Installing 64-bit Microsoft Access on a 64-bit environment running 32-bit Microsoft Office

If you do much systems installation as I do, you may have become aware that the Microsoft Access Database Engine redistributable is required for Management Reporter process service to read report data from Excel workbooks. However, if Management Reporter is installed on a 64-bit environment, you must install the 64-bit version of Microsoft Access 2010 Database Engine redistributable.

See the Microsoft Access 2010 Database Engine redistributable page for more information and to download the component.

On the other hand, some specific (and widely used) features in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 require 32-bit Microsoft Office - Email and Word Templates features.

See the Technology Requirements for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 and Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 R2 Features page for more information.

To overcome the issue, this is, being able to install 64-bit Microsoft Access Database Engine redistributable, side by side with a 32-bit Microsoft Office installation, you must install the redistributable package in passive mode.

You will need to open the Command prompt (Start | Run | type CMD and press Enter) and change the path to the directory where the redistributable package was downloaded, then type the following:

64-bit Microsoft Access Database Engine redistributable installation 

This should allow you to proceed with your Management Reporter 2012 installation.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/

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More Management Reporter 2012

The Dynamics Corporate Performance Management team over at Microsoft has been releasing information about specific features in Management Reporter 2012 for the past 2 weeks. I hope you are enjoying these just as much as I am. In my previous article I provided some links to the first 6 articles released. Here is a new set of links with more of the cool Management Reporter 2012 features:

• Drill to Dynamics GP
• Missing Account Analysis
• Financial Reporting Data Mart
• Lync Integration
• Drill to Dynamics AX 2012
• Install Experience
• Report Scheduling
• Dimension Sets

This new set of features should get you excited about the product and its capabilities. Can't wait to see the demo at Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2012.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/

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Management Reporter 2012

Management Reporter 2012 Release Themes

Most of you know me to be a fairly technical guy, so it must be quite an event when I get excited about a financial reporting product. My excitement stems from a couple of things I saw in an MVP Product Group Interaction session yesterday with the Dynamics Corporate Performance Management team:

• Management Reporter 2012 is simply THE BEST darn financial reporting product produced to date by Microsoft. This release revolves around 4 core themes: Interactive Report Viewing, Deeper Dynamics ERP Integration, Report Collaboration, and Design Flexibility. I highlighted a few of the capabilities in my March 8, 2011 Corporate Performance Management Roadmap article.

• Among the things I can say for now, and from a technical perspective, this release removes its dependency on Internet Information Services (IIS), allowing it to run in native mode. If you are familiar with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, you can now begin to imagine how this will improve Management Reporter's reports delivering capabilities and efficiency.

Honestly, I wish I could just spill it all out right now... but that would make for a lot of angry folks over at Microsoft, but you don't have to wait on me. The Dynamics Corporate Performance Management team over at Microsoft already began releasing information about specific features in Management Reporter 2012, and the following are links to what they have posted so far:

• Start Learning how Management Reporter 2012 can make a difference in your business
• Rolling Forecast Headers - Management Reporter 2012 Feature Highlight
• Viewing dimension codes and descriptions - Management Reporter 2012 Feature Highlight
• Report group navigation changes - Management Reporter 2012 Feature Highlight
• Comments - Management Reporter 2012 Feature Overview
• Distributing reports to multiple locations - Management Reporter 2012 Feature Highlight

From what I have seen so far, the Comments feature will make a lot of accounting folks happy, but the ability to distribute reports to multiple locations at once will certainly make a lot of IT folks happy. From me to you... there's not one reason, at least in my mind, why you need to continue your love affair with FRx. The new Management Reporter 2012 blows off the FRx 6.7 hat off by a long shot.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/

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Management Reporter: Server Error in Application "MANAGEMENT REPORTER"

Just recently, I fielded a question on an issue that was happening with a Management Reporter installation. The partner reported getting the following error (shown in the picture) when attempting to open the Management Reporter URL address: Server Error in Application "MANAGEMENT REPORTER".

The error also indicated an HTTP Error 403.14 - Forbidden. The Web server is configured to not list the contents of this directory. Typically, when you attempt to navigate to the server URL hosting Management Reporter, at the default port 4712, you can expect to receive a blank page. A blank page simply means that all Management Reporter application services are running just fine.

Scrolling through the error page, the following additional information reveals that a default document is not configured for the requested URL, and directory browsing is not enabled on the server.

In doing some research, I came across Microsoft Support KB article 942062 which explains the issue being related to Directory Browsing and Default Document not being enabled on IIS. The article provide the steps to resolve both.

With the increased reliance on the Microsoft application stack, a lot of errors that on the surface may appear to be Dynamics GP or Management Reporter related, are simply the reflection of a problem with the stack's configuration. When troubleshooting these initial problems it's always recommended to look at the Event Viewer and do some extra research in the Microsoft Support database.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/

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Management Reporter - The operation could not be completed due to failure on the server

What would be the New Year without a little drama?

I don't often write about Management Reporter, however, we just went live at a client site this past Tuesday, with everything working just as expected - by us and the client. However, just a few days working with their new environment, the client decided to run some of the financial reports we'd created with Management Reporter. Upon attempting to generate the report, the client received the following error:

Attempting to outrule any permissions issue, I ran the report with the SQL Server system admin (sa) account and got the same error.

