SAP Business One Moving Data from Legacy Great Plains DOS

Dec 7
11:52

2011

Andrew Karasev

Andrew Karasev

  • Share this article on Facebook
  • Share this article on Twitter
  • Share this article on Linkedin

Data migration from legacy accounting packages to modern Small Business ERP is always popular and we do not expect the trend to change in the future. In this small paper we would like to review the options assuming that you are walking away from Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Windows or Macintosh versions 9.5, 9.2 or earlier.

mediaimage

Publication is addressed to computer professionals who are comfortable with such terminology as ODBC,SAP Business One Moving Data from Legacy Great Plains DOS Articles Pervasive SQL, Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and data massage in Excel.  Current version of SAP B1 is 8.81 as we are writing these lines in December of 2011:

1. Data Conversion Recommendations.  First of all think about its complexity and the idea to keep legacy accounting running on one of the computers for data inquiry.  Maybe it is all you need in case if old-good-days customer calls and asks about balance or historical payments.  GPA could be redeployed on 32 bit version of Windows XP, Vista or Windows 2007.  It is not compatible with 64 bit version as Btrieve and Pervasive SQL 2000 had no idea in earlier 2000th about 64 bit computing.  If you think that data conversion is still required go ahead and read following paragraphs

2. Data Export methods.  When you are walking away from legacy ERP package the simplest method in our opinion is printing reports and saving them into text files with following processing in Excel, Microsoft Access or if you have to cleanse millions of documents then probably to MS SQL Server custom database via import wizard.  If you have to face millions of invoices or sales orders consider import to SQL Server and cleansing in custom SQL Views.  Now if you are exporting from Great Plains DOS version on Btrieve database platform then we recommend you to do it in Pervasive SQL 2000 Control Center.  You will have to familiarize yourself with table structure and produce DDF file or in other words Data Definition Files.  Procedure is described in GPA ODBC manual which could be opened in PDF format directly from GPA installation CD.  Table structure is self-explanatory and we recommend you to open GPS and GPDATA directories for table names review

3. Importing into SAP BO.  This is typically done via Data Transfer Workbench where you have to fill out CSV templates.  If you are dealing with millions of documents then consider ODBC option where you are connecting to SQL custom View which imitates CSV template including the first row containing columns headers.  There are ISV supported tools such as IBolt but these are outside of the scope in this paper

4. Old Platforms.  GPA could be deployed since historical times on WindowsNT, Windows 2000 Server, Novel or Faircom on Macintosh server.  In all cases it is Btrieve database and in order to do data export, massage and import into SAP Business One we recommend you to redeploy it in Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 on Pervasive SQL 2000 Service Pack 3 32 bit edition

5. Pervasive SQL 2000 Control Center.  In our consulting practice we tried various tools including MS Access linking via ODBC but in the case of Great Plains Accounting we realized that it hosts several tables in the same OS file and this is major complication in data connection and extraction

6. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center).  help@efaru.com  We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese.  Our core expertise is in International Business