Thursday, April 11, 2013

Management Reporter Report Scheduling

Earlier this week, I received my regular GPUG Community Update email, and it contained the following poll results:



Really?  Only 17.4% picked Management Reporter?  As I was prepping a presentation on MR Report Distribution for the GPUG Special Interest Group (SIG) on BI and Reporting, I kept coming across more and more features in MR 2012 (UR 4) that are exciting not just because they exist but because they are so easy to use.  I mean, I come from the wayback days of FRx Report Server and WebPort, and all the hours and hours and hours (and hours) of fun that came with wanting to deliver reports easily to end users.  So, at least for me, MR is a breathe of fresh air as Microsoft continues to add improvement after improvement in the incremental releases.

Of course, I am a realist, and I know that there are issues that remain and will continue to be addressed and discussed.  But I am an optimist as well, and wanted to share a little on just how easy it is to schedule the automatic generation of reports in Management Reporter 2012.

First, we navigate to Report Schedules in Management Reporter.


Then we click "New" to start a new schedule.



Note that you can include a single report, or a report group in the schedule.  You can have a variety of different schedules based on your needs.  Click the permissions button to supply the credentials to be used to generate the report.  If your report or report group includes data from multiple companies, ensure that the proper credentials are supplied for all companies.



Then, in the frequency section,  specify the constraints of the schedule.


Set the start, pattern, and range of the recurrence.  Then when you save the schedule (either by clicking the Save icon or by closing the Schedule window), you will be prompted to give the schedule a name.

The reports will then generate automatically (based on their output selections to the Reports Library and secure report links) based on the schedule.  Very easy in my book :)

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a supervising consultant with BKD Technologies, providing training, support, and project management services to new and existing Microsoft Dynamics customers. This blog represents her views only, not those of her employer.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

2013 Top 100 Most Influential People in Microsoft Dynamics



Dynamics World has once again prepared a list of candidates for The Top 100 Most Influential People in Microsoft Dynamics.


The candidate list is quite long, and includes people focused on all of the different Dynamics products.  And someone apparently graciously nominated me again this year.

I don’t know all of the Dynamics GP candidates, but while scrolling through the list I saw a few that were well known in the GP community.

The names are listed in pseudo alphabetical order by first name, and are split across different pages, so it takes some searching, but I've included links to the pages for each of the names below.

Please take a few moments to vote!


Christina Phillips – Dynamics GP genius and blogger on Dynamics GP Land  (my co-blogger!)

David Musgrave – Developer of the Support Debugging Tool and the final word on all technical GP topics

Frank Hamelly – Dynamics GP MVP and blogger on GP2themax

Leslie Vail – Dynamics GP MVP, blogger, and author of Developing GP Applications

Mariano Gomez – Dynamics GP MVP, blogger, and globe-trotting conference presenter and trainer

Mark Polino – Dynamics GP MVP, Dynamics GP book author, prolific blogger, and conference presenter

Patrick Roth – Support Escalation Engineer at Microsoft who handles the really tough support cases

Steve Endow – Blogger on Dynamics GP Land and Dynamics GP Wizard on Experts Exchange



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

http://www.precipioservices.com