As you may already know Microsoft Business Solutions recommends switching from FRx Financial Reporting to Microsoft Management Reporter.
There is no guarantee for FRx to be compatible with 64 bit Windows7, Vista or XP. For version 2010 of GP Microsoft released service pack 12 for Financial Report Extender. We did numerous upgrades to version 2010 and we would like to share our opinion. We saw numerous discussions about 64 bit deployments and at this time large numbers of customers are updating to Dynamics GP 2010. We are only sharing our opinion and we cannot guarantee your results:
1. Installation on 64 bit Operating System. It seems to produce several installation minor error messages, however we all the times ignored them and the install was all the times successful. These errors are likely associated with the fact that Microsoft didn’t test FRx on 64 bit platforms, but its original code is 32bit compatible only anyway. As you know it is OK to install 32bit application on the 64 bit Windows7
2. Service Pack 12 and some known issues. Several customers reported the case when after applying SP12 printed report shows garbage column of zeros on the left edge of the page. This was kind of annoying for them. After some research we found the reason and it is probably bug in this service pack. Open report catalog, switch to Formatting tab and verify that Display Blanks for Zero Amounts is checked. If it is unchecked – report printing produces the column of zeros on the left edge. Sometimes you need all the zero amounts to be shown, but we believe that this inconvenience is not critical and much better to have nicely printed pages
3. Data repair. Of course there are known tricks, such as compacting the database, deleting GL Index file and rebuilding them, exporting objects from the Specification Set and reimporting (some of the formatting features will be removed and you need to reapply them on reports manually after Specification Set export/import). In some cases you have to go beyond these easy procedures
4. Microsoft Access Database. The metadata, such as Row Format, Column Layout, Reporting Tree, Accounts Set, Catalog and other objects are stored in password protected MS Access database. In several projects we had open Specification Set bearing file directly in Access and delete broken objects directly there. One of the projects was to export objects and reproduce the logic in custom set of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services reports. We believe that replicating in SSRS was definitely a luxury, but each customer is unique and you never know what is the next exotic project
5. The future. Likely that Microsoft Management Reporter will be the way to go in the future. However at this time of mid 2011 we think that technology that has only about one and a half years old needs some time, more service packs issued and issues fixed. The good news however is very similar design of MMR, it also supports Excel files (in certain situations you do not want full featured GP company and compile simple Excel worksheet). Probably the next version of Dynamics GP will not be compatible with old-good-days FRx
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