eCommerce Posting for Microsoft Dynamics GP – overview for web developer

This tool allows you to create or update master records: customer, address, credit card info; also you can create or update work documents – Sales Order Processing (SOP) order or invoice.  If needed, eConnect allows you to work with the majority of GP master records and documents: purchasing, payroll, inventory control and other modules (in some cases, eConnect doesn’t work – Invoicing module, for example, but it is not heavily used in ecommerce automation anyway).  Some ecommerce integration models require automatic posting – this is not possible if you use eConnect only.  In this small article we describe Autoposting server technology:

• Microsoft Dexterity posting engine.  The heart of Microsoft Great Plains is well structured and allows Dexterity developer to submit the batch for posting and trigger posting process.  In theory it looks nice, however if you are .Net C# or VB developer – it doesn’t look as the programming guideline for you: Microsoft Dynamics GP Dexterity is proprietary tool and it requires years of software development experience to program such intrinsic processes as instructions to post the batch
• Posting Server approach.  Autoposting server is Dexterity customization, which checks newly entered records in approved batches table – it checks the table every few seconds and if the new record is there – it initiates the posting process for you.  All you need to do – is to place approved batch records into the status table.  Posting Server works with almost all the types of posting batches, however the most popular are Sales Order Processing batches, where we post SOP invoices
• Other eCommerce integration options.  If you need very light version of eCommerce integration, then you may decide to utilize stored procedures, placing Sales Orders into SOP10100 and SOP10200 tables, especially when you do not charge taxes and all your items are non-inventoried ones.  This simplification might be efficient in light weight ecommerce scenarios.  The reason, why we recommend you to create Sales Orders and not Invoices – you should avoid complex GL Sales invoice distribution records.  If you need to create records for inventory items, then we recommend you not to do automatic allocation – it might be difficult to program inventory allocation in SQL scripts – you can always do order allocation in GP later on