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Dynamics GP installations usually have many different client installs of GP all accessing data on a centralized server.  GP allows customizations to reports and forms (windows) and it’s very beneficial if everyone that logs into GP accesses the same version of these customizations.  Following are some steps that can be taken to centralize these customizations.

Pre-Requisites

1. GP installations should exist with a client server relation and all client systems accessing the same set of databases.

2. Shared folder should be available either on server/network with read/write access to all users.

3. Depending on 3rd party modifications VBA and Visual Studio Add-ins may still need to be updated manually as they must reside with the runtime components.

Steps to follow in order listed below:

1. Identify the list of products which have Forms/Report customizations.
   1. To identify these, navigate to the Customization Maintenance window in GP (Microsoft Dynamics GP >> Tools >> Customize >> Customization Maintenance).

Note: The list of customizations may also vary per user. Ensure to verify and check each client machine to ensure all customizations are placed in the shared location.

2. In Customization Maintenance window verify ‘Product’ column to get name of products (EX: In Picture 1  below you would notice that there are two products with customizations i.e. ‘Microsoft Dynamics GP ’ and ‘Ignify’)



3. Next obtain the Forms and Report dictionaries for the products as in step 2.

   1. To get Forms and Report dictionary name & location navigate to Edit Launch File window
      (Microsoft Dynamics GP >> Tools  >> Setup >> System >> Edit Launch file)

   2. Select Product from Edit Launch file window and obtain the path of Forms and Report DIC name from the location provided
      (EX: In Picture 2 below Product is ‘Microsoft Dynamics GP’ and Forms dictionary name is ‘FORMS.DIC’)

   

   3. Create a shared folder on the server and copy the dictionaries and reports.

   4. Ensure shared folder has access to all users as mentioned in prerequisites.

   

   5. Ensure to copy all products that have customizations.

4. Launch GP on client’s system and go to Edit Launch file window (Microsoft Dynamics GP >> Tools  >> Setup >> System >> Edit Launch file)

5. Select the products which have Customizations  and change Forms and Dictionary path to map to shared folder path on server (Note : Use UNC path)



6. Repeat this on all clients and you would be ready with Centralized sharing of reports and dictionaries.

This post is written by Devesh Kasat. Devesh is a Technical Analyst in the Microsoft Dynamics GP Practice at Ignify. Ignify is a Global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics ERP for RetailDistribution, Manufacturing and Chemicals verticals. For help on Microsoft Dynamics ERP email us at dynamics@ignify.com

As this is my first step in .net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 both, so I was thinking why not just try with my existing web application in .net 2.0 which I daily work on using Visual 2005. Because creating a new application is not that much challenging I guess but converting an application from an older framework to latest framework is little bit challenging.

Before I put my 1st step I needed .net 3.5 framework and Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition in my place. You can also get free downloads of .net 3.5 framework from Microsoft’s official site (you can use http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=333325FD-AE52-4E35-B531-508D977D32A6&displaylang=en ) and please buy a genuine copy of Visual Studio 2008 before you follow my steps bellow.

Step 1:

When you are ready with VS 2008 and .net framework 3.5 in your system and you have configured default setting in VS 2008, then you can open VS2005 solutions. So, go to File >> Open >> Project/Solution (Ctrl + Shift + O); Open Project dialog will be opened. Select a VS 2005 solution and open it. It will open a wizard to convert the solution from older version to new 2008 version.

Step 2:

Click Next to backup your current project. Check Yes, create a backup before converting radio give the location for backup

Step 3:

Click Next to finally complete the conversion.

Step 4:

Click Finish to complete the Wizard. It will open a Message Box and ask you to upgrade the project’s framework from .Net 2.0 to .Net 3.5.

Step 5:

Do not check the check box for all solutions unless you want it to convert all .net 2.0 solutions in .net 3.5 whenever you open it using VS 2008. Click Yes to upgrade the framework. You will get the Conversion Complete window of the wizard.

Step 6:

Check the checkbox to view the conversion log and click close button to close the wizard and open the Log like bellow screen.

