If you are in active ecommerce integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP Great Plains ERP application, we would like to offer you this article with highlights on Dynamics GP web based Business Portal and its ecommerce module Order Management, plus some highlights on Great Plains eCommerce ISV and technology partners custom add-ons.
eCommerce is very diversified and it is often too complex for simple ecommerce product to cover numerous requirements, that businesses in various industries might have. Microsoft Business Solutions offers Dynamics GP Business Portal Order Management (for Great Plains 7.5 and earlier this product was known as eOrder, however it was redesigned from scratches on Business Portal platform). Business Portal is definitely cool direction and future technology orientation, however if you find it too limited in customizability (the same limitation was applicable to eOrder, where you would have to customize existing ASP pages in InterDev to adopt new logic, and every version upgrade required you to reapply these changes), then you should appeal to Dynamics GP ISV community and try to find appropriate ecommerce extension, or connector product. We made the research and figured out that ecommerce integration is underserved for both Dynamics GP Great Plains and Dynamics AX Axapta products, where at this time you can come to the conclusion, that third party add-ons have domination
1. Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal, for B2B. If you have GP implemented you know the price of user license, it is comparable to k$1. The idea of web base Business Portal is simple - you add ten times more users to Dynamics GP database via web application, where use license cost will be ten or even five percent of the regular GP user license. BP could be connected via internet browser and it is natural expectation that you would attract your USA country side, or international employees, B2B customers or Vendors to your BP web site and have them do ERP, MRP, Sales and Purchasing routines remotely. Before we leave BP consideration, we would like to mention about Electronic Document Delivery module for BP. This module allows you to enable specific customers or vendors for their invoices to be delivered to them via email. In sort of kick off scenario Business Portal requires infrastructure to be hosted internally, however with some limitations it could be outsourced. If you are hosting Exchange Server (even in Windows 2008 Small Business Server scenarios), you should consider to get some knowledge about SSL Certificates for Microsoft Exchange 2007, 2003, this is especially applicable when you deploy OWA with MS Exchange 2007
2. If Dynamics GP Business Portal Order Management is not doing the job - then please try to think about connector approach, where you as Software Developer or ecommerce programmer will have complete control and the product you about to purchase will help you as friendly connector or the library in your ecommerce application. Our company Alba Spectrum offers Order Connector to connect you ecommerce shopping cart to Dynamics GP Sales Order Processing documents: Sales Order, Invoice, Quote, Return, Back Order
3. eConnect programming. This software development kit was introduced in 2003 and at that time it was dedicated to ecommerce programmers, however it is now expanded to cover most of Great Plains master records and work phase transactions. Before you dive into eConnect programming, please review GP Integration Manager - this tool is also in process of being redesigned on eConnect technology, and it should be good option if you do not need real time integration, and batch integration one a day or every hour is OK. There are options to schedule Integration Manager integration to run automatically with Windows macro add-ons, available from third party developers (in some cases free), or you can purchase IM scheduling tool from Microsoft Business Solutions. Both IM and eConnect should be good options in B2B and B2C (business to business and business to customer) ecommerce scenarios. If you need advanced eConnect custom ecommerce programming project done, please feel free to call us. eConnect should be friendly to Microsoft Visual Studio C#, VB developer with some excurse to XML and SQL Stored procedures
4. Posting Server. Alba Spectrum Porting Server or Autopost allows you to extend eConnect logic with GP batches posting. This is theoretically optional feature, however if you want to post your batches directly from your ecommerce C# or VB.Net application Autopost allows you to do the job
5. B2C ecommerce additional notes. We recommend you not to invent the wheel and take one of the leading and usually reasonably priced products as the base for you ecommerce web site, shopping card and credit card or other sorts of payment processing. Then, you should program integration in eConnect, or simply purchase connector to Dynamics GP. We would be happy to resolve your integration to GP issues with our Order Connector or even tune it for advanced logic. In the case of small business ecommerce operations, you can export customer orders log to EDI compliant or even text file, which could be then imported via Great Plains Integration Manager. You may think to get some help in synchronizing GP Pricing and Promotion Campaigns on your ecommerce website
6. eCommerce for legacy GP versions. Theoretically ecommerce integration is possible for Dynamics GP eConnect compliant versions (in our opinion GP 10.0 and 9.0, with some restrictions to GP 8.0). eConnect was introduced for Great Plains 7.5 in 2004. We recommend production eConnect integration for Dynamics GP 10.0 and 9.0, if you are on lower version, please consider to give us a call on upgrade scenarios and options
7. How to get help? Please, feel free to call our office at 1-866-528-0577, if you are outside of USA: 1-630-961-5918, or email us: help@albaspectrum.com We speak English, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, including Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Filipino. Please, be aware that Dynamics GP is not UNICODE compliant application, and if you need help in having GP Screens to be translated to Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and other hieroglyph based characters language, this is not possible. We would be happy to create Chinese Crystal Reports out of your Dynamics GP system with the help of third party Dynamics GP ISV tools, such as NJ Star. If you are trying to consider Great Plains for your Brazilian subsidiary, we would have to discourage you and ask you rather to consider SAP Business One, which is localized for Brazil. Great Plains Dynamics GP is also not localized for Russian market, we invite you to call us to help you understand ecommerce and Corporate ERP options in Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldova, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia, Uzbekistan
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