eEnterprise: Great Plains old version upgrade scenarios

In this small article we would like to give you technical highlight on version upgrade process and decision making.  Great Plains Software eEnterprise in its turn is successor of Dynamics C/S+, versions 3.2, 4.0, 5.0, 5.5

1. eEnterprise brief review.  GPS made eEnterprise, which was high-end GP Dynamics version, available on MS SQL Server DB platform only, targeting eEnterprise to mid-size and large companies.  Later on Microsoft capped user count in Great Plains standard to 10, meaning that if you need more – you have to switch to GP Professional, plus GP Standard has 500 active employees limit in Payroll and HR modules across all the companies in GP installation.  Also for eEnterprise as well as for GP Pro you can have the option to add advanced modules, which are not available for former Dynamics or current GP Standard or Business Ready
2. eEnterprise upgrade path.  You should respect ERP development company to provide upgrade path from 2 or 3 years old versions to the current one.  In the case of eEnterprise, version 6.0 belongs to 20th Century.  This is why upgrade path has several steps: eEnterprise 6.0 to Great Plains Professional 7.5, then to Dynamics GP Pro 9.0, then you apply 9.0 Service Pack 2 and then go to version 10.0
3. New version licenses.  Microsoft Business Solutions requires GP customers to be current in annual enhancement program, which is typically from 16 to 25% of the software list price.  If you are not in this program, you should expect re-enrollment fee, please contact your GP VAR or our office
4. eEnterprise customizations upgrade.  eEnterprise has the same platform as Dynamics – Great Plains Dexterity.  In order to upgrade and review GP Dex customization, you should have Dex source code: Dynamics.Dic or Extract.dic with Dexterity sanscript codes in it.  Recent trend in GP modification technology is switching to SQL stored procedures and by doing so, optimizing customization performance – this is why we recommend to revise custom code with new version upgrade.  Other popular trend is switching portions of Dexterity customizations to eConnect, which is faster than Dex and allows you to control custom logic via Microsoft Visual Studio (C# or VB ADO.Net programming)
5. Dexterity excurse.  Great Plains Software Dexterity was designed as the shell, written in C programming language to provide computer OS (MS Windows or Mac) and computer graphical platform independence to new GPS Graphical MRP application – Great Plains Dynamics.  Dexterity was developed in the time when the battle between Software tycoon, such as Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Oracle, Sybase, Ingress, IBM was on the way.  As Software developer of programmer you can find Dex traces in DEX_ROW_ID, Dex.Ini, Dynamics.Exe files architecture
6. eConnect excurse.  eConnect was specially designed for Great Plains eCommerce developers to enable e-commerce web application integration to GP backoffice ERP.  If you are Visual Studio programmer, you should begin investing your time in GP development from eConnect side.  eConnect replicates Dex logic in SQL Stored Procedures