Dynamics GP Support Blog confirms that the Professional Services Tools Library (PSTL) is now available for all, free of cost.
BUT, all Customers should contact their Partners to get this tool. Once installed, it would generate the registration key by default and you are good to use it.
PSTL has been a great tool with top notch features to solve real time issues. With this becoming free to use, customers should make use of this.
VAIDY
This post is just an extension of what Janakiram (DynamicsBlogger) had posted. Microsoft Dynamics products line (CRM, AX, GP, NAV) are all heading towards Cloud. And Microsoft is quite serious about it for sure.
Janakiram had expressed some doubts (or concerns, if I may say) about this offering.
I would like to clarify these points as much as I can. I just happened to attend Microsoft Open Door Gulf event today and also have been closely watching this area (of Dynamics GP & Cloud model).
According to what I have understood:
1. Microsoft is NOT listing Dynamics GP as PUBLIC CLOUD enabled product at all. Having said that, Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Web Client is just a beginning to attract customers towards GP as an ERP. GP had long been considered as a stagnant product in terms of extended functionality or its technology. With this web client, both are now quashed.
Web Client will enable customers to get rid of several H/W & S/W costs. Terminal Server licenses will be immediately abolished, which will certainly save some hard cash for customers.
It also enable Partners top expand their business from being “mere Partners” to “Partners & SaaS Providers”, by allowing them to host Dynamics GP for customers. It’s going to be win-win situation, at least for another 5 years from the time Dynamics GP 2013 is released.
Hybrid Model? YES. That’s because you can have a private cloud on your environment and also you can have desktop clients. You can also have your GP data mirrored to your on-premise server and can have clients accessing that as well. It’s more like your Microsoft Office 365, wherein you can have your email server hosted on cloud and can also have the same being synchronized on your On-Premise server. Decision is up to customers.
Microsoft Dynamics GP Public Cloud is NOT going to be realized anytime soon.
2. Microsoft is not going to abolish the Dynamics Partners model at all (at least for another 10 years). That’s for sure. If you closely watch Microsoft Dynamics business, it’s always been Partners who have driven this and not Microsoft. Microsoft indeed has worked a lot on improving it’s Dynamics products but it’s always been partners who have taken these products to end customers.
Microsoft recently took a clean up act on Partners, by reducing the number of Partners and also downgrading some and also stripping their “Gold Certification”. MSFT also toughened the criteria for anyone to become a Microsoft Partner. This was both condemned as well as praised. Ultimately, the incidents of customers getting a negative impression with Microsoft Dynamics (& Partners) got a bit reduced.
But never did Microsoft take the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics Products from partners. Never ever.
You also have to have a Microsoft Partner to avail the license for any Microsoft Dynamics product. This is true for even Microsoft Office 365 implementation. We, as customers, can never get out of Partners anytime soon.
So Partners need not worry about.
3. Microsoft Dynamics GP has been a great product NOT because it’s great out-of-box. It’s because, it is flexible and can get extended by having proper and correct customizations. It also made easy for a customer to avail a Partner or Freelance Consultants or In-house Consultants to manage their GP environment with so many value added enhancements.
In my experience, I have never seen one single GP implementation without a single customization. Oh yes, there was indeed one, but that was for a Non-Profit company and they used ONLY GP Finance Module (GL, AP & AR) and that’s it. Trust me, that’s all about it.
Till now, GP never had a built-in, user-friendly, technology-friendly reporting tool (no offense intended to Report Writer). It supports external tools such as Crystal Reports, SSRS, etc., but that had to be CODED by consultants/developers to get it work. Not one single GP implementation was done without having to write one single Custom SQL Stored Procedure for any kind of business requirement. It’s not just GP. You take any ERP solution in current market. And you will certainly understand that, without additions, it’s highly impossible.
Why am I talking about this? Because, with cloud hosted GP, there comes several restrictions such as denial of access to SQL Server on which our GP data is going to lie. Oh well, we won’t even know on which server our data is hosted and in which country the server is located AT A GIVEN POINT OF TIME. In such cases, who will take care of extending our business requirements? It’s a big question, trust me.
