Dynamics GP Technical Conference Presentation Topics

It's a toasty 7 degrees Fahrenheit here in Fargo at the moment, and with the 10-20 mph winds the temperature is well below zero.

The weather hasn't been a deterrent for the large crowd here that is filling the Microsoft building to near capacity.

A lot of content is being covered this week, but I thought I would share some of the key topics that have been mentioned so far.

GP 2010 R2, scheduled to be released in May 2011 is slated to include a new business intelligence application, which is an interesting new report / dashboard / KPI display tool.  It can apparently be installed as a stand alone client application on machines that do not have GP installed, and it is also integrated into GP, so your BI reports and graphs can be displayed on the GP home page and in the GP navigation panes.  On the surface, the demo reports and charts look similar to the GP home page 'metrics', but are vastly more powerful, as the content is delivered via SQL Server Reporting Services reports, and the tool has functionality to allow users to perform basic modifications to the report design and data.

GP 2010 R2 also includes new features and tools for the Word templates, making it easier to customize the Word templates.  The functionality that was covered was pretty deep and had quite a bit of technical details, so I wasn't able to digest all of it, but it looks like some of the Word template modifications will require a developer, or someone who is comfortable working with Visual Studio and OpenXML.

And another very cool feature that should be released with GP 2010 R2 is a new version of the Rapid Migration Tool that allows you to use Excel templates to import data to GP.  So, rather than trying to read the database of another ERP package directly, the Excel templates will allow you to extract data from the legacy system and paste it into Excel files, which are then quickly imported into GP.  The example provided was for something like NetSuite, where a customer can retrieve their data and populate an Excel file for import to GP.  I don't know which data or transactions are supported, but if customers, vendors, GL accounts, journal entries, and inventory items are supported, it may help to minimize or negate the need for Integration Manager for initial data migrations.

Steve Endow is a Dynamics GP Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional.  He is also the owner of Precipio Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and automation solutions.

http://www.precipioservices.com