Step 7:

So now you have completed all the steps. Your solution is converted to VS 2008 version and project framework is converted from .net 2.0 to .net 3.5. You can check all files and directories in your Solution Explorer. Now we need a build to run the application. Follow the steps to change the Target Framework to .Net 3.5 : Right Click on the Solution >> Select Properties >> Click Application Tab >>  Select .Net Framework 3.5 as Target Framework. Save the Properties and Build the application.

Step 8:

Now you may be thinking that I will tell you to configure IIS to run the application properly in .net 3.5. That's not required –  Since Net 3.5 is just an extension of .Net 2.0. So the same aspnet_isapi.dll of .net 2.0 is used. So, there is no change in IIS. In fact you will not get any option of .Net Framework 3.5 in IIS. (For more information http://blogs.msdn.com/vijaysk/archive/2008/03/20/running-asp-net-3-5-on-iis.aspx )

As web.config changes were taken care of by the wizard I don’t need to tell you the changes but if you want to see the changes you can check the following link

http://www.selarom.net/blog/2009-04-20/Ajax_Conflicts_Between_net_2_0_and_3_5.aspx

Now the time is to check the running application to confirm the successful conversion.  Yahoo I got the first screen of my application. I was pretty happy that time. My application was running in .Net 3.5.

Ooops! I got the bellow screen when I browsed one of the ajax page where I used ScriptManager.

To overcome this issue I deleted all my \bin filesand rebuilt the application. I browsed the application again and checked the same page and it was working fine. (For more details http://weblogs.asp.net/javiervillarreal/archive/2008/01/30/the-type-system-web-ui-scriptmanager-is-ambiguous-it-could-come-from-assembly.aspx)

I got stuck with another issue when I browsed a page where I used the Ajax toolkit. 

To fix the issue I downloaded the latest Ajax tool kit from http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=36097 and copied AjaxControlToolkit.dll and System.Web.Ajax.dll from AspNetAjaxLibraryBeta0911\WebForms\Release to bin and then rebuilt.

Now I can smoothly run my old .net 2.0 web application in .Net 3.5 framework.

This post is written by Arghya Mahapatra. Arghya is a Tech Lead in the eCommerce Practice at Ignify. Ignify is a Global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner specializing in ecommerce for Retail, Distribution, and Manufacturing businesses. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine.

I'm still surprised at how many customers still insist that the new system work exactly the last one does or supports their business process like they had it before the project. A fundamental question then is - why are you doing this project? If you are just looking for a nicer looking interface with no meaningful results then don't even waste time on an ERP project. Modern ERP systems bring with them bundled best practices. And an ERP project is the perfect time to re-evaluate your business processes and bake those processes into your new implementation.

I lead the implementation for an global Activity Based costing (ABC) effort for a 1 billion dollar division of a Fortune 10 customer. Of the many things I was analyzing, one key element was how people spent their time.One report in particular took about 5 person days of time to get ready every month. An annual cost of over 15,000 ($40/hour X 12 month x 5 days x 8 hours a day).This particular unit had a net profit margin of just $1 million on revenues of $1 billion and such reports were a gold mine to bring that net margin up. However, the cost to auotomate this report was estimated to be in the $45,000 range as it was a fairly complex report. The management balked at this cost. So we started digging into ways of simplifying the report. The report was initiated by a person in San Jose, California. Other data was filled by a finance person in Singapore and then by a team members in UK, Phoenix, Malaysia, UK and Germany. Certainly a lot of coordination and time. When finalized, the report was distributed to about 50 executive team members. I took the approach of reaching out to each recipient to ask them what was truly critical in the report so we could eliminate some of the complexity of the report. The results were staggering – none of the recipients ever readthe report and felt it was something that others probably found useful. Instead a simpler report was designed that cost only $2,000 to write and built in a day and was actually useful to all the divisional heads in improving their bottom-line. The report was completely automated and required no manual intervention.However, the fact that we developed a report that saved $15,000 is not so significant as the fact that had we not dug deep enough to find out the true pain we would have spent $45,000 ensuring the system worked like the client worked prior to the implementation and achieved nothing in the process. Are you sure you are not doing this to some degree?

