Microsoft Dynamics GP, formerly known as Great Plains Dynamics and eEnterprise, serves as reliable and flexible Corporate ERP application for large number of mid-market and often large companies in USA, Canada and English Speaking countries. In the case of ecommerce B2B and B2C integration to Great Plains you have multiple tools and options, plus there are number of Dynamics GP ISV partner products.
In our case,
we also have packaged products plus so-called Solutions, where proven modules and code blocks could be tuned to automate your requirements in ecommerce website integration to Accounting back office. We will begin with programming tools and technologies to give you some ground for decision making of directions for further research and discovery. Plus, we would like to give you information about GP limitations, such as lack of Unicode support (Chinese, Japanese, Korean alphabets are Unicode based and are collections of Hieroglyphs):
1. Great Plains Technology Layers. Historically Great Plains Dynamics was introduced as Graphical and Database platform independent Corporate ERP and Accounting application. In early 1990th Dynamics was available on two computer graphical operating systems: Mac OS and Microsoft Windows, and at that historical time it was available on two DB platforms: Ctree/Faircom and Btrieve (and then very soon on Microsoft SQL Server). Such strategy (being OS and DB platform neutral), was implemented in the programming shell, named Great Plains Dexterity with its own programming language Sanscript. Dexterity in our opinion is of course innovative, but other Corporate ERP software development firms, such as SAP introduced similar strategies (ABAP), Navision (CSIDE), Axapta (X++, MorphX). Of course Shells give you advantages, but there is the price for advantages and some sacrifices should be expected. In the case of Dexterity it was programmed in C++ programming language, which in time didn't have support for Unicode characters (hieroglyphs). We do not expect or specially recommend you to program in Dynamics GP Dexterity to integrate ecommerce with Dynamics GP, we are giving this excurse as information only for better understanding of Great Plains limitations and advantages
2. Dynamics GP eCommerce integration tools and options. There is special technology, initially dedicated to Great Plains eCommerce developers and programmers to enable addressing GP objects directly from ecommerce MS Visual Studio projects (or as libraries and Software Development Kit sample codes for other development environments, Delphi, for example). In its Microsoft Dynamics GP project Microsoft Business Solutions announced special dedication to eConnect technology, and for version 10.0 we see such tools as Dynamics GP Integration Manager have eConnect connectors options for good range of integration destinations: Customer, Vendor, GL Account, SOP Transaction (except return for GP 10.0, a bit strange, but hopefully this problem will go away in GP 11), POP Transaction, Purchase Receipt and others
3. Ecommerce Integration in Batch mode versus Real Time. If you have moderate number of ecommerce generated customer orders or invoices, plus if you treat all or most of your customers as walk-in (without selling on account) as in B2C scenario, we recommend you first to evaluate GP Integration Manager module (in the case of importing to Sales Order Processing Documents, you will need to purchase GP IM Distributions). Integration Manager is user friendly tool, plus you have powerful options to alter IM integration logic in VBA event driven scripts, SQL Views as Advanced ODBC data sources for IM Queries. IM integration could be scheduled via Windows Macro automation open source add-ons (or you could purchase IM scheduling extension from Microsoft Business Solutions directly). If you schedule IM Integration to run every hour or twenty minutes, in our opinion it should be comparable to real time integration
4. Dynamics GP real time ecommerce integration. If you think that Great Plains Integration Manager doesn't do the job in real time scenarios, you can trigger each ecommerce invoice real time integration in eConnect libraries. eConnect SDK is friendly to Microsoft Visual Studio C# or VB .Net programmer, and learning curve is reasonable if not minimal. We will be monitoring eConnect integration and programming trends in the future, for now, October 2009, it is likely that Microsoft Business Solutions Dynamics GP subdivision is committed to eConnect layer, as it provides reasonable openness to GP objects and transactions to generic software programmers (and resolves Great Plains Dexterity issues, related to Dex proprietary or semi proprietary platform restrictions)
5. Dynamics GP eCommerce add-ons. We have several products, offered out of the box: Alba Spectrum Posting Server, Great Plains Order Connector, and currently we are working on releasing ecommerce connection suite
6. How to get help? Please, feel free to call us: 1-866-528-0577, outside of USA: 1-630-961-5918 or email us help@albaspectrum.com We are very technical and real Dynamics GP Dexterity, SAP Business One SDK and Microsoft CRM programming gurus. We have Great Plains Software Development Factory and could support unlimited Dynamics GP Customization and Programming needs. Plus we speak English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and not only as native speaking sales folks, but as real technical consultants. If you prefer skype: albaspectrum
