Rushi Patel, from Microsoft Dynamics GP Team in Fargo, has started a new series of posts on Developing For Dynamics GP blog that would shed some light on upcoming Dynamics GP in terms of underlying technologies and how its developed.
First post, Web Client Window Ribbon Part 1, talks about default Ribbon Rules that are followed in developing the web client window ribbon.
Awesome posts ahead.
VAIDY
Mark Polino, after his uber-successful ways of informing the community about many things in Microsoft Dynamics GP, has found one more brilliant way to hook us on to Microsoft Connect (portal where we can voice our feedback about a Microsoft product).
It’s simply this: Every Tuesday, Mark would link us to a feature feedback on Microsoft Connect portal, which require Dynamics GP End Users/Consultants/Developers to vote for it, so it would be worked upon by Microsoft and would get released on subsequent major releases of this product.
Starting with May 1st, 2012, he has already pointed out two features that cry for our attention and vote:
May 1st, 2012: Unit Account should have the option to clear at Year End
May 8th, 2012: Management Reporter should allow each column to have it’s own current rate
And many more to come.
Stay tuned to his blog for future Dynamic Future posts.
VAIDY
I second Christina’s point. Never ever, you consultant, post any transaction on a client’s system. Whatever it is. Be it correction entry or a backlog entry or a real time transaction or even a test entry to demo.
I learned that lesson very long back, around 5 years back, when I was in my infancy on consultancy. Like Christina, my lesson was also very bitter. And then, I never did that ever in my life.
VAIDY
Microsoft had published a white paper on choosing a development tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP, at the time of GP 2010 release.
Though it’s pretty old, it’s still valid even now to refer to this white paper.
Download it here: Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 White Paper – Choosing a Development Tool
Soon, we would all be getting ready for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and I am sure, this white paper would still be valid. 🙂
VAIDY
Awesome tool and I would say, its need of the hour.
Now, I read this post on Microsoft Dynamics GP Support Blog on a tool that comes with Professional Services Tools Library (PSTL) to Prevent Users from Keying Incorrect Document Dates in GP 2010.
But unfortunately, scope of this tool is limited to following transaction entries:
I would have expected this to have even more reach, especially on POP side. Today, just today, I received a bunch of PO Invoices being posted on a wrong date. I would have loved to have this tool on my environment had this covered much more types of transactions.
However, this is still very good than reinventing this by developers or partners.
VAIDY
Q: From where does the Inventory Adjustment entry retrieve a product’s Decimal Places Currency value?
A: When we create a product, this value will be defaulted from the Functional Currency of that company. While entering an Inventory Adjustment for this product, the decimal places currency value will then be retrieved from the product master record.
I realized this when I faced an issue couple of days back. I got a requirement where, I have to facilitate an automated program that will replicate a product information (Master, Quantities/Site, Vendors, Currencies & Price List) from one company to another. Of course, with necessary changes that are specific to the destination company.
It worked merrily till both companies had functional currencies with same number of decimal places. I had to extend this program on to another company, whose functional currency supports 3 decimal places. Now you might have realized the issue. My program, quite honestly, was written with a hardcoded value of 2 decimal places.
When I created some products on my new company using this program, I could not enter Inventory Adjustments with 3 decimal places. It was always 2. Upon spending some time on this, I realized what I have mentioned at the start of this post. You cannot override this at all.
So those who write customization like what I have explained above, beware of all such nuances which will play very crucial role in day-to-day transactions.
VAIDY
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
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
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 SY40101Â
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
Dynamics GP - Learn & Discuss 