I even found traces of this at Ignify. When we cut over to Dynamics AX – we got the ability to attach each receipt or expense with an AP invoice. We no longer had to sort and catalog these on a portal as Dynamics AX automatically catalogued our attachments with the invoice that was posted. However, our booking team members for a full 6 months after going live on Dynamics AX kept uploading the booking receipts to the portal while our payables team kept cataloging this in Dynamics AX. Of course we stopped the earlier process of uploading to the portal as soon as we found out. We had found a better way to do this, adopted it but forgot to tell someone to stop doing what they were doing . How much work goes on that is useless and redundant. In my ABC analysis project that I had done – I found it was very significant. Employees were spending approximately 40% of their time doing non value-adding activities. When you cut over to a new system – leverage its intrinsic benefits of best practices. There is no better time to re-engineer your business process and ask 'How can I make this better simpler and more cost-effective' for every process. Weigh the cost with the benefit. The highest benefit with the lowest cost is when you can leverage what is out of the box and use that.

When Ignify adopted Dynamics AX globally, we cut out several redundant and manual processes – the workflow and ability to review postings, role-based security allowed us to cut out all the manual approvals that we had.We are still learning to improve but we implemented Dynamics AX globally for 300 employees across seven offices in 6 weeks by staying vanilla. We made zero customizations and drove our business to the best practices Dynamics AX provided to us. We spent a lot of time on business process design and how each process can be improved over what we had today. We spent time writing up process training documents for pretty much every finance, accounting, collections, and AP job – how to post a credit card transaction, how to post vendor invoices, how to post wire transactions, how to apply a customer payment. It was great- suddenly we moved from an undocumented, disorganized set of processes to a methodical way of doing business that supported our core consulting and software implementations.And these processes were written 100% by the Dynamics AX task recorder tool and have Microsoft Dynamics AX screen shots in them. At the heart of it we asked ourselves if we were a complex business and the answer was a resounding no. We are a simple business model and we wanted everything to be simple and easy to understand. Our goal was to make our processes even simpler and yet have the desired level of controls which Microsoft Dynamics AX did a great job of bringing to the table.

Microsoft Dynamics AX was great for us and has been great for our customers but I'm not proposing that as your ERP. I'm proposing that whatever system you choose to work with, that you leverage its native strengths and use the ERP implementation as a way of strengthening and simplifying your business processes and getting more for less. I've also run into situations where customers want to wait for writing up the perfect business process before starting an ERP project.That can take a really long-time and you may never start. The ERP application you choose will give you business processes out of the box as a starting point – use that as a spring board to move to the next level.

Sandeep Walia is the President & CEO of Ignify. Ignify is a technology provider of ERP, CRM, and eCommerce software solutions to businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify is a Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner and ranked in the top 18 Microsoft Dynamics partners. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine.

Every online retailer, at some point during their evolution, asks the question:  “what should my conversion be?”.  The hope is that, if you could only find this holy grail number, it would serve as a panacea for all of your online business ills and allow you to finally know where your online business should be when optimized.  If you jumped when you saw the title of this article, we can assume you might be one of these hungry souls.  The good news:  you can finally stop looking.  The bad news:  it’s because there is no answer. 

Somebody asked me about hiding a field called 'Workspace' from Calendar: New Event or Edit existing event.
I was wondering that there should be some easy way to hide any field available on 'New' or 'Edit' page.

I googled around, and I found couple of responses, for example:

1. Modifying the NewForm.aspx page in SharePoint Designer 2007, hiding existing List Form Web Part, and then adding Custom List Form. Then delete the Workspace row from the form.

   Let me talk about the disadvantages of this option:

   • a. Attach File will NOT work. You need to investigate further to make it work. Still painful process.
   • b. Try to create a 'Recurring' event; it will not work as expected.

   Considering these advantages, I thought that this is very tedious process, and one has to make the changes to all calendar lists. And then this change is required to be done on NewForm.aspx and EditForm.aspx. How about that? So it is really very painful process.

