Microsoft Great Plains customization ? Freight Forwarding/Transportation industry example
January 15, 2008
Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains version 8.5, 8.0, 7.5, Great Plains eEnterprise/Dynamics 7.0, 6.0, Dynamics C/S+ 5.5 and 5.0 serve USA, UK, South Africa, Australia, Middle East horizontal market. As being relatively inexpensive solution, it is reasonably open to be customizable to fit specific industry niche. In this small article we’ll give you highlight on how Great Plains could serve specific vertical demands of transportation and freight forwarding industry Industry requirements:
? Agent Monthly Settlement invoicing. Freight Forwarders use agents and usually pay them on the monthly basis, depending on the results. Freight Forwarded pays fees and collects money from customers, and if collection exceeds fees ? it pays to the agent, in the opposite case it issues debit memo. Agent should receive detailed invoice.
? Shipment Inquiry Form. Usually each Freight Forwarding has custom or standard shipping tracking system. This system is primary source of information about the shipment, then all the collections and fees and associated customer and vendor invoices are moved to Accounting Application, such as Microsoft Great Plains. From this accounting/ERP system we need Shipment Inquiry functionality with the report on the profit/loss from this specific shipment
Microsoft Great Plains realization:
Great Plains Dynamics on Pervasive/Ctree support ? overview for consultant
January 14, 2008
All of us know that Microsoft bought former Great Plains Software and formed Microsoft (Great Plains) Business Solutions in the earlier 21st century. It was total success for GPS, we guess, but for Great Plains Dynamics / eEnterprise / Dynamics C/S+ clients it was the time of change. First of all ? Great Plains Software, as being independent corporation in 1990th had to stake on certain future predictions. They decided that future should be based on these two basic principles:
? Database Independence. Nobody could predict if Microsoft, Ingress, Oracle, IBM DB2, Btrieve, Ctree/Faircom or somebody else from newcomers will win the market. In such a situation, if you are growing ERP publisher ? you need to be flexible and have the ability to switch quickly from one DB platform to another
? Universal Graphical interface. Some illusions were related to 1972 invented C language ? now it is clear that each computer manufacturer tries to stick standards to its own platform and universal graphics is somewhat no-one uses because of the slow performance. But it is seen now ? not in 1990th These two above principles resulted in creation of Great Plains Software development environment and language ? Great Plains Dexterity. This is history.
Groupware: Answers the 5 Questions of Document Collaboration
January 13, 2008
Every organization which creates collaborative documents, whether they are budgets, presentations, reports, spreadsheets, or other documents recognizes that collaborative efforts are requirement. That collaboration always forces the 5 eternal document collaboration questions: Who? What? Where? When? How? The reason I refer to them as eternal is that every day businesses are faced with these questions and rarely find the answers when they collaborate on documents.
Business frantically searched for groupware solutions that answers the 5 questions of document collaboration, and this informational article is written to provide helpful information on technology that is now available to bring answers.
Three helpful groupware software technologies will be presented and referred to throughout this article as means of answer-finding, as a refreshing relief to the more common question-making of collaboration. These technologies are Digital Thread technology, Version History technology, and Document Signature technology. These three teamware technologies function as the "triple threat" against document chaos.
Who?
From the start, it is important to state that accurate records are the key to keeping track of the editorial or collaborative process. So much record keeping gets jumbled because documents and drafts are spread out across many different places and collaborators like butter over too much bread. As the deadline nears, searches become more frantic. "Who has which draft?" or "Who made this change?" are questions that will frequently arise.
SQL scripts for Project Accounting: Microsoft Great Plains series ? overview for developer
January 12, 2008
Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains has Project Accounting module where you can budget the project, assign it to customer contract and then log expenses, timesheets, inventory spending, and finally bill the customer against the project or contract. Microsoft Great Plains Project Accounting does excellent job, but there are cases when you need developer or MS SQL DB Admin touches.
? The first script transfers salesperson and sales territory from Customer master file to Project master table
update PA01101 set SLPRSNID=b.SLPRSNID, SALSTERR=b.SALSTERR from PA01101 a join RM00101 b on a.CUSTNMBR=b.CUSTNMBR where a.SLPRSNIDb.SLPRSNID or a.SALSTERRb.SALSTERR
? The second scripts unlocks Project Accounting user, this rare and funny one ? really hard to get it from Microsoft Business Solutions Tech Support site:
delete PA000001 where userid=’put user id here’
? The third script is really advanced one ? it is for users trying to place billing address with contact info on the PA invoice form at the bottom section ? address comes from Contract ? not from the project
/* Updates Primary Bill To Address Code for Billing invoice to be the one from Contract Master table, instead of Primary Billing Address Code from Customer */
Quick Summary of Basic and Common Linux Commands
January 11, 2008
There are many commands that are used in linux on a daily basis, ones that everyone should know just to get by. Like back in the days of DOS, you had to know how to work with the command line and how to navigate around. Learning new commands is always hard, especially when there are so many new ones that don’t always seem to make sense in their names.
cd
Change directory - this command is essential for traversing folders and moving about your linux computer. Its quite straight forward, cd /where/you/want/togo or cd .. to go up a level. It’s pretty basic, but be aware of absolute and relative paths. If you are currently in the folder /home/puppy/pictures then you can type cd .. to move up to /home/puppy/ or you could type cd /home/puppy/ not to mention cd ~/puppy/. You must learn how to traverse folders effectively before you can use the operating system.
ls
The ls command gives you a directory listing. This command has many options, but basically provides you with the same information as the “dir” command in DOS. The most common use of ls is probably “ls -la” infact many people have an alias setup, so whenever they type “ls” it actually runs “ls -la”.
netstat - Linux Command to Display Networking Information
January 10, 2008
In linux, one of great commands for finding out information about your network connections is “netstat”. It provides you interface information, statistics, connections, and a lot of other really great information about your computer.
