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
Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL Reporting Reflections
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
Dynamics SL 941 Updates Available
Microsoft recently updated their 941 Crystal Report for 2011 to rename and remove the fields previously used for the Hire Act. The report and revised SQL statement can be downloaded from CustomerSource or PartnerSource.If you are a Dynamics SL payroll user, and are not familiar with either of these Microsoft sites, but need to download these updates, please feel free to do so from CustomerSource if you are on a plan.If you are a Boyer client and you would like a step-by-step walk through in how to download these types of files in the future, please feel free to contact Colleen McCoshen (CMcCoshen@boyerassoc.com or 763 412-4309).If you are not a Boyer client, your existing Microsoft Dynamics SL reseller should be able to do this for … [Read more...] about Dynamics SL 941 Updates Available
Survey Results Dynamics SL 2011 Launch Event
55 of the 56 attendees answered “Yes” to the question “Was your time investment in the event worthwhile?”. The other response was “Yes and No”-but with positive comments to the other questions.Many of the surveys enjoyed how prepared Jon Augdahl, Erik Vigesaa, and Tim Jones were. Most commented that they enjoyed the open-ended question and answer format for the event.20 of the surveys mentioned that “Quick Query” is a big improvement. 15 pointed out that they enjoyed learning about Management Reporter’s replacing FRx and the many enhancements this upgrade will provide.Several commented that they liked the paper saving options such as being able to publish any report to a Sharepoint site as well as the ability to attach documents to … [Read more...] about Survey Results Dynamics SL 2011 Launch Event
Cloud Outage
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
Dynamics SL and Sharepoint
Jeff Suwyn wrote a nice article on the community site with regard to using Dynamics SL 2011 in order to publish reports to a Sharepoint site rather than printing the same reports over and over again.As many of you know, the Period Sensitive Aging reports in Dynamics SL allow you to print aging reports “as of” March 31st or September 30th but most Dynamics SL reports do not have this capability.With the newest version of Dynamics SL, you can now publish or “print” your standard and customized reports that use the ROI screen (the screen you see before you print a report that allows you to sort/select or load a template). This means you can use this function to print any report that changes where you might want to file “what was the … [Read more...] about Dynamics SL and Sharepoint
Cloud Computing for Project Managers
Today someone emailed me an excellent article on Cloud Computing for Project Managers. The article was in a very project-centric magazine promoted by the Project Management Institute.One practical point made in the article is that “instead of installing, upgrading and maintaining multiple licenses for a particular piece of software, or upgrading hardware, IT project team members will have time to make sure their colleagues understand the software, to implement best practices, to deal with security and train. This will free up their schedules to lend their expertise to projects, presentations, and client issues.”Additional time managing projects and training people on new software is always welcome to just about any software … [Read more...] about Cloud Computing for Project Managers
Quickbooks versus Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL
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
5 Ways to Tell If You are a Dynamics GP Expert
There are so many ways to define “expert.” There is of course "how people perceive you" as in your reputation, but there is also “how expert are you?” You may not have a blog or lots of Dynamics GP cronies to solicit opinions from and yet have 12 years of daily consulting work you've done in the Dynamics GP toolset.The goal of this blog post is more to entertain than to educate, but we do take the “expert” thing seriously when it comes to Dynamics GP. What people think is not always what is real.1. You press the Control Key and the L key together when wanting a field to give you possible values from programs that are NOT Dynamics GP.2. You respond in endless detail, about the pros and cons of creating a new report in GP Report … [Read more...] about 5 Ways to Tell If You are a Dynamics GP Expert
Convergence and Dynamics SL 2011
Are you ready for some big talk? It’s one thing to talk about a software product’s features before you’ve seen them; it’s another to discuss software you’ve actually seen.When Carol Simonson, our Office Manager, first came to Boyer 9 years ago, she and I had a miscommunication. I wanted something about Biz Talk in a proposal. Having just come from the insurance industry and knowing nothing about technology she “translated” this to “Big Talk” for me. Fortunately I caught it and she is wonderfully fun to tease…so here comes some Big Talk on SL 2011.Quick Query is very cool. I’ve spoken to a number of clients that have at some point in their career used both Dynamics SL and Dynamics GP. I always like them to tell me what they like … [Read more...] about Convergence and Dynamics SL 2011