Till we get an answer to the above question, no customer would ever want to go for a public cloud.
4. Consider that your GP is on cloud now, hosted by none other than Microsoft. Customers will gain A LOT. I mean it. I am a consultant and I still say that customers will gain a lot.
Why? Because they don’t have to worry about upgrades, backups, downtimes, H/W maintenances; well at least theoretically and also by agreement, they don’t have to.
Microsoft has ensured (and also boasting) that the uptime and availability is a staggering 99.99%. Which means A LOT for a customer. IT expenditures on backing up the data, preserving the H/W resources, upgrading H/W resources are all quashed.
As far as support is concerned, the only support that you may have with Microsoft, when you are on cloud, is the non-availability of the service itself. You won’t complain to them about a missing transaction. Worst case scenario, you may miss your entire company data due to a server crash or malfunction happened on their servers.
5. Cloud Services are a BIG PLUS for customers who have an unlimited & fast bandwidth internet connectivity. Not all countries (let alone cities) enjoy this. And this will play huge part on customers’ psyche. There are so many customers who pay for their data usage. For them, on premise cost would be less than data usage cost.
Even for customers who have a faster line connection, the upload bandwidth is still crazily low.
Simply, it’s not always possible for all customers.
Alright, I have much more that I can share with you about this. Above are all my understanding about this Cloud concept in accordance with the product Dynamics GP. I have been working on this product for 8 years now and my thoughts shared above are based on that.
I welcome you all (readers of this blog) to share your thoughts on this.
VAIDY
Those who are on Microsoft Dynamics GP 10, would want to seriously think about upgrading their product.
Microsoft Dynamics GP Support Blog has posted this morning that Microsoft Dynamics GP 10 Mainstream Support ends on October 9th, 2012.
So be aware of this fact and plan for your upgrade at the earliest.
VAIDY
Professional Services Tools Library (PSTL) is a sweet bunch of amazing tools that would be any GP Consultant/Administrator’s delight.
Want to change a wrongly coded item? PSTL
Want to change a Fiscal Period and automatically rearrange historical data? PSTL
There are much more. But this was not a free suite, TILL NOW. Microsoft has released this suite for all customers free of charge.
It’s either available on GP media or CustomerSource. Go ahead and have some fun.
VAIDY
Njevity Blog has got an important piece of information, posted by Melissa Sandrovich, on available Upgrade Paths for Dynamics GP 2010.
The paths are detailed from versions 9.0 till lower versions of GP2010 to it’s current version.
Those who are looking for this information anywhere else, this post would be of immense time saver.
VAIDY
This post is kind of reblogging David’s post, Cross Dictionary Dexterity Development, for just one reason.
We can write cross dictionary triggers on DEX.DIC. I had tried this once, some years ago, and could not succeed. I never got a chance or requirement again that would push me beyond that limit. Looks like that chance is here and now.
And this is certainly the right time for me to reblog this point and the post itself.
VAIDY
I am currently working on custom SSRS dashboards performance tuning and related exercises. One task among all is to automate the Fiscal Year Start Date and Fiscal Year End Date based on which Fiscal Year we are in.
If the fiscal year is the same as calendar year, we can hard code the values to 1-Jan-[current year] and 31-Dec-[current year]. Since it’s not in my case, I had to dynamically get the dates from somewhere.
The simplest way for me is to query this from GP Fiscal Periods Setup table, which is SY40101.
Following is the query, if anyone would like to know how the dates are retrieved:
SELECT FSTFSCDY Fiscal_Start_Date,
LSTFSCDY Fiscal_End_Date
FROM SY40101
WHERE YEAR1 = CASE WHEN MONTH(GETDATE()) >= [first month of your company fiscal year] THEN YEAR(GETDATE()) ELSE YEAR(GETDATE()) – 1 END
With above, I can now be rest assured that by the time a new fiscal year is started, my dashboards would automatically get refreshed with new start & end dates.
