Microsoft Business Portal for Great Plains Dynamics – architecture notes

This article is intended for small and mid-size business IT engineers, who supports Microsoft Dynamics GP and such legacy Great Plains applications as eOrder and eRequisition, which require you to think through technology switch and implementing Business Portal, as eXXX line of GP products is no longer supported (please, do not mix this with eConnect, which is not a product per se, but rather integration and connection technology, which allows eCommerce developer and GP programmer disregard Microsoft Dexterity and create integrated extensions and custom logic to GP in MS Visual Studio.Net)

• Hosting Databases.  Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal hosts such applications as HR & Employee Self Service Suite, eOrder, Requisition Management and others in system database: DYNAMICS and company databases.  We heard questions from GP consultants and SQL administrators what happens if GP upgrade process is launched – will it purge all the tables and stored procedures from GP databases.  The answer is no – GP upgrade will drop and recreate Dexterity zdP stored procedures (allowing Dexterity to use its own indexes and come with dex cursors across Dex tables).  If you as developer or programmer will place custom tables, views or stored procedures into these tables – these objects will be intact during upgrade process, the same should be said about BP tables.
• Sharepoint.  Business Portal kind of extends Sharepoint and utilizes Sharepoint to give you latest company news, generic document workflow, roles, however it is coming beyond SP realm in fact.  It uses eConnect to make a link to Dynamics GP objects, and in some cases supersede Sharepoint security with Dynamics GP security: GP user, employee, salesperson, etc.
• BP User Licensing.  Licensing is subject to change without prior notice, currently what we observe is business portal users number license, where license per user is substantially lower that Microsoft Dynamics GP user license, however if you plan to deploy say only Requisition Management module in BP – you have to purchase the BP users licenses for all the required users, which would look like a reasonable investment if you plan to deploy other BP modules.  Currently BP modules cost is promotional