David Meego - Click for blog homepageSome more great news after the release of new builds of our products.

This morning (Perth Time) I had an email from Terry Heley from Microsoft with a link to a pre-release (ISV Drop) of the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics GP version 18.6 (October 2023) release. This download is provided to the ISV community to help them prepare for the final code when it is released.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageOne of the big new features for Build 30 of GP Power Tools is the Note Fix Utility.

In a perfect world the need for a utility to fix issues with Notes would not exist, but this is not a perfect world and some of the design decisions made many years ago when Great Plains Dynamics 1.0 was created in the late 1980’s were a little flawed.

Usually, the first indication to a user that there is a problem with the record notes is when they open a note, and its contents don’t seem related to the record they are currently editing. This is a sign that there are cross linked notes caused by the same Note Index being assigned to more than one record in the company. These duplicate Note Indexes are a symptom of more complex issues. It is best to actively look for and fix the issues before they result in cross linked notes.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageI was approached recently about an issue that a customer was having with the ServiceUpdateVendor Service Procedure being called as a Service Based Architecture (SBA) web service.

The web service call had worked perfectly on the system before upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics GP 18.5. Once they had upgraded, it was failing with an error.

Here is how GP Power Tools fixed the issue.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageWinthrop Development Consultants as an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) is fully committed to the Microsoft Dynamics GP product and its ecosystem.

Our products are designed to work only with Microsoft Dynamics GP and have been created based on missing features and functionality that the GP community have asked for.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageCommunity Summit 2023 in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA is fast approaching. David Musgrave from Winthrop Development Consultants will be running two extremely valuable training courses and now it is time to register.

The conference will be held on the 15th to 20th October 2023. There will be pre-conference training in the week before, from 9th to 13th October 2023, as well as Academy days on the first two days of the conference itself.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageFollowing on from the article published on Friday about why Microsoft Dynamics GP uses many 8 upper case character table and column names:

This article consolidates many of the articles written about using MS SQL Server with Dexterity and also publishes original documentation from 1999 on how SQL Server support was added to Dexterity.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageA recent post on LinkedIn asked about the reasons that most of the column names in Microsoft Dynamics GP are cryptic abbreviations of 8 upper case characters. My friend and fellow Microsoft MVP, Jen Kuntz (congrats on being re-awarded) responded and in that response tagged me.

I wrote up another comment, and then decided to turn that comment into a blog post….. here it is. 😁

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageI am really looking forward to joining forces with John Kirsch from sa.global to co-host a free GP Power Tools webinar. The session will be an introduction and demonstration of GP Power Tools, showing how it can solve you pain points and make the lives of GP Users, Administrators, Consultants and Developers simpler and better.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageToday, I was asked by a consultant how to parse specific data out of the record note associated with a transaction or master record in Microsoft Dynamics GP using a SQL Server query.

GP uses the SY_Record_Notes_MSTR (SY03900) Record Notes Master table to store a text field of up to 32767 characters linked to master or transaction record using the Note Index (NOTEINDX) field. The next available Note Index is stored in the SY_Company_MSTR (SY01500) Company Master in the system (DYNAMICS) database and is assigned to new records when they are created.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageThis is a further update to the previous versions of the change tracking projects for Customer and Vendor cards:

Based on the version 2 projects, this update adds tracking to the Vendor and Customer EFT Bank Maintenance windows.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageOn the 4th April 2023 Microsoft made an announcement about the future of licensing for new customer sales of Microsoft Dynamics GP. The details of this announcement, my thoughts on it and links to other related articles are available from:

On Friday 14th April 2023, MS Dynamics World and Dynamics User Group held a panel discussion on what the announcement means to the customer base, and it raised the concern that prompted this article.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageAs is becoming a tradition, I will once again be running the 5-day Dexterity training class in the week before the Community Summit conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA in October. Please register for the training now and plan to be in Charlotte for the week before the conference.

Dexterity is the development environment that Microsoft Dynamics GP is built on and the best tool to use for any customization to the user interface of the product. Knowledge of Dexterity is vital for anyone customizing Dynamics GP even when using other development tools such as GP Power Tools – Developer Tools module, Visual Studio Tools (C# or VB .Net) or “End of Life” VBA (Visual Basic for Application).

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageOn the 4th April 2023, Microsoft made an announcement about the future of new Microsoft Dynamics GP sales. While the details of the announcement are primarily behind “partner only” links, I wanted to explain the main points and how the announcement has very little effect for existing Microsoft Dynamics GP customers.

For existing Microsoft Dynamics GP customers nothing has really changed. Microsoft has committed to continuing support and development of Dynamics GP to 2028 and beyond.
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David Meego - Click for blog homepageBack when Australia introduced its Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2000, I designed and developed the Business Activity Statement (BAS) Tax reporting tool which also contained a utility to update tax schedules and recalculate taxes on unposted Sales Order Processing Transactions.

This code was re-used in October 2010 when New Zealand changed its GST tax rate. The code from the BAS reporting tool was copied and placed into Runtime Execute scripts for the Support Debugging Tool (see original article).

This week I was contacted by James Bacon from Green Rubber – Kennedy Ag as he wanted to use the code again to update some transactions when a tax rate had changed. While the code did “mostly” work, this was an opportunity to update the code to improve it and use more features in GP Power Tools.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageMicrosoft Dynamics GP has added support for Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) to the emailing functionality inside Dynamics GP to allow it to connect to Microsoft Exchange, now that simple authentication is no longer supported.

However, there is no MFA functionality for logging into the Microsoft Dynamics GP application itself… until now.

[Edit] Build 33 of GP Power Tools now supports true MFA on login using an Authenticator app with a One Time Password:

Using GP Power Tools Developer Tools module, with a single after login trigger, it is possible to force the request to connect to Microsoft Exchange and close GP if the connection is not authenticated.
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David Meego - Click for blog homepageYes, you heard correctly. Winthrop Development Consultants is thrilled to be Title Sponsor of the March 2023 DynamicsCon Virtual Conference taking place on 15th and 16th of March 2023.

Make sure you register to attend this free online conference to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics GP and related products and technologies.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageThis article has two purposes. The first is to highlight a very useful script published by Michael Krasivsky from The Resource Group back in 2016. The second is to explain how easy it is to use the GP Power Tools SQL Execute Setup window to execute scripts against multiple databases.

Microsoft Dynamics GP provides access to all the SQL Resources (Tables, Views, Stored Procedures, etc.) using the DYNGRP SQL role. For this technique to work correctly, all GP users need to be assigned to the DYNGRP role and all SQL objects need access “Granted” to the same DYNGRP role.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageBack in mid-January, I had fantastic long chat with Christian Buckley from buckleyPLANET about my journey to becoming a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional), my time with Microsoft, my work since starting Winthrop Development Consultants and my hobbies with music, Lego and robots.

We actually spoke for quite a while before the recording started and it was really enjoyable to compare notes with Christian as some elements of our respective career paths were very similar.

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David Meego - Click for blog homepageI received a very interesting email yesterday. AccountingWare, the people behind the ActivReporter reporting tool for GP, created a report on the future of Dynamics GP based on the results of a survey of 164 Microsoft Dynamics GP customers.

This report supports anecdotal evidence that most of the Microsoft Dynamics GP customer base is happy staying with Dynamics GP for the foreseeable future.

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