or not, then something is wrong fundamentally.

2. If it’s voided, we won’t be able to copy the line items of that quote.

Wrong. You can. Copying line items from an SOP document is very much possible, even if it’s transferred or voided.

3. We don’t know whether the comments that we had added specific to that quote would be available for us to reuse it.

Answer is a positive YES. You can reuse the comments, because comments are NOT stored on that document but on Comments Master. Just select the ID and there it is. Unless, you have edited that comment on the document. But again, come on, it’d take 5 mins for you to inquire the voided one, copy the comment text and paste it on new one.

And so on…

VAIDY

Dynamics CRM Connector V2 RU2 supports Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Already

Posted on by

So that’s so relieving to know that we do not have to wait to get a compatible Microsoft Dynamics Connector for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013.

The current version V2 RU2 supports Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 already. Check out this post on official Connector blog: Connector for Microsoft Dynamics V2 RU2 supports Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013.

VAIDY

Infamous “Sales distribution amount is incorrect” Error

Posted on by

I received an email from one of my users seeking my help in clearing this issue. While posting an invoice, this error message popped up:

SDE-01

 

Upon running the Edit List for this invoice, I realized that it was due to an imbalance in Markdown Amount and corresponding distribution line. Below was the error report that I got:

SDE-02

There seemed to be Markdown entered on one or more line item(s), but there was no distribution line for that amount. But the issue was not THAT simple and didn’t stop there.

When I ran thru’ all line items, none contained a Markdown. Now that’s the problem. After some minutes of thinking, I realized something must be stranded on header record’s Markdown field, for which GP requires a Markdown distribution line, but since line items do not contain any Markdown, it’s not creating one. Strange.

I decided to query the records from SOP10100 (SOP Header) and SOP10200 (SOP Line) to understand the issue. Below is what I found:

SDE-03

SERIOUSLY…?!?!?!?!

But yes, that was the issue. And most baffling thing is, when I tried to reconcile this sales document, this major mishap didn’t get cleared at all.

Obvious solution for this abnormal situation is as follows:

1. Take backup of this SOP10100 record.

2. Update Markdown fields with ZERO.

3. Reconcile this sales document again to see if the above update had caused any imbalance.

Happy new year and happy troubleshooting…!!!

VAIDY

DBCC SHRINKFILE

Posted on by

There is an amazingly simpler yet highly informative post up on TECHNET portal, which proved very handy this morning.

My systems admin reported to me that our SharePoint server ran out of storage for some reason unknown to him, but he could identify that it was SQL Server program files folder which consumed 80% of storage.

I immediately knew what could be the reason. It’s those crazy log files problem. To truncate and clear these overeating log files, I had to use this command: DBCC SHRINKFILE.

SP-Log-FileGrowth

Once I cleared out all unnecessary file space from these log files, I had to setup the File Growth and Maximum File Size (shown in the screenshot beside):

Never for a DB log file, we should setup the file growth as “In Percent”. This would prove disastrous over a period of time. Instead, always set it up to “In Megabytes” and enter a least sensible value; in my case I had set it up to 5MB.

For a DB Log file, 2GB should be reasonable amount of file space to hold the logs. To learn more about Log files, read this post on TECHNET: The Transaction Log (SQL Server).

We must understand one thing, that shrinking the DB log has got it’s own impact.

VAIDY