Your Microsoft Dynamics GP Product Management & Marketing team:
Errol Schoenfish
Pam Misialek
Jay Manley
Jen Dorsey
Gerice Anderson
Darrin Hawley
While this blog is technically "owned" by the Microsoft Dynamics GP Product Management and Marketing team, it truly belongs to ALL of those who call themselves a part of the Microsoft Dynamics GP community!
I started to write a post on the Technical Conference coming up and realized other fellow bloggers probably beat me to it. Since David did a great job talking about it, I’ll just point you to his post.
Developing for Dynamics Blog Post on Conference
Mark your calendars for November 9-11 to be in Fargo. We are limited to 450 people, and the registration numbers are climbing. So sign up early!
Pam
Microsoft Dynamics GP Service Pack 4 is now available for download!! It includes specifications for the International ACH Transaction (IAT) and Royal Bank of Canada EFT Changes.
This download also includes the highly anticipated release of our new Extender Functionality. To learn more about the Extender functionality, check out the links below.
Partner Source: Functionality for Extender in Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Service Pack 4
Customer Source: New Functionality for Extender in Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Service Pack 4
Service Pack Downloads
CustomerSource
https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/downloads/servicepacks/mdgp10_patchreleases.htm?printpage=false
PartnerSource
https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/downloads/servicepack/mdgp10_patchreleases.htm?printpage=false
Take care,
Weekly, the Dynamics GP team is posting a ‘Did you know?’ series. We give tips, tricks, and general comments around features and functions that already exist in Microsoft Dynamics GP.
Our challenge to you is…how much do you really know about Dynamics GP?
This week I’m going to break from tradition slightly as our topic isn’t really a feature directly in Dynamics GP. Our topic this week is actually a feature in Excel and SQL Server that our Dynamics GP Customers and Partners absolutely MUST know about called the Data Mining Add-ins!
If you haven’t been able to tell already, we here at the Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP blog are pretty big on the Excel reports that are available in Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 (see previous blog posts about Excel here). They provide real-time data (no more manually exporting or refreshing reports), they can be shared with the entire organization (with flexible security of course!), and they let everyone analyze their Dynamics GP data with one of the business world’s favorite tools when it comes to slicing and dicing information. If those aren’t reasons enough for you to deploy these reports immediately, I think this cool Add-in for Excel and SQL Server may be the tipping point!
Once the Data Mining tools are installed, you’ll find a couple of new Toolbars in Excel that let you do some REALLY great analysis of your data. Here is a screenshot of the Analyze tab that comes with the SQL Server 2008 version of the add-in. The one button I have showed a number of times recently is the “Shopping Basket Analysis” option.
This feature churns through your detailed sales history and picks out the items in your inventory that tend to sell with one another…highlighting the most commonly matched pairs of items that are good candidates for cross-selling and/or promotional bundling. It even computes the “lift” for each combination of items to help you understand the potential impact to your bottom line if these items were paired more often. Let me show you an example of the output from this particular feature on an actual Dynamics GP Report (the SalesLineItems Default.xlsx report):
In the example above, let’s say a Home Electronics business wanted to analyze their sales history to see which items were commonly being sold together. Now look at Row 5 on the screenshot above. The output is telling them that the item “Receiver 2.1 Channel Model 03” sold 23 times, with 13 of these sales also including item “LCD Television Model 01” (for a linked sales percentage of 56.52%). The average value of these combined sales was $2,272, so if combined together for all 23 sales, the overall value (or “lift”) would be over $52k. The business now has a firm understanding of which items commonly sell together, which may help them train their sales staff on the best cross-selling opportunities, or perhaps create some promotional bundles to help boost sales.
That is the type of analysis companies typically pay loads of money for with complex and expensive Business Intelligence solutions. If you are running Excel 2007 and Dynamics GP 10.0 with SQL Server 2005 or 2008, you can have this type of analysis today…FOR FREE!
You can download the Add-in for your specific version of SQL Server here: Add-in to Excel 2007 for SQL Server 2008 Add-in to Excel 2007 for SQL Server 2005
I should point out that only the SQL Server 2008 version of the Data Mining Tools contains the Shopping Basket Analysis feature I described above. They added some new analysis features in the 2008 version, this being one of them. However, there is a whole slew of other analysis tools I haven’t even had a chance to play around with yet that I am guessing our Dynamics GP customers would find very beneficial. Download them and try them out today!
PS: Partners, if you want to demo this to your prospects or customers, here is a handy DemoMate file you can leverage!
AndyW
We need to hear from you….
Have a great story to tell about a GP customer who recently replaced Oracle, SAP, or another Tier 1 competitor to save money like the one told here:
http://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2009/08/stila-cosmetics-selects-dynamics-erp-over-oracle-and-sage/
We have a great opportunity to secure additional press coverage with these competitive migration stories. Send your customer stories to mbsgp@microsoft.com to help spread the word!
The Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP is a great tool that can save you time and money. Many partners are already using it and have given stellar reviews.
Why is the tools so great? It is an application that has a collection of utilities and tools to make your solution easier to support and debug issues. From a high level, here are just a few things you can do with it:
These are just a few of the benefits to the tool. For more Detail about the Tool check out the Developing for Dynamics GP blog.
David Musgrave has a new post out with a FAQ that is fantastic. Click here for FAQ. Check it out.
Customers, if you would like the tool, please contact your partner and work with them on a plan to get it installed.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones who is already running the RTM version of Windows 7 on my primary laptop. I had been using the Release Candidate that was available to the masses earlier this year, but as soon as the corporate IT guys made the RTM version available, I had to get it installed. I am not alone when I say that my Win7 experience so far has been great, and it's obvious our Windows team has made some very nice improvements over Vista and XP. So it makes sense that considering the recent announcement that Windows 7 will be generally available starting in October, our team has been getting more and more questions like “When will Dynamics GP be compatible with Windows 7?” Well, the good news is…IT ALREADY IS!!
That’s right…you can run Dynamic GP 10.0 on Windows 7 the minute you are able to get your hands on it. Our test team has already completed compatibility testing of the Win7 bits, and our support team just recently added a notice to the System Requirements page posted to PartnerSource and CustomerSource. It isn’t in big bold letters on the page, but it does indeed state the following in the Additional Information section:
Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 will be compatibility with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 once it has RTMed.
There are no plans to make versions 9.0 or before compatible with Windows 7, so if you are an existing customer eager to move to Win7 but you haven’t yet upgraded to Dynamics GP 10…what are you waiting for?! You should make immediate plans with your Partner to get upgraded so you can start taking advantage of the new features in Win7 along with ALL of the great things we delivered in Dynamics GP 10.0!
I think our customers will love the increased performance, faster boot-times, ease of maintenance and more when making the move to Windows 7. Users will also like the sleek UI, the “fun” graphic capabilities (see this for an example), and improved navigation features that really do make you more productive as well. And thanks to the great test team we have here, you can rest assured that all this goodness and more will work just fine with your Microsoft Dynamics GP system!
Our topic this week is Manufacturing MRP Enhancements!
Why this feature is cool!
Manufacturing never looked so good! The manufacturing team has completely redesigned the MRP windows in Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 to lead to unprecedented user experience improvements. Here is a quick list of something that you’ll want to look into.
What does it look like?
Pegging Inquiry:
MRP Projected Available Balance Inquiry:
Thanks,
Ben