Ecommerce for SAP Business One and Microsoft Dynamics GP custom programming

We assume that you are midsize or small company, and budget is important for you.  And we think it is very practical to publish SB1 and Great Plains ecommerce FAQ and guidelines:
1. Do I have to purchase third party ecommerce add-on?  The answer is typically NO.  Both SAP B1 and  Dynamics GP have Software Development Kits (SB1 SDK and eConnect for GP), plus both have Integration modules: SAP Business One Data Transfer Workbench and Microsoft Dynamics GP Integration Manager.  Why we are appending the adjective Typically - because in some cases Dynamics GP ISV and SAP Business One ISV partners have wizards and tools, allowing you to facilitate ecommerce to Corporate ERP integration programming, however those tools are optional and technically not required
2. Which tables or objects should I target in ecommerce integration?  In the case of SAP Business One, you should target Marketing Documents (for customer orders and invoices), Business Partners for new and updating existing customers.  In the case of Great Plains - please consider Sales Order Processing Documents (Quotation, Sales Order, Invoice, Return, Back Order), for creating new customer (in B2B ecommerce scenarios), please consider Accounts Receivable Customer Master record (for B2C ecommerce you can use one generic Walk In customer and simply add new address to this generic customer).  In both cases of SAP Business One and GP we do not recommend you to feed data directly to SQL tables, as both SB1 and GP Corporate ERP applications business logic is quite sophisticated, and it is easy enough to violate it via direct SQL Insert statements
3. Shopping Cart Credit Card Payments - how to handle these transactions?  You should understand that Corporate ERP software vendors are not the same companies, who do Credit Card processing.  You should check with your credit card processor or the bank to understand to understand the mechanisms.  Likely that you will end up calling to such CC processing authorities as ICVerify, PCCharge
4. SAP Business One eCommerce relates SDK Programming.  SB1 is very selective to ISV partners certification, and SB1 SDK certification is required for doing any SB1 SDK programming (and you should consider subcontracting SB1 ecommerce integration to SAP B1 SDK authorized partner).  In the case of Microsoft Dynamics GP eConnect SDK, requirements are more flexible and you can do eConnect programming in-house
5. Microsoft Dynamics GP eConnect.  If your customer is on current Dynamics GP version (GP 10. as we are writing these lines in October 2009), Microsoft is typically open to reveal its technologies to newcomers, and as Microsoft Visual Studio C# or VB programmer you should be able to begin coding in eConnect right away
6. Hosting Questions.  In both scenarios: SAP Business One and Microsoft Dynamics GP Great Plains the question is actual.  Your SB1 or DGP internet hosting provider may try to charge you per page view or per ecommerce transaction, in our opinion this is the signal to you to change you web hosting partner
7. Special Consideration to Dynamics GP Integration Manager.  This tool allows you to run pretty sophisticate integrations on demand or schedule them (you can schedule via Windows Macro add-ons) to implement quasi real time integration.  If you base your integration on Advanced ODBC Queries, you can cross limitations of simple tab delimited text file
8. Special Considerations to Microsoft Dexterity extensions to Sales Order Processing.  Dexterity is semi proprietary (meaning that it is not feasible to force your internal IT programmers to begin coding in Dexterity over night, over week, over month or in short term perspective, as Dex requires year long extensive learning curve) and it is not recommended for in-house programming.  However, if you need SOP Document interface modified Dexterity might be optional tool, as it is naturally integrates into GP Security realm and it looks as native GP interface (you should grant user, who is supposed to use Dex modification so called Dynamics GP Alternative Forms)  9. Modifier with VBA.  This is another option to modify SOP Entry form (you should have customization site enabler license to have access to VBA modifications).  Modifier allows you to place new buttons and editable fields on existing GP forms and VBA scripts could animate these fields.  In order to manipulate existing GP tables from modifier fields, consider traditional ADO connection to MS SQL Server database
10. Special Consideration to SAP Business One Data Transfer Workbench.  For ongoing integrations we recommend deploying DTW with Advanced ODBC queries - in this case you can base your integration on SQL Views in MS SQL Server (or even with heterogeneous queries, where data is joined from various platform: Oracle, MS Access, MySQL/PHP/Linux, etc).  If you integrate huge number of transactions (100+ per hour), consider switching over to DI Server (which could be programmed from SB1 SDK in XML)
11. Differences between SAP Business One and Dynamics GP in eCommerce integration business logic.  GP is more geared toward larger organizations and it has Batch Posting mechanism (with associated documents review and approval cycles).  SAP Business One doesn't have batch posting logic, each customer invoice is posted all the way through General Ledger.  This may mean to you that ecommerce integration in SB1 is more straight forward, as in general it should be for smaller organization Corporate ERP
12. How to get help?  Please, feel free to call us: 1-866-528-0577, outside of USA: 1-630-961-5918 or email us help@albaspectrum.com  We are very technical and real Dynamics GP Dexterity, SAP Business One SDK and Microsoft CRM programming gurus.  We have Great Plains Software Development Factory and could support unlimited Dynamics GP Customization and Programming needs.  Plus we speak English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and not only as native speaking sales folks, but as real technical consultants.  If you prefer skype: albaspectrum