Great Plains Extender and SmartList Builder now available for download

Two of the most anticipated products in the "Great Plains 8.0 Extensions" release are now available for download. These are Extender and SmartList Builder. They are both OEM'd products from eOne Solutions. Extender allows you to customize your Great Plains windows and add additional fields to the system without the need to write any Dexterity code. SmartList Builder allows you to create custom SmartLists that can address modules not typically available in the out-of-the-box SmartLists and you can also build SmartLists for third party products.

Customers and Partners can download them from these links:

Great Plains Extender
Great Plains SmartList Builder

Also, Customers and Partners can go to this site and get all sort of info on Great Plains 8.0 Extensions and links to download the other new modules.

Great Plains "Report Pack" now available for SQL Reporting Services

Just released is a collection SQL Reporting Services reports for Great Plains 8.0. You can download the new report pack right here. Below is a list of the reports that are included. Also just released is a new report pack to run against your IIS log files to get all sorts of info on the activity of your web servers.

• Commissions Report - Shows sales commissions by territory, salesperson, and year. Expand a territory to view sales commissions by a salesperson, or expand a year to view quarterly commissions by territory.
• Customer Profitability Report - Shows sales, total profit, and gross margin percentage per customer for the selected year. Expand customer ID to view the sales, total profit, and gross margin percentage by document number.
• Inventory Value by Site Report - Shows a bar graph of the value of inventory by site and the total inventory value for the company. Click an inventory site bar to display the Inventory Value by Site. Use the Item Number Report to view items and their total value for that site.
• Item Quantity Back Order Report - Shows the quantity of items that are back ordered, quantities that are allocated to purchase orders, and item quantities available for all sites. Expand each item number to view item quantities for all sites.
• Open Purchase Orders Report - Shows purchase orders that have not been closed or canceled per vendor or for all vendors. The report also displays in a list view the number, status, and date of each purchase order, along with the vendor assigned to the purchase order. Expand each purchase order to display the line items and the status of each line item.
• Open Sales Orders Report - Shows a list of unposted sales orders for a range of customers. The report displays in a list view the sales order number, the date of each sales order, customer information, the requested ship date, and the amount remaining on the order, as well as the salesperson assigned to the order. Expand each purchase order to display the line items and specific information about each line item.
• Work Center by Weeks - Employee Capacity Report - Shows the available work centers and the employee capacity of each work center by weeks.
• Work Center by Weeks - Machine Capacity Report - Shows the available work centers and the machine capacity of each work center by weeks.

I'm glad to see MBS start taking advantage of SQL Reporting Services. Also, the word on the street is that the next release of Microsoft CRM (CRM 2.0? CRM 2005?) will be yanking out Crystal Reports Enterprise and instead converting to SQL Reporting Services.

Microsoft Data Protection Server

Microsoft has a new product in the works. It's called Data Protection Server. It's a disk-based backup solution. It's a separate service like SQL or Exchange that would run on top of Windows 2003 Server. It sounds like Volume Shadow Copy on steroids. It takes snapshots of your files periodically throughout the day and stores them on the Data Protection Server. And like VSC, it will have a mechanism for allowing the users to restore their own backups, if they have accidentally overwritten or deleted a file for example.

You'll still need your tape backup solution, such as Backup Exec. DPS isn't intended to replace that just yet. It's just meant to provide a quicker, simpler way to recover your data for the majority of problems. Tapes will still be needed for long-term backups and the ability to move data out of the server itself and offsite of the facility in case of disasters.

The first release will be intended primarily to backup your file servers. Future versions should have the ability to target specific applications such as SQL and Exchange.

Sounds pretty interesting. It's still in development but you can go the DPS website and signup to be notified when the beta is released.

Service Pack 3 for FRx 6.7 is available

Just released in the last week or two is Service Pack 3 for FRx 6.7. I first had a chance to see this in action last week at Convergence 2005 and then had my first install of it this week for a client.

Here are the two new items that stand out for me:

1 - Built in report wizard. You'll see a new "magic wand" icon on the main tool bar. This brings up a totally new window for the report wizard. It takes you thru about 7 different steps that are required to build your report. It even has a small thumbnail preview image of the report that changes dynamically as you complete each step. Very nice looking and its so easy, even *I* could create a financial statement. :)

2 - You no longer get a login box if you are using NT authentication. Whenever I implement FRx, i always setup 2 ODBC sources - one for Great Plains using SQL authentication and a 2nd one for FRx using NT authentication. This makes it easier for the users to login to FRx. To facilitate this I can create a network security group called "FRx Users" and then add this group in as a user account in SQL Enterprise Manager. So in the future if someone needs access to FRx, they just need to add them into the NT security group, rather than having to go into SQL. But even though FRx was authenticating the user based on their NT credentials, they still saw a login box when getting into FRx and just had to click "Ok" without entering any password. But now with FRx 6.7 and SP3, you will not get a login box at all if your NT credentials are valid. Very smooth and simple for the users. As a test, i switched my FRx ODBC source to use SQL authentication and then i WAS prompted for my SQL username and password to get in.

It's nice to see FRx finally getting a little attention from the dev team. I'm thinking that since FRx 6.7 now requires the .Net Framework 1.1 that we'll continue to see some nice new enhancements in the pipeline. One rumor i heard is that in the next major release, FRx will no longer store its data in .mdb files but rather in SQL. That would be excellent. I don't know if this means that the shared Sysdata folder would go away completely or just parts of it. Anything would be an improvement.

MBS Customers and Partners can download FRx 6.7 SP3 right here.

Microsoft CRM Live Chat on March 8th

I wanted to let you know that the MBS Community site is hosting a live real-time chat about boosting the performance of your Microsoft CRM 1.2 installation in March. This chat will occur on Tuesday, March 8, from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. Pacific time.

The chat room is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/businesssolutions/chatroom.aspx

And here's a description of the chat:

***Tuning the Performance of Your Microsoft CRM 1.2 Installation***

Here’s your chance to talk to the guys who know! Take a breather from the whirl of Convergence 2005 and join Chad Rexin and Greg Gawryluk, Microsoft Business Solutions CRM Support Engineers, in an in-depth chat about the best ways to tune up the performance of your CRM 1.2 installation. Chad and Greg will talk about which tweaks have the potential to increase performance the most and are also relatively easy to perform, plus they will delve into more
complex optimizations.

Great Plains Service Pack 2 now available

Microsoft Business Solutions has release Service Pack 2 for Great Plains. Partners and Customers can use this link to download SP2.

Also, at the bottom of that page you'll find links to get the latest service packs for other related products such as Integration Manager and FRx.

Microsoft CRM 2005 - not quite around the corner

Just last week, Microsoft announced that their next generation CRM product will be delayed a little longer. Rather than coming out in the next few months, we're now looking at a fourth quarter release in 2005.

Microsoft CRM 2005 (formerly going to be called Microsoft CRM 2.0) is being held up in an attempt to add some more of the features that partners have been requesting. One of the big topics is to make installation easier and require just a few clicks. Other areas for improvement include workflow and more exposed API's for developers to extend the solution.

I guess i'll be waiting a little while longer before seeing the new and improved customization tools that were supposed to be available.