Since the error was not descriptive enough, I turned to the Windows Applications Event Viewer and immediately spotted 3 entries. The first entry clearly stated the problem:

"Length of LOB data (678233) to be replicated exceeds configured maximum 65536. The statement has been terminated"

Because the exception was generated by a SQL client component, I could definitely rule out an issue with Management Reporter.

The second entry shows the service model fault exception messaging component that trapped the error and relied it to the Management Reporter component.

Application Event Viewer - 2nd Entry

The third entry showed the Management Reporter component that was directly affected by the cascading errors.

The original error message in the Event Viewer pointed to the length of the LOB data used for replication. This prompted me to think back for a bit and I realized that the hosting provider for my clients infrastructure and data had configured transactional replication in the past days based on the instructions provided in Microsoft Support article 926490.

Hence, it was not a surprise to me the error was referencing an issue with replication. In doing some extra search, I came across a SQL Server setting in the Advanced tab that allows you to set the Max Text Replication Size. By changing this value to -1, SQL Server would acknowledge no limit to the size of any character, XML, or image data type that could be replicated with a single insert or update operation.

The good thing also was, after setting the value, I did not have to restart the SQL Server service which made the client pretty happy as well. We re-ran the MR report and problem was gone!

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/

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Microsoft Dynamics GP Home Page scripting errors on Citrix XenApp

For the past 2 weeks I have been working on a fairly complex installation of Microsoft Dynamics GP for a hospitality staffing company whose hardware infrastructure is hosted by a very reputable provider. My client has made all their applications available to their end users via Citrix XenApp. Xenapp is Citrix Systems' secure on-demand application delivery platform for the Citrix Presentation Server.

After completing the installation of Microsoft Dynamics GP on the Citrix Servers, the next step was exposing the application to XenApp. This by all accounts is a fairly straightforward process. I logged into XenApp, launch Microsoft Dynamics GP and everything was working fine: home page, reports, SSRS reports, Business Analyzer, Management Reporter, the whole 9 yards!

A couple days later, users began reporting home page script errors as the one shown below:

Typically, if you follow the prescribed KB article 918313 - Frequently asked questions about the home pages and area pages features in Microsoft Dynamics GP, specifically Q21 and Q31 you end up understanding the following:

1. There must be a UserData folder under the %Appdata%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer folder. Under normal circumstances, this folder will get created when the user profile is first initiated.

2. You cannot roam user profiles and in particular the user Temp folders as this causes issues with Microsoft Dynamics GP.

We went through both questions - well, we went through all the questions - and realized that the UserData folder was not created for the end-users. Remember, I was not getting this error under my domain account, but I attribute this to the fact that I was a domain admin. Effectively, we setup the UserData folders, but the problem persisted.

I then went to the Run... command utility with my Windows account and typed %Appdata% and quickly realized that Windows Explorer was taking me to \\\UserData$\Appdata\..., in effect confirming that roaming profiles was active for all users on the domain.

This seems to contradict the previous point #2 above. However, this is where all hell broke lose with the infrastructure vendor. It turns out that disabling roaming profiles on a Citrix farm may cause all kinds of unpredictable results for other applications such as Microsoft Outlook which tend to lose personalized settings when bouncing between servers in the farm - this is a load balanced environment with 4 servers.

In short, disabling roaming profiles was not an option!

However, in working with the point Citrix and Windows engineer at the infrastructure provider and running some ProcMon traces, we realized that each time the home page attempted to load a file, ProcMon would display errors stating that the file location could not be found (effectively what the error was displaying even after the UserData folder was created). Since the profiles were being roamed this was disconcerting.

Of course, the immediate thought was, "it must be a permissions issue!". We then tested this theory by opening Windows Explorer and attempting to navigate to the Roaming Profile location with a standard user account. No luck!

The engineer quickly realized that the only way this could happen was via a Global Policy setting. In doing some more research, the likely candidate emerged: Remove Run Menu From Start Menu.

Clearly, from the policy description above, UNC paths are blocked and accessing local folders like \temp is a no, no (temp is roamed off to another server, remember?). Once we disabled the policy, Microsoft Dynamics GP started working like a charm and the errors were gone!

Now, you may say, "not sure we want to enable the Run commad for end-users". In my client's particular case, this made no difference because applications are being deployed via XenApp and not accessed from a desktop, so disabling the policy won't have any effect. At the end of the day, we all went home happy, which begs the question...

Can the above KB article be revised?

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/

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Corporate Performance Management Roadmap

For those of you who were wondering what's happening with Corporate Performance Management and Management Reporter, and the overall product roadmap, you would like to know that CPM has not gone unnoticed by Microsoft and plays a vital role in the overall Dynamics ERP direction.

Corporate Performance Management Roadmap

Some highlights of this direction include integration with AX, SL, and NAV to be delivered by the 2H of CY2011. If you have overseas operations and are in need for consolidated financials, you will also be glad to know that Management Reporter will be supporting currency translation from within Microsoft Dynamics GP. This is a shift from what FRx currently does with the FRx Currency Translator, which is built within FRx.

Management Reporter will also gain the ability to drill back into Dynamics GP -- clap here! -- a la FRx, with the added bonus of richer report viewing - translation: really cool looking reports! - and perhaps the most impressive of it all, integration to Intant Messenger and the ability to add comments to the reports themselves.

Perhaps, even more telling is Microsoft's effort to move away from the cumbersome Forecaster (though, it will continue to be supported for some time) into a more strategic and operational budgeting tool. This will be something to watch for in the coming year and beyond.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/

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