Summit Group Software Blog

With Microsoft Dynamics GP 11 rolling out just around the corner, we are dedicating a number of blog posts to giving you a sneak peak at the new features you can expect to see.  Today’s topic is focused on a new feature that will be included with GP 11.  In GP 11, you will now have the ability to print your reports to Microsoft Word forms and also be able to email those reports, right from within core Dynamics GP functionality.

Yes, you heard right!  Microsoft received a lot of feedback to have reports available through another source other than Report Writer, and they have answered with new functionality around Microsoft Word.  With GP 11, you will be able to print most of your reports as either your existing Report Writer report, or you can print them with new Microsoft Word templates.  Microsoft will be shipping a number of templates out of the box, as well as the ability to create and customize your own templates and use them to print your documents.  These templates will be able to be used if you’re on Microsoft Office 2007 or newer.

The way this is going to work is relatively simple and will not require any additional software.  When you choose to generate a report to Microsoft Word, it still goes through Report Writer, which is the “processing engine”.  However, instead of it being printed then in Report Writer, it will be pushed to Word as an XML format, and Word will then be the “design engine” for the report.  With the information being pushed to Word, we will now have the ability to easily manipulate the design of the report, as well as adding our own graphics and style!

GP 11 is also introducing the ability to email documents from right within GP.  With this feature, we can now email reports directly to our vendors, customers, etc.  GP will utilize the power of Outlook to send the emails, either as an attachment or embedded directly into the body of the email.  This will reduce the cost of postage and printing for an organization, as well as simplify getting information out.

Some pretty useful features coming in GP 11 surrounding Word forms and emailing documents.  Check in for my next blog post, in which I will talk about a few more features coming up in GP 11!

The pieces are starting to come together on what the next release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 11 is going to look like.  There are going to be a number of changes coming in GP 11 that we will be giving you a sneak peak into.  The first thing I’m writing about is the future of Business Intelligence.  In GP 10, Microsoft opened up the door to more BI features and functionality.  75 SQL Reporting Services (SRS) reports out-of-the-box, SharePoint integration, and Business Portal functionality were just some of the new features.  In GP 11, these features are expanded upon with the hope of greater usability.

The biggest piece in the enhanced Business Intelligence is going to be SQL Reporting Services 2008.  In addition to the existing 75 SRS reports shipped with GP 10, GP 11 will include an additional 150 new reports!  SRS 2008 is also going to be the underlying technology driving most of our Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and graphs in GP and Business Portal.  The homepage of GP will now have SRS KPI of the GP metrics.  These KPI’s will also be reusable in Business Portal and the executive center, meaning that now you only have to create them once, and you can reuse them in multiple places.

Another key feature with Business Intelligence is the addition of drill-back capabilities.  This allows us to drill back into GP from an SRS report, our Business Portal page, or even a link that we send to people in our organization.  Now when we’re viewing a KPI in Business Portal, for example, we will be able to click on a certain field, and it will pull up our customer card or sales document, depending on the window that report is linked to.  To make sure that not just anyone can access this window in GP, however, you will need to have a copy of GP open in the background to utilize drill-backs.

As you can see, there are going to be some neat changes coming for Business Intelligence.  Watch for the next article, in which we will talk about some changes coming in reporting (here’s a teaser – it involves Microsoft Word!).

This may be somewhat technical, but for those of you who utilize Excel quite heavily and are adept at using Microsoft Query to create refreshable reports/lists, you may want to utilize a Stored Procedure that has already been created in Microsoft SQL.

A Stored Procedure is a group of SQL commands that runs to produce some valued output.  For instance there are Stored Procedures that can put information from the Payables Open Tables together with the Payables History Tables to give you a listing of all of the outstanding payables as of a certain point in time.  We routinely refer to this as a Payables Historical Aged Trial Balance.

There may be times where you want to utilize a Stored Procedure that has already been written and return that information to Excel.  Most times, there are also PARAMETERS that need to be included so that the Stored Procedure will return just the set of data you actually want.

In this example we have a Stored Procedure that compiles Payables info based upon a certain point in time– let’s call it SP_PM_AGED_HISTORY (and it already exists within our SQL database).  The trick is, we also need to be able to identify the DATE in for when we want the procedure to run, because without this important piece of data, the Stored Procedure will NOT run.  This is called a PARAMETER.

Utilizing Microsoft Query we can do the following:

1. Open the SQL View
2. {CALL <storedprocedurename>(?)}  In our example it would look like this: {CALL  SP_PM_AGED_HISTORY (?)}
3. Put the Date in the Parameter that pops up in the following format– MM/DD/YYYY
4. Save the Query and return the results to Excel
5. When you refresh the data, it will prompt you for the Parameter, and you can put in whatever you want for the date.