(1888PressRelease)
March 04, 2008 - Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 has higher reliance on such new Microsoft technologies, as SQL Server Reporting Services or SRS, Sharepoint with its famous workflow (competitor to traditional Lotus Notes workflow) and of course eConnect (this is rising star in GP software programming and e-commerce development). If you was GP IM user or developer for earlier versions, you probably remember that IM required GP user workstation to be up and running (and so taking extra precious user license in system manager), plus all the forms got to be closed in IM GP instance, and this is understandable as Integration Manager deployed OLE server technologies (GP workstation was serving as OLE application server). And additional complication was related to the fact that you had to login to the specific company to do integration, IM could not switch companies automatically. All these restrictions were gone with the appearance of eConnect connector for Integration Manager 9.0 and 10.0
1. eConnect technology stack. There is no magic behind the scenes about eConnect – you can read nice pile of whitepapers and technical documents about eConnect technology, but in the beginning of the chain you see traditional and old known SQL encrypted stored procedures. These stored procedures replicate and probably improve GP traditional Great Plains Dexterity business logic. In some cases they are Dex following and do it in SQL cursors, in other cases they use SQL aggregated logic, such as Select, Insert into and similar constructions. If you look at Dexterity performance restrictions (Dex is C programming language written shell and so it in turn is two layers architecture and it is by its nature a bit slow). And consider these facts about Dexterity, you could trust us, that eConnect does job a way faster than Dexterity based old Integration Manager connectors
2. IM and eConnect. Microsoft Dynamics GP IM introduced new connectors, now you can deploy original eConnect connectors and get performance boost. If you are IM manager consultant, who used to consult for older versions: 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 7.5, please remember this important change – eConnect IM integration integrates to dedicated GP company and so database
3. VBA scripting. Even if you are using eConnect connectors for Integration Manager, you still can deploy traditional VBA scripting techniques to manipulate integration: Before Integration, Before Document, etc.
4. Traditional IM connectors. At this time Microsoft Business Solutions keeps traditional OLE integration connectors in and, considering this nice fact, you can still seamlessly upgrade IM from earlier versions (however we discovered the fact, that if you are on version 7.5, you can’t just follow upgrade wizard, you have to upgrade in two steps with intermediate version upgrade
Andrew Karasev,
Alba Spectrum Group http://www.albaspectrum.com help ( @ ) albaspectrum dot com, serving Microsoft Dynamics GP customers in Chicago and Houston locally plus in USA and Canada nationwide via web sessions and remote support. We also invoite you to contribute to our Great Plains support knowledge base at Pegas planet, where Taisia Karaseva is happy to review and publish your Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics articles: http://www.pegasplanet.com . If you have questions, please call us: 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918. We also have customers in Latin America, Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