There are many intricate commands that you can use with this program, and I won’t be discussing all of them. If you would like a full review of the program, check your man or info files for more information. Below I will discuss the basic and most commonly used commands with netstat.
netstat -i (interface)
This command will give you an overview of networking on your PC. It will give you your local loopback (lo) and any network cards in your PC. This information is useful, so later you can specify a specific network interface card (NIC) that you wish to gain information on.
netstat
Using netstat alone, will give you some pretty good quick information. It gives you a list of active connections, the protocol that it is using, local and foreign address and the state of the connection. More often than not, you will not just use netstat by itself, most people add -a which gives you all listings, including ports that are actively listening.
These Items Are A Must Before Making The Decision To Purchase Any Off-The-Shelf Software
January 10, 2008
1. What determines the software price? Is it Per Seat or Per User or Per Processor?
The cost of software is determined in many ways. The two most popular ways are Per Seat or Per Concurrent User. Per Seat is determined by how many seats in your business will be using the software at any given time. On the other hand, Per Concurrent User is based on a set amount of users that can access the software at one time. (Example: concurrent users means a program with a license for 5 users can be installed on 100 machines but only a maximum of 5 people can use the system at once.) Per Processor is calculated on how many machines (PC’s or servers) the software will be running on. Many larger enterprise software applications use this method to determine their prices.
2. What types of on-site services are included in the purchase?
Microsoft Business Solutions Partner ? How to Launch New IT Consulting Practice
January 9, 2008
In the new era of internet marketing the problem of severe competition comes into the first position. If you look back into 1990-th you will find high tech companies using traditional sales techniques: purchasing local and regional businesses contact lists, making cold calls and then trying hard sales closing techniques, such as "selling to the top" ? IBM style, selling to VITO (very important top officer), etc. It did work those old days. We would dare to announce that these days are gone and these techniques are now obsolete.
We launched Microsoft Business Solutions VAR business nationwide without any money/investment in 2002 and now we are present in major US business metros, have international satellite offices in Brazil, Russia and Europe.
Below we would like to share our techniques
1. Internet Marketing ? in contrast to the old believe that you can cheat out internet search engine and place your web site on the top position, we state that this is virtually not possible. But the paradox is in the fact that internet is the major marketplace. So ? you have to spend most of your sales efforts on the internet. There is no direct answer about the preferred method ? all the methods should contribute and be tried out
Microsoft CRM Implementation - US Market Lessons
January 8, 2008
Microsoft CRM is CRM answer from Microsoft Business Solutions. If you compare it to other traditional CRM applications, such as Siebel - you will see that Microsoft CRM does use all the resent Microsoft technologies, that means that Microsoft targets its CRM to Windows market exclusively, plus this means that Microsoft CRM is more difficult in its installation. Microsoft doesn’t even have to care about other platforms, such as Linux/Unix or Apple. Now - we see kind of paradoxical situation when Microsoft CRM is gaining market share even in recession and early post-recession time. Where is the secret?
Let us give you our vision, based on our three years of MS CRM implementation practice in USA and internationally.
1. Microsoft CRM is for MCSE / Microsoft oriented IT departments ? Microsoft CRM would be be-loved system for IT specialists. If you are MCSE+I - CRM will recruit all your MS Exchange, Active Directory, MS SQL Server, Windows domain security, Windows 2003 Server, Web publishing and HTML knowledge and experience. This is completely opposite to earlier Apple Computer believe - that computer systems should be easy in service and completely intuitive. MS CRM is kind of intuitive for end user, but not for its administrator.
Microsoft Great Plains as ERP and Microsoft CRM as CRM
January 7, 2008
If you have Microsoft Great Plains and support it for your company then you need to know some technical details about Great Plains version upgrade and what is going on behind the scenes, which options do you have in case of Dexterity, VBA, SQL customization, additional complexity comes with migration from ctree/Pervasive to MS SQL/MSDE.
What is upgrade in the language of technology? Upgrade has server and client sides.
- Server side - upgrade converts tables from old format to the new one. In general words - Microsoft Business Solutions developers may change table structure, append additional fields to add new functionality, things like that. Upgrade copies the table with changes to temporary table, then drops original table, recreates it with new structure and copies all the data from temp table to the newly created one.
- Workstation side - workstation is written in Great Plains Dexterity and has Dynamics.exe - engine and DYNAMICS.DIC - dictionary. These two plus all the additional files will be replaced with the new ones. Other dictionaries, such us REPORTS.DIC and FORMS.DIC should be also upgraded and upgrade will try to deal with them automatically. In some cases modified reports (in REPORTS.DIC) could not be upgraded and need to be recreated in the new version.
What is customization upgrade? You should consider different types of customizations: Dexterity, VBA/Modifier, SQL, ReportWriter, Crystal Reports
