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Showing posts from January, 2017

Deploying Microsoft Dynamics GP Web Client with Office 365 Identity and Azure Active Directory - Part 1

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Hi! As of late I have been seeing a number of questions on forums about deploying Microsoft Dynamics GP Web Client using Office 365 identity. So I figured I would take a deep dive look into this topic, by providing a bit of background and steps to achieve a successful deployment. What you need to know is, you have a range of options. Background Office 365 uses Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) cloud-based user authentication service to manage users. This service provides 3 identity models that can be used to manage user accounts: Cloud identity . In this scenario, accounts are managed in Office 365 only. All the administration is done in the cloud, requiring no on-premise servers to manage the accounts. Synchronized identity . In this particular case, your on-premise directory objects are synchronized with Office 365, with the bulk of the administration done from your on-premise server. Passwords can be synchronized such that users have the sam...

Revisiting: Microsoft Dynamics GP's PerformancePoint Server Connector

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I realize this one is a really obscure topic, but I thought it was important to bring it to light. Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server  was an actual thing, it existed, and to the surprise of everyone reading this and not in the channel long enough to remember, Dynamics GP had a connector to it. Summary Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server was a business intelligence software product released in 2007 by Microsoft. It was discontinued in 2009, then resurfaced with its dashboard, scorecard, and analytics capabilities incorporated into SharePoint Server 2010 - the feature was known as PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2013. PerformancePoint Server also provided a planning and budgeting component directly integrated with Excel. However, by 2009, the actual Microsoft Dynamics GP connector for PerformancePoint was also discontinued. Back in 2008, I wrote a stub article about it for an article published by Alan Whitehouse . You can read more ab...

"Get-Content : Cannot find path 'C:\en-US\Welcome.txt' because it does not exist" error when running GPPowerShellStart.ps1

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Lately, I have been dabbing into PowerShell. The truth is, I had been wanting to do this for the past 3 years now, to switch from DOS batch files and VBScript to a more robust, developer-like task automation alternative. So I thought myself PowerShell over the past few days and, in doing so, I decided I'd look into the GP PowerShell feature, so off I went installing it. Summary Directly from the PowerShell TechNet page, " Windows PowerShell® is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language designed especially for system administration. Built on the .NET Framework, Windows PowerShell helps IT professionals and power users control and automate the administration of the Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows. " More on PowerShell here . GP PowerShell is available for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and above and can be found on the main application setup page. Setup page A couple clicks and you are ready to go. The Problem The GP P...

Revisiting: The Dexterity OLE Container

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Welcome to the first article in my  Revisiting series. Today I'm going to talk about the now defunct Dexterity OLE Container feature in Microsoft Dynamics GP. However, not because the technology is dead, it means that you don't have to deal with OLE notes. If you are coming from older versions of Microsoft Dynamics GP and upgrading to, say, GP 2013 R2 onward you have to be substantially aware of OLE notes: how are you going to migrate these and what is there in place to replace them. Summary In principle, OLE is a compound document technology from Microsoft based on the Component Object Model (COM) . OLE allows an object such as a graphic, video clip, spreadsheet, etc. to be embedded into a document, called the Container Application. The Dexterity OLE Container is part of the Dexterity Shared Components . In OLE compound document technology, it is the OLE client application ( CONTAIN.EXE ), which holds the linked or embedded objects. The Dexterity OLE Container first surf...

New Year's Resolution

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Well, hello everyone! I hope you had a great time with family and friends and that you are now cranking it in high gear to get this year started off on the right track. I know I am. A little of what I'm working on.. . As the Lead Software Engineer for Mekorma , my job is to make sure we build quality new products, while improving the capabilities of our existing offerings. To that effect, my team has been working on a really cool product that automates the entire processing of payments (checks, EFTs, and Credit Cards) and remittances by leveraging our existing MICR offering, all the while, delivering total Accounts Payable automation in the process. I am really excited to talk about this, so more on this in an upcoming article. Blogging challenge for the New Year One of the questions I get asked the most in my comments section is, "does this article still apply to the newer versions of GP?" Usually, the person asking the question is referring to versions GP 2015...