In Touch with Dynamics GP

This blog is intended to be a useful resource for Microsoft Dynamics GP users and professionals in the UK and the wider Microsoft Dynamics GP community as a whole.

Monday, 19 October 2009

Conference High Lights

As most of you are aware we had our client conference last week, a great chance to meet and greet some of our clients and catch up on the latest technologies and the Dynamics (GP) road map.

I think that most people would agree that one of the high lights was the sneak preview of some of the Dynamics (GP) version 11 features and the integrations with office 2010.
Our thanks to Tom and Will from Microsoft for these insights and especially to Will for the mind blowing insight into project Gemini.
Imagine being able to filter cut pivot millions of rows in excel full of GP data without any effect on performance, all achieved through a simple add in to excel. It will change the face of BI as we know it. As Will mentioned there are loads of demos of it out there on you tube so here is a link to a few.
http://www.youtube.com/user/geminute#p/u

Also the end would appear to be in sight for report writer, as we were shown the new word 2010 report templates allowing you to create professional looking reports in word linked to your dynamics Data and with unlimited numbers of templates per report type ( you could have 20 different invoice layouts if you wanted).

All the presentations from the day are available on request from the contact page of our web site
http://www.touchstone.co.uk/contact_us.aspx

And I can not close off this blog without mentioning the lunch which was fantastic, a full on carvery with roast beef Yorkshire pudding , lamb , turkey all the trimmings and desserts to die for, fantastic.

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

Dynamics (GP) v8 is no more. Microsoft stopped support yesterday

For those of you still on Microsoft business solutions (Great Plains) version 8. Microsoft finished support for this version yesterday.

We however have not , if you are one of our clients and you are on version 8 or lower we will still support you. However you need to be aware that we will not be able to escalate issues to Microsoft for these versions or produce code fixes if required.

If you would like look into upgrading you to the latest release please contact helpdesk@touchstone.co.uk

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

Integration Manager Dynamics (GP) V10 not pulling through fields

Hi folks , this one has cropped up in several support cases this week.

In version 10 Integration manager data is sometimes not being pulled through. This is usually when the destination field is down several sub levels in destination mapping.

A good example of this is the email field that is held under internet settings when integrating a debtor or creditor record.

We have found that although it is already mapped you just need to go into destination mapping and re add the source field. it will now bring through the data.

This is not immediately obvious when troubleshooting as the source field appears correctly mapped to start with.

If you have any questions please contact helpdesk@touchstone.co.uk

Friday, 9 October 2009

Dynamics (GP) eConnect, web services and ISO Currency codes

When you set up econnect to use with web services you need to have all the ISO codes for your individual currencies in Dynamics (GP) populated.

These are setup on the currency maintenance window in Dynamics (GP).

There are two internationally recognised codes for each currency. An alphabetic and a numeric code. Please be aware you need to use the alphabetic code as the web services will not pass/recognise the numeric ones.

The below ISO website has the list of internationally recognised codes.

http://www.iso.org/iso/support/faqs/faqs_widely_used_standards/widely_used_standards_other/currency_codes/currency_codes_list-1.htm


If you have any questions contact helpdesk@touchstone.co.uk

Hurry Hurry hurry, Touchstone's Dynamics Client Conference is next week.

Our annual Dynamics Customer conference is next Thursday, its a great opportunity to catch up on the Dynamics product range and see what extra value you can get out of your Dynamics (GP) system.

Use the below link to sign up.

http://www.touchstone.co.uk/DynamicsConference2009/

Dynamics (GP) v10, unsupported printers and small fonts.

We have had a couple of cases recently where after an upgrade to Dynamics (GP) v10 , the standard reports all print out in very small fonts.
This usually happens if you are using an unsupported printer. You can request a list of supported printers from helpdesk@touchstone.co.uk .

There are a couple of workarounds you can use for this.

The first is to try different printer drivers for a supported printer from the same range. For example HP printer drivers a pretty well interchangeable. Select the nearest model number off of the supported printer list and down load the driver from the manufacturer’s website and try these.
Nine times out of ten this will work.

We have recently discovered there is a second option you can try. In the Dex.ini file on each workstation add in the following printer commands.

FontCourier New=Lucida Console
Tolerance=-1
MinMilHeight=180

This forces the printer to take on the above font settings, however a quick word of warning, it does not work with all printers and print drivers as they don’t all support these settings and it may not alter the output of the report (In which case you will need to experiment with drivers).

If you have any questions contact helpdesk@touchstone.co.uk

Report writer, calculations, functions and those pesky global fields in Dynamics (GP)

Anyone who has tried to add a global field (such as company name or companyID) into a function used in a calculated field within report writer for Dynamics (GP), has probably become very frustrated.
For some reason Report writer handles global fields differently. To make matters worse several of these fields are non string values and have integer data types so can not be used within concatenation functions.

Well there is a way round this and it is in essence very simple.

If we take the global field of CompanyID for example. This has a data type of INT5 (integer) and so can not be used in a concatenation in a calculated field. Therefore you need to use the INT_STR function in the calculated field to change its data type to string. However because it is a global field it won’t let you do this.

So to get round this simply create a calculated field with a result type of Integer and insert the global field of companyID. This has effectively created a calculated field with the same value as the global field.

Now because it is a Calculated field Report writer will treat it normally. This means you can now use the INT_STR function but instead of using the global field you use your new calculated field.

This technique will work for all those global fields and will allow you to include them in functions within report writer and with this technique you can add global fields into functions such as STRIP, CAT and INT_STR within Dynamics (GP).

Thanks to Jon Eastman (Touchstone Consultant) who came up with this handy hint.

If you have any questions please contact helpdesk@touchstone.co.uk