The question has been raised:
Does the Dynamics GP W-2 Electronic File format conform to individual State format requirements?
The answer:
The Dynamics GP W-2 Electronic File conforms to Federal filing requirements only. BUT… if you check with your State, ask them if they will accept the Federal Filing Format. If they will, then the answer is YES!
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!
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:
Have you heard? Multidimensional Amalysis (MDA) is going away. Well, this is only PARTIALLY true.
For Dynamics GP Customers that already own MDA, they will be able to continue using it even with future releases and upgrades!
However, NEW CUSTOMERS to Dynamics GP, starting with Version 10, will NOT have access to MDA. They will utilize Analytical Accounting.
If you would like the simplicity that MDA offers, we can DEFINITELY create something with eXtender to mimic the MDA functionality!
What in the world is MDA? In a nutshell, MDA gives the user the ability to post to GL accounts, but then to further categorize that posting.
For example, let’s say you have a GL account called Vehicle Expense (5100). Every time you post something to Vehicle Expense, you ALSO want to track for which specific vehicle in your fleet the expense was incurred. Now instead of adding more GL accounts (5100-001 for Vehicle 1, 5100-002 for Vehicle 2, etc..), you can set up an MDA Analysis Group called “Vehicles”, and affiliate that group with the GL 5100 account. Then, you can add all of your Vehicles as Analysis Codes under the Vehicle Analysis Group. When you post to the GL 5100 account, you will then have the opportunity to open another window, and allocate that expense to a Vehicle or Vehicles.
Summit Group Software implemented a time and expense entry system for our consulting practice using xRM (Microsoft Dynamics CRM) as the platform.
It started out as a simple use of some additional entities for projects, time entries, expense entries in order to track our billable time and expense entries for clients. These entities have relationships to customers and are integrated (using Scribe Insight) over to our Microsoft Dynamics GP accounting for billing purposes. In the past couple of years since we have been working on this evolving functionality, two great benefits have been acheived over our legacy time entry system.
1) Natural linkages with all our customer data in CRM– account/contacts, links to cases for support incidents, etc. That insight to every person in the organization on who has been billed and for what has been a great thing.
2) REPORTS, REPORTS, REPORTS! Ah! Finally - instant insight to our billing data for clients, on a per-project basis, and of course our own utilization reporting. The old system left us with almost no insight. As the consulting team manager, every day I sing the praises of my instant reporting through CRM and SQL Reporting Services! It has changed the way I work.
A third benefit is one that we always talk to our clients about and it is really cool to see it ourselves — Flexibility with our changing business needs.
Summit Group has rolled out numerous changes to our business in the past year including the allowance of discounted, prepaid time and a Managed Services plan that really changes the way we look at billable services for our clients. xRM (CRM) as the platform for our time entry system has allowed for new entities, many-to-many relationships between all of them, and very fast changes to reporting through SRS to be agile and make our time entry and project tracking system bend to the needs of our business. When I think of the way we could think about turning parts of our business model upside down and just have the systems ‘work’ to support whatever changes we needed for our business… that is priceless. A ‘custom’ built time and expense entry system with the supportability of being built into the rest of our CRM system. What more could a consulting manager ask for?
Google has just released their JavaScript development toolbox which itself is not supported for use with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, however it does include a component called the Closure Inspector which will optimize, compress, and debug JavaScript code. The compression removes all of the unnecessart whitespace, so gone are the days of painfully trying to remove all of the whitespace so that the Jscript will work within the ISV.config file.
For example, I took a function from one of our CRM forms and compiled it with simple optimization in the Closure Compiler and here were the results:
Original
function billable() {
if (crmForm.all.sgs_billablehours.disabled == false) {
var minutes = prompt(’How many minutes?’, ‘0′);
var fullhours = minutes / 60;
fullhours = fullhours - fullhours % 1;
var remainder = (minutes % 60) / 60;
remainder = Math.ceil(10 * remainder) / 10;
crmForm.all.sgs_billablehours.DataValue = fullhours + remainder;
}
}
Compiled Code
function billable(){if(crmForm.all.sgs_billablehours.disabled==false){var a=prompt(”How many minutes?”,”0″),b=a/60;b-=b%1;a=a%60/60;a=Math.ceil(10*a)/10;crmForm.all.sgs_billablehours.DataValue=b+a}};
Original Size: 466 bytes (241 bytes gzipped)
Compiled Size: 262 bytes (189 bytes gzipped)
In conclusion, with CRM Jscipts usually being pretty small, the compression is probably not going to optimize performance much (unless you are on dialup, it takes a fraction of a second to download either 8KB or 16KB), however I do think that the debugging and whitespace removing features will come in very handy for me in the future. If you take advantage of the optimization, you will want to make sure that you save a copy of the original code since your comments will be removed and variable names will be changed.
Here is the link to the web based version of the Closure Compiler.
http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home
For more information, check out the Ars Technica article where I discovered it:
I was approached by a customer today with a request for emails written from CRM to have some spell checking capability. Knowing that CRM does not natively do any such thing on its own, I did a little searching for a generic Internet Explorer add-on that could spell check any text box in IE. One of the first ones that came up was called ie7pro, at www.ie7pro.com, it is free, small, and checks as you type. Perfect. I installed it, and with no configuration whatsoever my CRM emails were now being spell checked.
Sometimes, the task of adding Master Records into Microsoft Dynamics GP may seem time-consuming.
There are numerous ways you can load data into GP but most are either time consuming (hand-keying it in) or require licensing a product such as Integration Manager or some other software tool. A commonly overlooked option is using a pre-recorded Macro.
The ability to record and play a Macro within Microsoft Dynamics GP costs nothing extra, and needs no additional installation of software. If you know how to formulate a Mail Merge within Microsoft Word, you’ll definitely be able to accomplish this!
To summarize the task of integrating data via a Macro:
1. Have the information/records you want to pull into Microsoft Dynamics GP placed in an Excel file (or some sort of delimited *.txt file).
2. Record the steps of the Macro within Microsoft Dynamics GP (from the Tools>Macro>Record menu within the window you wish to populate data). This will create a *.mac file. Don’t forget to STOP the recording.
3. Open the *.mac file and copy everything but the 1st 2 lines to Microsoft Word.
4. Utilize Microsoft Word Mail Merge to create the master template. Use the Excel file that contains your data as the Data Source for the Mail Merge. Run the Mail Merge, and copy the text back into the Macro file and play it in Microsoft Dynamics GP.
**Since every Macro is potentially different (depending upon the info you want to bring into Microsoft Dynamics GP), feel free to email us for more details on your specific needs– support@summitgroupsoftware.com.
Think of other ways you can utilize Macros to speed data entry or repetitive tasks!