The Technology Corner: IE9 Beta Follow Up

In my previous article I talked about the recent launch of the new Internet Explorer 9 Beta. There are a couple of things I forgot to mention and I want to bring them along in this post for further clarification:

1. Microsoft Dynamics GP is currently NOT supported with Internet Explorer 9 Beta. If you decide to install IE9 Beta, do so in a test environment, not in production as you will not be able to receive support should you have any issues.

2. Internet Explorer 9 Beta will not be made compatible with Windows XP. The new Microsoft browser will run on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2003, and Windows 2008, but no plans for a Windows XP version.

3. You will continue to need the Microsoft Office Web Components to run the metrics on the home page, even with IE9 Beta.

Nonetheless, I have to say that my experience so far with the new browser and Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 and Dynamics GP 10.0 has been very satisfactory. The home page seems to load faster and the metrics display much faster.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Read More

The Technology Corner: Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta now available for download

If you keep up much with what's going on in the Microsoft world, you may have come across the new Internet Explorer 9 Beta. I have installed it and have to say that the performance is just plain superior to the prior two iterations (IE7 and IE8). In addition, I have not run across any issues with Microsoft Dynamics GP home page or any of the new features in GP 2010 not working as expected, for example, the Connect feature -- I must say though, that I continue to experience the pop ups I reported a few weeks ago, all before the upgrade.

If you are one of those who love to explore with new applications, this is certainly one of them you can try. IE9 continues to need some work as some fonts seem to be pretty rough around the edges, but other than that I love it.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Read More

Is the new "Remember User and Password" feature in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 safe?

Increasingly, a number of you have been asking about the security of the new "Remember User and Password" login feature in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010. I will start with the short answer to this question...Yes! Very safe indeed.

Back in January, I posted an article about the new feature - see Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 - Security Enhancements. In this article, I described the new automatic login capabilities in Microsft Dynamics GP 2010. As you may know by now, these settings are stored in the Windows Registry under the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive as shown below:


HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Dynamics GP

The ProtectedValueA and ProtectedValueB keys correspond to the user Id and password values respectively and are stored as REG_BINARY values. You may be thinking, it would be simple enough to get a cracker from any website that decodes the value into a readable string. Even if you did, the development team has taken extra precautions to introduce an entropic encryption key to prevent user Ids and passwords from being decoded with external applications.

The entropic encryption key is passed to Dexterity's new Registry_SetProtectedKeyString() function to ensure maximum encryption and no, you cannot see it with Script Profiler. Now, don't ask me about the algorithm used by the Dexterity function or the entropic encryption key, because I simply don't know the former or don't have the latter, just know your user Id and passwords are completely safe!

Related Articles

Why does Microsoft Dynamics GP encrypt passwords @ Developing for Dynamics GP
Microsoft Dynamics GP Application Password System @ Developing for Dynamics GP
The Scoop On Dynamics GP’s Application Password System @ Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Read More

Configuring Email for Sales and Purchasing Documents in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010

Recently, I have been receiving a number of questions on the new Sales documents email functionality in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 and how to get it configured and working adequately. If you know me by now, I love to translate those questions into useful articles for the Microsoft Dynamics GP community at large.

Fortunately enough, the configuration process is not that difficult. Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 allows this feature to be configured in a top-down approach which in turn ensures that all related areas of the application are email-aware.

As a first step, there is a setup needed to be done at the company level - MSDGP > Setup > Company > E-mail Settings, or if you prefer, click on Administration on the Navigation Bar, then locate the E-mail Settings link under the Setup web-part:



The first settings you will be able to configure is whether you want the actual document embedded as part of the email body or as an attachment to the email itself. My preference is the latter as it allows for a cleaner look when the email is received by the recipient. Microsoft Dynamics GP supports 4 different attachment formats, DOCX, HTML, PDF and XPS.

Since Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat are widely available and have been around for a while, I strongly suggest selecting at least these 2 options. XPS has only been around as a document standard since 2009 (released in 2006) and has native support on Windows Vista and Windows 7, hence recipients running Windows XP may experience some difficulty opening attachments in this format, especially if they are unaware of the XPS viewer's download location.

NOTE: The IE-hosted XPS viewer and the XPS Document Writer are also available to Windows XP users with the download and installation of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0.

Once you have defined the initial settings, you may then proceed to enable the email documents that can be submitted from your Microsoft Dynamics GP application. You will be able to define settings for both the Sales and the Purchasing series, as shown below:

Sales E-mail Setup

Purchasing E-mail Setup

The Sales E-mail Setup and Purchasing E-mail Setup windows can also be accessed under the respective series setup menus.

