Changes to Great Plains Certified Master program

Starting on December, 15th, Microsoft Business Solutions has made some changes to the program requirements for most of the "Certified Master" programs, including Great Plains. These changes should be very beneficial because they have made less exams mandatory and given you more electives.

Here is the old structure for the Great Plains Certified Master:

Certified Master–Great Plains Application (Old)

(4 Exams required)

Mandatory exams:

• Great Plains Financials
• Great Plains Inventory & Order Processing
• Great Plains Report Writer

Elective exams (1 required):

• Great Plains Human Resources and Payroll (US)
• FRx
• Great Plains Project Series
• Great Plains Manufacturing certification
• Great Plains Field Service certification (as available)
• Great Plains Field Service Implementation (as available)

And here are the new requirements as of December, 15th.

Certified Master–Great Plains Application (New)

(4 Exams required)

Mandatory exams:

• Great Plains Financials

Elective exams (3 required):

• Great Plains Report Writer
• Great Plains Inventory & Order Processing
• Great Plains Project Series
• Great Plains Manufacturing
• Great Plains Field Service Implementation
• Great Plains Human Resources & Payroll (US)
• FRx Reporting Design

And here are the old and new requirements for the technical Certified Master program:

Certified Master – Great Plains Installation & Configuration (Old)

(5 exams required)

Mandatory exams:

• Great Plains Installation & Configuration
• MS 70-228 Installing, Configuring and Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition**
• MS-70-290 Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment**
• MS-70-291 Planning and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure **

Elective exams (1 required):

• Great Plains Financials
• Great Plains Inventory & Order Processing
• Great Plains Report Writer

And here are the new requirements:

Certified Master – Great Plains Installation & Configuration (New)

(4 exams required)

Mandatory exams:

• Great Plains Installation & Configuration
• MS 70-228 Installing, Configuring and Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition*

Elective exams (2 required):

• Great Plains Financials
• Great Plains Report Writer
• Great Plains Inventory & Order Processing
• Great Plains Modifier with VBA
• Great Plains Integration Manager
• MS-70-290 Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment*
• MS-70-291 Planning and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure *

Great Plains 8.0 Service Pack 1a is available

Seems that there were a few issues in Service Pack 1 for Great Plains. I know that i personally ran into one of them. After I installed SP1 on a server, i attempted to go into Great Plains Utilities to run the database update scripts via the "Perform special upgrade" option but i received an error message...

"Unable to open input SQL script D:\Great Plains\sql\util\tasks\"

When i took a look in that folder, it was empty. But right next to it was a folder called "Tasks(Original)". So it appears that it had moved the original list of database tasks to this new folder but it failed to create the new SP1-based tasks in the proper folder. MBS support then sent me those scripts seperately so i could populate them manually. They also informed me that SP1a was on its way out and would take care of this issue.

So authorized Partners and Customers should be able to download SP1a from this link.