GP Technical Airlift Notes - Day 1 - GP11 ?

Keynote tidbits

Direction

• Product will be increasingly 'role-based', mapping the product to actual business processes.
• Product will be integrated more tightly with Office product line.
• Product design will be handled through Visual Studio. Standardized customization means increased supportability.

Add and extend:

• Role based => Enhanced user experience
• Portals and worflow => process-centric design
• BI => ad hoc, self service informationg athering
• web service => simplified / standardized accessibility

Direction

(A) Check out "Statement of Direction"

MS will spend $7B in R&D this year

GP looking to increase value to customers who subscribe to Enhancements by releasing Feature Packs between product releases. Next Feature Pack will be a step-in to GP 11, which will be built around Office 14.

16,000 QuickBooks customers last year moved from QuickBooks Pro to QuickBooks Enterprise. They should be GP customers. GP will begin aggressively marketing to QB customers.

New VPC is out.

Feature Pack Features

• Excel report builder - Additional data sources available. Preview columns before export. Add restrictions and calculations. Summarize a Excel Report for multiple companies into a single workbook.
• Forcasting enhancements
• Reporting
  • Personal BI - Report Writer, Excel Reports, Smartlists
  • Team BI - Excel Services, SQL Reporting Services, Sharepoint
  • Org BI - PerformancePoint Server, FRx
  • (A) - Check on PerformancePoint

Scope

(A) Check out Pinnacle Award winner stories to find out what cutting edge solutions are being done.

Demos

Upgrade to GP from QuickBooks. Old vs New

!! - GP 10 Feature pack includes rapid migration tool which allows you to bring in ALL data (including transactions !) in one single export / import routine.

During migration, all master records can be exported to Excel and vetted before importing into GP.

(20 minute upgrade)

Start a new company from scratch

Demo of Rapid Configuration Tool

Using Excel templates, allows for extremely rapid initial setup. End of setup, brings up list of all errors which link directly to cells in original Excel documents

Shipping 13 templates out of box for verticals.

Rapid Config tool hits ~78 windows and over 1300 Fields during setup.

(20 minute setup)

Fun Moments

Pissed off ISV barely controls his fury that his product feature will be built into GP 11 as a native feature - almost blowing his NDA.

MOSS Implementation

Eric Gjerdevig - egjerdevig@summitgroupsoftware.com

Joe Tews - jtews@summitgroupsoftware.com

Business Data Catalog - Map to back-end data that allows that data to be presented in Sharepoint as a list.

Method 1 - Business Data Catalog:

• Imported into SSP in MOSS Central Admin
• After Import, create new site. Add new web part Business Data List / Business Data Related List
• Modify to select source for data for each.
• After data resolves, Edit, Connections, Get data from...

Method 2 - Excel Web Access:

• MOSS Central Admin / Operations / Services on Server / enable Excel Calc Services
• Open SSP page
• Edit Excel Services Settings
• Fill in unattended service account
• Back to SSP / Enter trusted file location
• Upload Excel doc to MOSS library. Open document and publish to excel services (Office key / publish)
• Select what items get published
• Save to publish
• Open page, add Excel Web Access Web Part
• Select workbook created

KPI's

Search

Sources:

• Internal MOSS sites
• External websites
• File Shares
• Line of Business applications
• Exchange public folders

Workflow

Approval process that defines how documents move through an organization.

• Consistent processes
• Automatic notification
• Accessible through MOSS / Outlook
• Reporting

Participant Roles:

• Administrate
• Manage
• Originate
• Approve
• Delegate
• Carbon Copy

Customizing Workflow

Christina Phillips - christinag@theknastergroup.com

Tim Oines - tim.oines@microsoft.com

General Notes

• Requires MOSS
• MDW MOSS Site
• Documents originate in GP (NOT like requisition mgt in Business Portal where documents originate outside of the system)
• Approvals via GP, Outlook or MOSS
• Flexible approval structure
  • Multiple approvers
  • Routing based on document criteria
• Workflow SDK now available on partnersource
  • Integration Guide
  • Web Service Reference
  • 2 Samples (new + extending)
• Creates SQL role DYNWORKFLOWGRP to allow security via MOSS site. However, authentication happens via WSS Timer Service account

Terms

• Workflow Contract - Definition of the workflow. What components are available.
• Workflow Contract Registration - registration of assemblies with the GAC
• Workflow events - events that occur which need to be acted upon
• Dynamics Security Store - stores web services permissions for operations and tasks using auth mgr tool
• Form Controller - responds to gp client events, manages communications with web services, adds message bars, controls and history bar to dynamics window
• Form Factory - .NET code that runs before dexterity windows are opened to determined whether information is affected by a workflow

Out of the Box Workflows (6)

• Batch Approvals
  • GL
  • Payables M
  • Rreceivables Mgt
• Sales Order Processing
  • Credit Limit Override
  • Quote Approval
• Purchase Order Processing
  • Purchase Order Approval

Beyond Out of the Box

• Create a new workflow
  • Payables Check Approval
  • Sales Credit Memo Approval
• Extend existing
  • Add custom fields to standard workflow
  • Integrate 3rd party products

Building a new workflow

1. Make app dictionary changes
2. Install data and config changes
3. Add workflow columns to database
4. Add a web service
5. Create a client workflow assembly
6. Create a server workflow assembly
7. Create a document viewer
8. Update the Dynamics Security Service
9. Update Microsoft SQL Server Security
10. Deploy the Server Workflow Assembly
11. Deploy the Web Service
12. Deploy the Client Workflow Assembly

Business Intelligence

• Jennifer Harwood, Microsoft
• Brian Meier, Microsoft
• Gary Tronson, Microsoft

Excel Report Builder

• Users create or modify data connections and refreshable excel based reports
• Combine data from multiple companies into a single workbook
• Allow publishing to MOSS or other network locations

Setup:

• Install Smartlist Builder
• Tools / Smartlist Builder / Refresh Cache
• Grant Security to tables, views. Tools / Smartlist Builder / Security
  • Update cache every time new views are created and assign security, otherwise they will not be exposed to SLB
  • Tools / Setup / System / Security Tasks / SLB window
• Open Excel Report Builder
• Begin building your report
• If you publish the report, grant security to the report wherever you publish it.
• If you can see the report, but get errors about access - grant access for the data connection in SQL. SQL Mgt Studio / Security / Logins / Make sure the user's Windows account has rights to the databases.

SQL Reporting Services (Jennifer)

Partnersource / Product Releases / Download reports that can be opened in Visual Studio for exploration or modification

Make sure to rename reports if modifying existing reports so that they are not overwritten by service packs or upgrades

Model - a diagram of data that includes tables and views which is used as the foundation of the report. automatically creates aggregates of data (date becomes day, week, month, etc.)

Rest of presentation canceled due to trying to run the demo via Terminal Services over a wifi connection that was anemic.

Integrating BI into Dynamics GP

Demo - create a list in purchasing using Business Data as the source to pull in vendor list and purchase order list. list tracks purchasing disputes. then build a kpi that tracks the number of disputes to show red/yellow/green.