Of special importance is to setup the different labels for each document that will be enabled for submission. Also, if you are expecting the recipient to reply to your emails, select the mail boxes to which replies will be delivered using the Select Names button. My personal preference is to setup general mailboxes on your Microsoft Exchange Server or any other email hosting application. For example, your sales orders can have a general mailbox such as orders@fabrikam.com, or accounts_receivable@fabrikam.com if you are expecting replies to things like AR credit memos or debit memos from the recipients Accounts Payable team. You may do the same for purchasing. This overall approach ensures that emails are delivered to one location or an individual in charge of monitoring these replies.

Finally, you may further tailor specific settings for customer and vendor records, which will allow you to define at a granular level wheter the recipient will receive multiple attachments per email and the specific format for each document that will be attached to the email. You may also choose to enable or disable specific documents that may be submitted to the recipient.

Customer E-mail Options


Vendor E-mail Options

A feature I find particularly useful is, if you have customers or vendors that have size limits to their mailboxes, you can tailor Microsoft Dynamics GP to not allow file sizes above those limits.

I hope this review of the email capabilties of sales and purchasing documents has been useful. Please drop your comments and let me know whether you are using these features today in your business and if it has aliviated any of the past pains you've experienced by not having the functionality or in turn has created new problems.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Read More

Dynamics Latam Blog

No, it's not a new Salsa group, but they will sure write to the tune of it. It's actually the brand new Microsoft Dynamics Latin American blog, Dynamics Latam, featuring my buddy Francisco Hillyer and Betrand Desmarest (left to right) showcasing content for the Spanish speaking Dynamics community around the world.

I have been in touch with Francisco for the past 3 years. He just recently moved from California to become a part of Microsoft's Mexico's support team. Chances are you will see future contributions of mine added to this new blog - ehem!

Muchos exitos compadres,

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Read More

Nigel Frank's Microsoft Dynamics 2010 Salary Survey

Microsoft Dynamics specialist recruiter, Nigel Frank International launches its 2010 Microsoft Dynamics salary survey. Fill out the survey and in the process enter your name to win a brand new Apple iPad.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Read More

What are all those GPSFOINTEGRATIONID columns in some tables

I thought I would close the week with a very little known fact to new comers (and some not so new) to the Microsoft Dynamics GP world.

First some history

Around mid 1998 (or so), Siebel Systems formed an alliance with the then Great Plains Software Inc. to deliver a suite of front- and back-office applications. Great Plains' back-office applications included an integrated suite of accounting, financial, and supply chain modules. Under the agreement the new suite would add Siebel's front-office applications covering sales, marketing, and e-business functionality. The combination would allow users to complete sales transactions over the Web, for instance. Great Plains delivered the first component of its new package in November 1999 as the Sales and Marketing Series of Great Plains Siebel Front Office, with customer service and call-center applications to follow in 2000. The suite was aimed at small and mid-sized businesses.

The new Great Plains Siebel Front Office product would initially offer a module to automate sales, marketing, service and electronic business processes. With another module for customer service following in January of 2000, this was the first step toward overall front office/back office solutions.

Fast-forward to April of 2001, Microsoft completed its acquisition of Great Plains and soon began working on other plans to phase out GPSFO, pushing overall its .NET technology and its vision for a .NET based CRM solution. As a result, Microsoft CRM 1.0 was released in January of 2003... the rest is, well, history!

So, how is history related to the title of this post?

So now that you know that your beloved Microsoft Dynamics GP used to play some serious game with Siebel, it's just about right that they had to have some way of talking back to each other, this is, integration.

As an integration mechanism between GPSFO and Great Plains Dynamics, the Dynamics dictionary (DYNAMICS.DIC) went through a few changes required to accomodate integration points between the two systems. Today, there are still vestiges of these changes in the SOP10100 (Sales Transaction Work), SOP10200 (Sales Transaction Amounts Work), RM00101 (RM Customer Master), RM00102 (RM Customer Address Master) tables. These tables all share a GPSFOINTEGRATIONID, INTEGRATIONID, and INTEGRATIONSOURCE columns, used to track and exchange information between GPSFO and Dynamics. Even the Field Service module had piece of the action with the SVC00203 (Service Call Line Detail) and the SVC_FO_ID column.

Now, can I reuse those columns to store my own data?

As the say goes, not because you can means you should. While these columns are no longer used to store data in these tables -- according to the Microsoft Dynamics GP SDK they are marked as "reserved" -- you should not begin to store your own data in them. Microsoft may choose in the future to re-purpose or simply drop these from the database schema and your data will be gone. Hence, it's not recommended to use these fields for any purpose. Alternatively, you can create your own custom tables, whether in Dexterity or natively in Microsoft SQL Server to store any related sales information.

As a final request, please add your comments on your experiences (or nightmares, depending who you ask) with GPSFO. Let's see how many of you veterans are still out there and tackled the "new brave world" (or the 'old' as it has been a good number of years since).

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Read More