Andrew Karasev

Great Plains Installation and Implementation overview

Microsoft Dynamics GP, or also commonly known as Great Plains is Microsoft SQL Server database application and at the same time it has its own IDE and programming language, known as Great Plains Dexterity. 

Dexterity in turn is written on C as a shell.  Recent versions, such as 10.0, 9.0 are tightly integrated with Microsoft Outlook, plus version 10.0 has integration with Sharepoint and SQL Server Reporting Services (or SRS).  Having said that, however we would like to inform you that installation itself is streamlined and not overly difficult.  Let’s review:

1.       Server Side.  When installation wizard loads application files, it launches Dexterity Utilities to create DYNAMICS and then company databases.  Here you should interact and enter maximum account length and number of segments.  We recommend you in order to install lesson company to have at least three segments and length of the first three should be 3, 4 and 2.  If you would like to know what is really going on and which objects are installed – atomic stored procedures (needed for Dexterity engine to manage tables by Dex indexes), tables: master, setup, work, open and historical, SQL stored procedures including eConnect encrypted ones

2.       Workstation.  Here when you add users workstations, for versions 9.0 and newer you don’t need to create ODBC connection manually – installation does it for you.  If you are curious and would like to understand technical side, please review Dynamics.set file to review modules installed.  Each module, listed in this set file has three lines: one for code logic dictionary, one for modified forms dictionary and one for modified reports dictionary.

3.       Implementation.  As GP is mid-size business ERP application, to implement it you need professional GP implementation consultant, who should help you install software, map business processes, perform data conversion and migration from legacy MRP to GP, train users, modify reports and customize the system if required

4.       Integration.  It is often the case, when your new ERP should be integrated with other systems and databases.  In GP you should review Integration Manager module, which allows you to integrate text files as well as connect to other databases via ODBC connection

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