Business Portal in GP 11
With the release of GP 11 just around the corner, we decided to give you a sneak peak at what is in store with some of the new features and functionality. Today, I will tell you about some of the changes that are being made around Business Portal for GP 11. With the ever-increasing focus on Business Intelligence, this new release will be combining some of the robust features of SharePoint and SRS with Business Portal to enhance the user experience.
In Business Portal for GP 11, one of the main changes that is being made is surrounding the web parts. As you may or may not know, Business Portal is really just some SharePoint pages with a number of Business Portal web parts to display the data. In the previous releases of Business Portal, these web parts were built on a technology developed specifically for Business Portal called Microsoft Business Framework. While these web parts were great and did the job well, they were not all that customizable.
With GP 11, a number of these Microsoft Business Framework web parts and Key Performance Indicators in BP have been replaced with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Reports. These new SRS reports will also have drill back capabilities that we discussed in the first GP 11 blog post. So that means that you will have greater flexibility with the type of Business Portal web parts that you will be able to create in GP 11. MBF has not gone away completely, so you can still utilize that technology along with the new SRS functionality for Business Portal.
Along with the release of GP 11, Microsoft is also releasing SharePoint 2010. Business Portal will be supported on either SharePoint 2007 or 2010, so whether your organization wants to upgrade SharePoint at the same time or not, Business Portal will be able to work for your organization. Because of SharePoint 2010 being a 64 bit only package now, Business Portal will also be 64 bit compliant, but only when used with SharePoint 2010. So if you were eagerly awaiting upgrading that Business Portal server to 64-bit, you will be able to with the new version of Business Portal and SharePoint.
Some nice changes coming down the pipeline for Business Portal. Stay tuned for my next blog posting, which will discuss some of the changes that will be in store for Workflow with Dynamics GP 11!