2. Another option is again, modifying the NewForm.aspx or EditForm.aspx, and add following script (However, it didn’t work for me though), but it is worth adding it here, just in case, if people are trying to solve the problem in this manner.

   <script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
       var toolbar = document.getElementByName("<name attribute value>");
       toolbar.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.style.display = 'none';
       toolbar.parentNode.parentNode.style.display = 'none';
   <script>

   This can be added in asp:content ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderTitleAreaClass".
   Once again as I said that it didn’t work for me, but it can be done this way too.

3. Recommended way. First thing is that it is a feature, and can be found (12 Hive folder) at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\Template\Features\EventsList. Yes, it is event list feature. Now the modifications are required in schema.xml that can be found under Events folder (folder location, once again, is ..\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\EventsList\Events). This file can be modified in notepad.exe.

   While looking into the Calendar List Settings in Internet Explorer, I noticed that this field 'Workspace' is of type 'Cross Project Link'. This is important to remember, and search 'CrossProjectLink' in schema.xml file. I noticed there is only one instance of it.

   Secondly, the field is SharePoint field so looked for the corresponding class which is SPField. I looked into SPField Class Members on MSDN and found a couple of interesting properties (and used two of them), for example, ShowInDisplayForm, ShowInEditForm, ShowInListSettings, ShowInNewForm, ShowInVersionHistory, ShowInViewForms. I was interested in ShowInEditForm and ShowInNewForm properties only. So in schema.xml file, for Field of Type="CrossProjectLink", added these two properties as attributes, and set the value="FALSE".

   IMPORTANT: attribute value should be set as ShowInNewForm="FALSE" (case sensitive). If you set the value as ShowInNewForm="false", it will not work, so be careful here.

   My final <Field> is looked like:

   <Field ID="{08fc65f9-48eb-4e99-bd61-5946c439e691}" Type="CrossProjectLink" 
       Name="WorkspaceLink" Format="EventList" 
       DisplayName="$Resources:core,Workspace;" DisplayImage="mtgicon.gif" 
       HeaderImage="mtgicnhd.gif" ClassInfo="Icon" 
       Title="$Resources:core,Meeting_Workspace;" Filterable="TRUE" 
       Sealed="TRUE" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" 
       StaticName="WorkspaceLink" ShowInEditForm="FALSE"
       ShowInNewForm="FALSE">

   As mentioned, I added only two attributes. Save the schema.xml file.

Now the task is to publish the feature with changes. And since the feature is already installed and activated, so it is mandatory to de-activate it and then un-install it.

To smoothen the process I wrote two batch files one each for de-activate, un-install and install, activate:

script for uninstallfeature.bat

path="C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN"
cd \
cd "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN"
stsadm.exe -o deactivatefeature -filename EventsList\Feature.xml -url http://moss2007:8551/sites/Demo1
stsadm.exe -o uninstallfeature -filename EventsList\Feature.xml -force
cd \

It is straight forward to understand, however, if you want instructions for the same, can send me request.

script for installfeature.bat

path="C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN"
cd \
cd "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN"
stsadm.exe -o installfeature -filename EventsList\Feature.xml
stsadm.exe -o activatefeature -filename EventsList\Feature.xml -url http://moss2007:8551/sites/demo1
cd \

URL is required to install the feature, in this script, I am deploying the feature for a specific website.
Don’t forget to do ISRESET

I am done, and when I tried to create or edit a calendar event, I don't see 'Workspace' option in there. I double checked that attach file is working, and I am able to create a 'Recurring' event too.
It is really very useful tip for me, so thought let me add it here for future reference too.

This post is written by Atul Shukla. Atul is a Manager in the Microsoft SharePoint Practice at Ignify. Ignify has over 300 person years of SharePoint experience with multiple SharePoint implementations. Ignify also internally leverages Microsoft SharePoint as a tool to collaborate across all its offices and for all its projects. For help on SharePoint Services email us at sharepoint@ignify.com