Former Axapta and now part of the Microsoft Dynamics ERP family known as AX is marching over United States Corporate ERP upper mid-market.
This migration path is popular where you are abandoning your old Great Plains Dynamics version and moving to AX. There might be various reasons and in our opinion the most popular ones are rapid company grows where former GP doesn’t provide required new functionality and the second one is the fact that you do not have active contract with Microsoft Business Solutions to get access to new GP version license key. Moving master records and historical documents into Axapta is recommended to be done in Excel Import however exporting from former Great Plains often raises questions from developer community. Let’s take a look:
1. Great Plains Custom Table Structure. It is not a secret that you can get access to table structure described in Dynamics.dic meta-data dictionary. However the power of GP Dexterity technology is crossing Dynamics dictionary borders. Let’s make an exercise. In GP user interface follow the path: Tools -> Resource Descriptions -> Tables. Now let’s abstract ourselves from the goal for the moment. Dynamics.set file has all the dictionaries coded in Dexterity registered. And it also has your uniquely programmed Dexterity customization distributed via Dex chunk method. It might be a surprise for you but if you click on Switch Product drop down list the custom add-on is listed there. Here you can review your customization table structure. Let’s now go to the next steps
2. Accessing old Great Plains database. If you are on the version hosted in Microsoft SQL Server then the question is probably closed. Just open query analyzer or MS SQL Server Management Studio New Query and go ahead as Certified Database Administrator. And good luck to you! However for the rest of us who are on Pervasive SQL Server, Btrieve or Ctree we have to continue reading. Connection should be established via ODBC DSN. The hurdle here is so-called Data Definition Files or abbreviated as DDF. Each Dexterity coded dictionary including Dynamics.dic and your customization meta-logic dictionary have the option to generate DDF files. Old Dynamics on Pervasive SQL 2000 or Btrieve has GenDDF.set file or if you do not see it in Dynamics folder please install it from original installation CD. We are talking here about versions 7.5, 7.0, 6.0, 5.5, 5.0, 4.0 and earlier. If you have success in creating DDF files the next step is to create company DB connection in Pervasive SQL Control Center or via ODBC compliant third party tools, such as Microsoft Access or Excel
3. Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Windows and Mac versions 9.5, 9.2 and earlier. Here we recommend you to deploy ODBC DSN and create database in Pervasive SQL Control Center. Here you also need DDF files to establish ODBC DSN. Be ready to be disappointed as GPA Btrieve file may host several tables and SQL Select Query in Pervasive Control Center may produce unreadable rows. Here you may need Great Plains Accounting data export and cleansing services
4. Conversion scope. Data Conversion into Corporate ERP system theory recommends limitations in customer expectation and the number of tables and documents to be converted. Consider keeping legacy accounting running for data query only on one of the office servers or user computers. In this case data migration should be moderate and covering master records and GL beginning balances only
5. Rolling out Axapta in International business environment. If you are working in IT department of multinational company then you should make your homework to discover that AX is available internationally and localized for the majority of world’s regions including Brazil, China, Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and India
6. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center). help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan and Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico and Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. We feature our expertise is in International Business
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