Microsoft Dynamics GP

If you attended our Dynamics GP or Dynamics SL events (the 2 events attracted almost 100 people) last month here in Minneapolis, you already learned these things.  You might still like the refresher course or having these items documented for you rather than “in one ear …”.  Before the session, many of the attendees were concerned about having to move from the comfort of FRx to the newness of Management Reporter.From a user’s perspective, there are big technical improvements and nice features such as the long awaited “undo” capability, but for the most part the rows, columns and trees are the same.  Catalogs with FRx are now called Report Definitions with MR. That’s not a change that anyone is going to have a hard time … [Read more...] about Comparing FRx to Management Reporter

I selected this title because I felt a bit out of touch when I read this morning that 96% of people under 50 (I’m 49) have Facebook accounts that have been used in the past month.  I don’t have one.Ok, my wife Kate reminds me that I’m a little uptight even by accountant standards-but are there that many people really wasting that much time?You can’t reclaim time spent so why is everyone goofing off so much?  I have to admit that I cringe when I see my kids on Facebook.  Really-you have nothing better to do than look at pictures of your friends and post “updates”?Perhaps managing a professional services firm, where our main asset is time, makes me sensitive about this.  In a good post by Synergy Business Solutions in Seattle, Michael … [Read more...] about Time, Time, Time is on My Side (Yes it is)

When would you opt for Dynamics GP, rather than Dynamics AX?  What about Dynamics SL?  What features and capabilities does that product have making it a better fit?  Is Dynamics NAV sometimes a better fit?Full disclosure, our business sells and supports both Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL.  Not only do we sell and support those products,  we love them.For Dynamics SL, this product still has lots of capabilities that the other 3 have some of but not with the depth and ease of use that SL can deliver.  Most of these capabilities are in the project series.For example, a Dynamics SL user can enter a sales order for product that is part of a project and have the lines on the sales order go to different tasks on a … [Read more...] about Comparing Dynamics Products

ZDNet published an interesting post on a blog that is linked here toward the bottom of this post.The article is about how some IT Professionals see Microsoft providing them less “love”, that is free services, convenient user interfaces, free software, etc.As Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL partners and consultants, our MSDN memberships and Gold Status have not changed in ways that favor our developers more than our infrastructure support person for these platforms.  Here in Minneapolis, not much has changed in terms of how Microsoft treats us perhaps in part because we have developers and an IT Professional to support our Dynamics products.The argument is that Microsoft sees the cloud as a development platform and is beginning to court … [Read more...] about Software as a Service and IT Professionals

If you make bad backups for 6 consecutive months and your system doesn’t crash-are you lucky? …or does it depend on whether or not you learn that you’ve been making bad back ups and change your behavior?As Dynamics Consultants based here in Minneapolis, we try to check clients’ SQL backups each time we go out. It’s not always possible. Sometimes the list of things clients need help with doesn’t fit in the time for ensuring clients are getting a good backup.More often than we would like to admit, our Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL consultants learn the database maintenance plan has stopped running for a variety of reasons, for example: ran out of disk space, the owner of the backup job had a password change, a configuration change in SQL … [Read more...] about Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL-Making and Testing Backups

Boyer & Associates staff just held two well-attended Dynamics events at the Microsoft office in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) area.Many of the presenters prepared for more than 8 hours to present what they had to show despite most already having over 10 years in experience with their chosen product-Dynamics SL or Dynamics GP.What surprised me the most about the surveys and thoughts on the minds of our (mostly) Minnesota based clients?  The focus that clients still have with getting the data out in a format that is useful to them.For both events-Dynamics GP clients were focused on Smartlists, Smartlist builder and some nice add-on tools from Rockton software.  They liked seeing Management Reporter and what those … [Read more...] about Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL Reporting Reflections

My enthusiasm for cloud ERP has dampened a bit in the past few months.The only cloud outage that affected me even slightly was when Blogger lost its ability to allow me to post anything for 20 hours.  It certainly was nothing like having no access to your email or the outage that Platform as a Service vendor Amazon experienced recently.My concern is that if the cloud can still be this fragile for giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon…are any of us truly safe in the cloud? Sure they have better data centers for backup, but what if we can’t get access at all for even a day or two?  It’s not like being asked to hold your breathe for a couple of days, but it might feel a bit like being water boarded for an hour or so.I read a good … [Read more...] about Cloud Outage

This month Intuit and Salesforce announced an alliance.  As a user of Quicken at home, I have to say that it’s easy-which is nice.  The software can be secure also if you are using it at home as well.  In fact Quickbooks is a nice solution for many small firms.Our firm here in Minneapolis is only 3 million in sales and we would consider using Quickbooks if it weren’t for the fact that we support 225 Microsoft Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL clients and we need to know those programs.  Clients like to know that we use what they are buying.On the other hand, we have replaced Quickbooks with Microsoft Dynamics solutions often.  Why?  It’s certainly NOT because their accounting firms want us to.  I’ve found often that smaller accounting firms … [Read more...] about Quickbooks versus Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL