Web Front for Microsoft Great Plains – overview for programmer
 by: Andrew Karasev

Microsoft Great Plains is very popular ERP solution from Microsoft and it is natural desire to enable data entry or querying for the Web users. In this short article we’ll try to give you the most typical cases, when our customers request web-design for Microsoft Great Plains. We are also trying to be technical and give you some valuable information on Great Plains back end tables structure and data feeding. Beginning with Microsoft Great Plains version 8.0 the only database platform available is Microsoft SQL Server – this makes web-enabling even easier and you, developer can use .Net technologies, such as ADO.Net (C# or VB.Net) to publish MS SQL Server data on the web.

    * Sales Order Processing – this is the most typical case – when client wants to enable order or invoice entry plus have order status querying mechanism. Well, depending on the complexity of the project you as programmer can deploy such SDK tool as eConnect, but in most cases you probably better off with direct transact SQL programming – stored procedures or queries. The tables you need to take care off are: SOP10100 (SOP work header), SOP10200 (SOP work lines), SOP30200 (SOP history header), SOP30300 (SOP history lines), RM00101 (customer master). Our recommendation – do not try to implement immediate allocation for your orders/invoices – this will make your SQL programming very complicated. You should probably have your Great Plains order takers to do allocation by orders batch. The really simple solution would be also using Great Plains eOrder – however this web publishing module has poor customization options and uses legacy ASP technology

    * Purchase Order Processing – this is not that popular, but we see the cases when customer wants its purchasing agents use web front to make requisitions. You have to deal with Great Plains Purchase Order Processing tables. The other option to use eConnect.

    * Payroll stubs – this is on very high demand – if you have several hundred employees – you are required by law to enable web-pay-stubs or have them mailed in paper to your employees

Good luck with customization and integration and if you have issues or concerns – we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577! [email protected]

About The Author

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving clients in Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is CMA, Great Plains Certified Master, Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer. You can contact Andrew: [email protected].

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