The Dynamics GP Blogster

Welcome to another edition of From the Newsgroups . The Microsoft Dynamics GP Online Partner Technical Community forum is one of those virtual places where you get to see and experience it all. One gets to become familiar with real life issues experienced by us partners keen enough to share our implementation and support issues. The following is a thread from the Online Partner Technical Community: Good afternoon. Our customer keeps getting these "mystery" GL postings [SALESASMxxxx] and wants to know why they are being generated but I cannot find any article or search that shows this document prefix for GP. Does anyone know what type of doc this is and why it may be generated automatically into GL? The answer comes courtesy of Tristan Thor Clores , a Microsoft Support Engineer. For transactions that have the SALESASM prefix in their description: These may mean that a sales invoice with a shortage override of a top level BOM (also known as finished good) was posted at one cost...

For many of you who have been in the channel long enough, whether as developers, partners, or customers and have been using GP for that long, you may still be able to remember the days of c-tree and Btrieve. Just recently, a developer approached my good friend David Musgrave with a question on a product they had created and been using since the days of GP 6.0. This product makes extensive use of c-tree temp tables and the developer wanted to know whether it was still ok to continue using c-tree tables or convert those to SQL Server temp tables. He received the following answer: There is nothing wrong with c-tree temp tables. They are faster. SQL Temp tables take a bit of work to create so ctree has less overhead. The only reasons to change them back to Default or SQL are: 1) You are using them on a report. This allows SQL optimization when generating the report with a single SQL Joined query. 2) You want to use SQL optimized functions such as range where clauses or range copy. 3) The ...

I have to give credit where credit is due. MVP Mark Polino may have the hottest summer read (see my article Cookbooks ), but my good friend and fellow blogger Jivtesh Singh has the mother of all blog sites... literally! Jivtesh is one of those die hard and passionate about Dynamics GP individuals. He probably saw the same problem many of you have seen with the proliferation of Microsoft Dynamics GP blogs and asked himself the same set of questions you may be asking yourself: "how the heck do I keep up with all these blogs?" , "I saw an article on [some topic here], where did I read it?". Jivtesh now provides an answer to these questions with his new GPWindow platform , which aggregates every single blog article, video, and resource about Microsoft Dynamics GP. C'mon, you know there's absolutely no reason to do this! For all I know, Jivtesh could be home writing cool articles for his own blog... but that's not how we Microsoft Dynamics GP advocates and ...

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Architecture Whitepaper is now available for download from Microsoft Download Center. Architecture is something dear to my heart so please be sure to download this document and read up. The document discusses the following topics: The structure of the Microsoft Dynamics GP application, which is composed of the Dexterity runtime engine, the Dynamics application dictionary, and the Microsoft SQL Server database. How Microsoft Dynamics GP efficiently uses system resources for both client workstations and servers. The customization tools that are built into the software and are accessible to all users, and the tools that system administrators can use to customize Microsoft Dynamics GP, such as Modifier, Report Writer, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The tools that are available for importing and exporting Microsoft Dynamics GP data, such as eConnect, Web Services, and Integration Manager. The features that provide platform enhancements, such as flexible...

Summer is just getting sizzly here in the United States and as a customary tradition, we begin rolling out our grills and dusting off our cookbooks, but this time around, my wife had me ordered two new cookbooks from Mark Bittman , an American food journalist and author of some of the best cookbooks in the market today. Here is my grill and the cookbooks to go with it. Webber One Touch Gold Mark Bittman's How to cook everything series I am among other things an avid cook, so I was trying to find something productive to do while the stakes were on the grill. I had to decide between the usual and traditional ales (while I wait for the food) or, well more cookbooks. I figured I would log into Amazon and see what was hot. Two weeks later my shipment arrived, and I just could not wait to get my hands on it -- just in time for the summer! I could not wait to open the box to get my hands on this new cookbook that would revolutionize my downtime while steaks and veggies were on the grill. ...

