subject: Dynamics GP Custom Development Projects and Integration Solutions [print this page] Dynamics GP Custom Development Projects and Integration Solutions
It is often a difficult task to find Corporate ERP consultant, who can help you with custom programming, integration, reporting and data migration on the regular base to Dynamics GP. How about Great Plains Dexterity, when you have custom module, programmed in Dexterity back in late 1990th, when Dexterity programming businesses were booming? Well, Great Plains Dexterity customization could be upgraded, as Dex is still the major customization tool for current version of Dynamics GP 2010/11.0. Of course you should expect some progress and transformations for old-good-days Great Plains Dexterity. For example, Dexterity is now closer to Microsoft Windows and SQL Server platforms, and of course Microsoft .Net projects. Well, of course may good words could be said about Dynamics GP and former Great Plains Customization technologies, let's try to move on to the paragraphs:
1. Great Plains Dexterity, or how it is currently known Microsoft Dexterity or Dynamics GP Dexterity. This custom programming tool and EDI has certain privileges, especially when you have to modify Dynamics GP client interface. Dexterity opens existing GP screen and forms for the customization and keeping the original forms to act according to the original logic (drafted in Dynamics.dic Dexterity metadata dictionary). To give you some excurse to the Dexterity history, it was introduced as Corporate ERP shell to abstract future Great Plains Dynamics from such computing hurdles, as Operating System dependency (nobody knew in earlier 1990th which computer platform will win in the future: Microsoft Windows, Mac, Solaris, Unix, and later on Linux and PHP). We believe that the compromise was the right one, Great Plains Dexterity was coded as a shell in C programming language
2. Microsoft Dexterity and technology advances dilemma. Please, think for a moment about the fact of such technology innovations as export to Excel, Microsoft Windows 2008 workstation, MS SQL Server 2008, XML, Unicode support (Chinese, Japanese, Korean hieroglyph based alphabets), Microsoft .Net. Obviously C and C++ -programming languages casted in the late 1980th had no idea about the future trends (we believe that programming language design professors in the USA universities tried to predict the future, but the real future appeared to bee too unpredictable)
3. Maybe eConnect as the replacement for Dexterity? eConnect is new tool, and it is based on encrypted SQL Stored procedures, replicating Microsoft Dexterity business logic. eConnect should be considered as the technology layer, where you can call eConnect methods from various tools: Microsoft Visual Studio (C# or VB project libraries). However eConnect connectors are now available in such integration tool as Dynamics GP Integration Manager, meaning that you do not have to dive into eConnect programing realm to achieve eConnect integration performance
