Great Plains VAR news: GP Dexterity Software Development Factory

Sep 23
06:07

2008

Andrew Karasev

Andrew Karasev

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For mid-market ERP and MRP application, such as Microsoft Dynamics GP there is relatively strong, but maybe a bit narrow customizations and modifications market, where projects are spread across the USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Mexico and Central America.

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This means that having GP Dexterity developers in consulting staff is probably impractical,Great Plains VAR news: GP Dexterity Software Development Factory Articles as it is not always possible to provide full workload and if programmed is used only on the case by case basis, then her or his software development experience maybe weaker than for the programmer working in centralized Great Plains Dexterity Software development factory.  We would like to review Dexterity development projects and specialization in this small publication:

1.       GP Dexterity overview.  This software development environment was specially created for Great Plains Software Dynamics ERP project in earlier 1990th as the shell written in C programming language.  Dex has its own scripting language Sanscript which is somewhat proprietary.  When Microsoft purchased Great Plains Software, Dexterity was enriched by such instruments as COM object call procedures, direct SQL stored procedures calls, etc.

2.       Dexterity customization examples.  The simplest Dex customization is Dex trigger, where if something happens with one of the fields on the form, or in the scrolling window, Dex trigger automatically updates mirroring record in the custom Dex table.  More sophisticated customizations create Dex custom window, which could be called from GP workstation interface and work with existing and newly created custom GP tables.  Also Dex can modify existing GP windows.  One of the most popular GP windows in Sales Transaction Entry screen.  One of the most popular GP tables, involved in customizations are: SOP10100 – Sales Document header, SOP10200 – Sales Document Line, IN00101 – inventory item master

3.       Dexterity versus eConnect.  eConnect is open to Microsoft Visual Studio C#, VB developers, who are familiar with MS SQL Server stored procedures and SQL Server in general.  eConnect, in essence imitates Great Plains Dexterity logic in its encrypted SQL stored procedures to do similar job as Dex, and initially it was dedicated to ecommerce web developers to integrate eCommerce web sites with GP SOP and Inventory modules.  eConnect is very popular tool, it lacks sutomatic batch posting logic, where you need to deploy Alba Spectrum Posting Server

4.       Great Plains Software Development Factory.  This centralized facility is dedicated to GP Dex, eConnect and generic Great Plains Integration projects.  This facility also includes Great Plains Remote Support call center