"The term "customization" can mean different things to different people..." My new article is out over at MSDynamicsWorld. This time, I go back to basics defining what is a customization and what tools are available to customize the Microsoft Dynamics GP user interface. This article is a good start if you are still trying to figure out your options for developing add-on solutions to Microsoft Dynamics GP. To read the full article, click here . Until next post! MG.- Mariano Gomez, MVP Maximum Global Business, LLC http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

The ability to enforce password policies was introduced since version 9 of Microsot Dynamics GP (see Why does Microsoft Dynamics GP encrypt passwords? over at Developing for Dynamics GP for more information). Surprisingly, still many system administrators are not taking advantage of this feature, because they have found it difficult to manage without certain reporting necessary to follow up on Microsoft Dynamics GP logins activity. The typical complaints revolve around the lack of visibility on when a user password will expire or whether the account has been locked or not. To make administrative tasks even more difficult, Dynamics GP systems administrators must rely on database administrators and Windows Server administrators to resolve any issues arising from a user being locked out the system, typically working their way through a helpdesk on a relatively simple issue. With that said, I set out to create a query that could provide systems administrators with an insight into Microsof...

There are a number of good blog posts in the community explaining the differences between sa, Microsoft SQL Server's defacto administrative user; and DYNSA, Microsoft Dynamics GP defacto administrative user. In reading a number of these articles I realized one thing: they address little about the DYNSA user. So what's DYNSA? You only have to read back a few lines to obtain this answer, however, I want take another direction. Let's start by saying that in Microsoft SQL Server, every database is created with a dbo user. Take for example this blank database created using SQL Server Management Studio: The dbo is a user that has implied permissions to perform all activities in the database. Any member of the sysadmin fixed server role (like sa for example) who uses a database is mapped to the special user inside each database called dbo . Also, any object created by any member of the sysadmin fixed server role belongs to dbo automatically. For example, if user DYNSA is ...

One of the biggest improvements in eConnect 2010 is the addition of the new eConnect Integration Service . The eConnect installer now creates a new Windows Service application named eConnect for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 integration Service . The eConnect Integration Service is a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service that replaces the (very unstable) eConnect COM+ object available in previous versions of eConnect. The eConnect Integration Service supports the operations of the eConnect .NET assemblies, the BizTalk adapter, and MSMQ interfaces. In addition, you can use the service directly from an application that adds a service reference to the eConnect Integration Service. If you add a service reference, you do not need to add the Microsoft.Dynamics.GP.eConnect assembly and namespace to your development project. To add the eConnect Integration Service to an application, you must first add a service reference to the Visual Studio project for that application. To add a servi...

In previous versions of Integration Manager you had the ability to save an integration with another name, but v10 onwards this feature was removed. Here is what Beth Gardner from the Microsoft Dynamics GP Online Partner Technical Community had to say: "We removed the Save As functionality in one of the IM 10.0 service packs. The reason why, was the Save As feature had a bug with it for many years. It would copy the integration source file instead of creating a new integration source file in the new integration. This meant that if you were to change the source file on the second integration to browse to a different file, the original integration source file would also change. This caused a large amount of confusion and problems for customers. Due to this, we removed it from the menu. What you will need to do instead is use the File Import Integrations process. This will allow you to browse out the the IM.mdb file you currently have open and select integrations. You will then be p...

A recurring question throughout these days of upgrades to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 is what version of Microsoft Office Web Components (OWC) is compatible with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010. In this article, I will address this question by explaining what is OWC and how it is used. OWC are a collection of Component Object Model (COM) controls for publishing spreadsheets, charts, and databases to the Web and are required to support the display of metrics on a Microsoft Dynamics GP home page. These components have been released with various versions of Microsoft Office, as shown below. Source: OfficeBlogs.net The latter is important to understand, because the Microsoft Dynamics GP home page is an HTML rendering done from Dexterity code with the aid of some XSL and cascading stylesheets. The HTML code embeds calls to OWC functions via JScript to display the metrics. The current supported version of OWC is Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components for versions 9, 10, and 2010. So now that we have...

This time of the year brings some stress for those of us MVPs in the July renewal cycle and holders of this prestigious Microsoft award. The bottom line is, every July 1st I find out whether I continue to keep my MVP stripes or... not! The good folks at Microsoft have felt once more that my contributions to the Microsoft Dynamics GP community in general have made me worthy of such honor, so it's with great joy that I announce I get to keep my award for one more year starting today, making it the 3rd consecutive year of such privilege. NOTE: The record for consecutive years in our track is currently held by MVP Victoria Yudin , with 6 consecutive years. Also, I must congratulate MVP Frank Hamelly for being reawarded. Frank's contributions have also earned him the right of passage. So you ask, "what does a Microsoft MVP do?" Here is just a few things I did since last July: Published over 160 blog articles on my site with replies to more than 100 comments Answered over ...