This query would also work if the fiscal year is as good as the calendar year.
VAIDY
With more and more excitement being felt on GP 2013 Web Client, David gives us some more insight on this and more.
The post, Microsoft Convergence 2012 – GPPC Games and Web Client, explains the good things and also the limitations of Web Client in its first version.
This post, therefore, is very important for developers and consultants to gear up for this awesome client and understand what they must do to get the existing GP environments to work on the new release post upgrade.
Thanks David for the all important post. It was really crucial for us to understand.
VAIDY
Mariano, in his new post, confirms that Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 is compatible with SQL Server 2012. The post also has got links to both CustomerSource and PartnerSource.
This is a good news, since SQL Server 2012 will precede Dynamics GP 2013, which means customers would be first upgrading their SQL Server first.
SQL Server 2012 has got tremendous amount of features that are going to be crucial in future.
So let’s gear up for some serious upgrades.
VAIDY
When you create a user, by default, GP creates the following segments on his/her homepage:
1. To Do (Reminders/Tasks)
2. My Reports
3. Microsoft Outlook
4. Quick Links
5. Connect (links to Online Resources such as CustomerSource, Forums, Blogs, etc.)
6. Metrics (quick dashboards for users)
All of the above work perfectly, but at some stages (especially when you are working on a GP Terminal Server) some of these components would halt GP for a while, not allowing users to do anything.
One classic example is Microsoft Outlook. We recently migrated our Email Services to Microsoft Office 365. For those users who use Thin Client to on their day-to-day job, Terminal Server is THE destination. Quite obviously, Terminal Server has got Outlook installed.
Before Office 365, Outlook profile used to connect to our on-premise Exchange Server. After migration, we had to change the profile from Exchange Server to Office 365 hosting server.
Whenever a user logs on to Terminal Server and opens GP, GP will halt for at least 3-5 mins to get this Outlook configured. I am getting calls from users (yes, even now) that their GP session does not work and they are not able to do anything. Following icon shows up on their taskbar when this happens:
It didn’t take me much time to realize that all these users had added Microsoft Outlook on their GP homepage.
“Do we really need Outlook on GP homepage?” is a question to be asked to oneself. Yes, Microsoft has integrated your ERP with one of the most used product by maximum business users. Agreed. But is that alone a reason for you to use it? Let’s not get into that argument in this post, anyways.
I had to take a stand and remove Microsoft Outlook from those users’ homepage. But then, I don’t know, right now, about how many users out of 100+ total users have added Outlook on their homepage.
Certainly not without the help of a SQL query.
The table where this information has got stored is SY08100 (Technical Name: syHomePageLayout). In this table, the column SectionID denotes the sections which are available for a user to add to his/her homepage. Following is the legend:
1 – To Do (Reminders/Tasks/Cues)
2 – Microsoft Outlook
3 – Metrics (quick dashboards for users)
4 – My Reports (links to users’ favorite reports and smartlists)
5 – Quick Links (links to users’ frequently used windows)
6 – Connect (links to Online Resources for GP such as Forums, Blogs, etc.)
Typically, for each user, this table will contain 6 rows, each row denoting each of above section. SY08100 also contains a column named Visible. This denotes whether or not to show a particular section on GP homepage.
For instance, if user SA has setup his GP homepage to show To Do, My Reports & Quick Links to show up, the following will be SY08100 records:
So, if I want to hide Microsoft Outlook from all users’ homepage, I just have to execute the following SQL query on DYNAMICS database:
UPDATE SY08100 SET Visible = 0 WHERE SectionID = 2
We must also understand one thing. Users can always add this again thru’ Customize this page… option. So this is NOT A PERMANENT SOLUTION.
Whenever there is a necessity, as in my case, you can certainly rely on this SQL method to do a homepage layout mass update.
VAIDY
Dynamics GP - Learn & Discuss 