Alba Spectrum Group, http://www.albaspectrum.com 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Alba Spectrum Group specializes in Great Plains customization, modification, reporting, integration, data conversion, GP version upgrade. For Microsoft Dexterity upgrade, GP customer should have source code: DYNAMICS.DIC dictionary file with dex source code sanscript not stripped out. Microsoft Dynamics GP customizations upgrade should be reviewed by GP professional technical consultant prior to making any decision to avoid business risks. In this small article we would like to give you some GP customization and reporting highlights:
• Crystal Reports vs. MS SQL Server Reporting Services. In our opinion both tools are good, however you should make a choice. If your internal IT support feels comfortable supporting your SQL server and web interfaces, for example if you host internally Microsoft Great Plains Business Portal, then you may decide to take SRS route. On the other hand if you don’t have strong internal MS IT support, you may decide to keep Crystal Reports. Again, sometimes customers are mislead in which reporting tools to use – you should know that if you need complex report for GP – more likely report engine job will be done outside of Crystal or SRS – it will be done in SQL in the form of SQL view or even (more powerful) stored procedure (where you can have temporary tables to help you with data set building). When you are done with report engine – both tools will do excellent job in listing, grouping and summarizing report lines
• Dex customizations. A lot of existing GP customers have them and they need to be supported, revised, upgraded and even expanded. Here you should be aware that Dexterity went through 15 years of evolution: initially it was supporting CtreeFaircom, Btrieve (later on Pervasive SQL). Currently GP supports MS SQL Server only, all the other DB platforms are not supported – last version, supporting “legacy” DBs was Microsoft Great Plains 7.5. On MS SQL Server you can increase Dex application performance by moving dex legacy cursors to SQL aggregated queries: select and insert statements

Andrew Karasev, Alba Spectrum Group, http://www.albaspectrum.com 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com , serving GP customers in USA/Canada via remote support: California, Indiana, Nebraska, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Florida, Virginia, Nevada, Arizona, Quebec, Calgary, Ontario, British Columbia, Minnesota, Michigan. Local service is available in Illinois: Naperville, Plainfield, Lisle, Itasca, Villa Park, Lincolnwood, Schaumburg, Elk Grove, Downers Grove, Lombard, Glen Ellyn, Aurora, Morris, Ottawa, Channahon, Kankakee, downtown Chicago, in Houston area: downtown Houston, Katy, Rosenberg, Sugar Land, Richmond, downtown Dallas


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