New and improved Great Plains for 2010.
Earlier this year Microsoft released their long awaited 2010 version of the Dynamics – GP product (formerly known as Great Plains) http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en/gb/products/gp-overview.aspx
In line with all new versions of a product, this release builds on existing as well as providing new functionality. Most importantly, however, is the continuation of the Microsoft policies of utilising functionality from other Microsoft products, providing rock solid integration to these and ensuring that the user experience is as familiar as possible.
In these difficult economic times cost savings are being demanded in a number of areas, implementation costs being no exception. In the light of this, Microsoft has updated their ‘role centre’ functionality to enable sets of similar user accounts to be created quickly. Dynamics GP2010 is also shipped with more than 400 pre-built reports for SQL Server Reporting Services and Excel. Whilst these may well need minor adjustments they are a good starting point to reducing implementation time and costs. Implementation time can be further reduced by the simple fact that Dynamics GP2010 is an intuitive product to use, the more so for users familiar with Microsoft Office applications.
Dynamics GP2010 includes integration capability with other Microsoft products such as Word, SharePoint and Excel, including the new PowerPivot business intelligence tool. For those companies already utilising the Dynamics CRM product an adaptor is available to integrate vital sales data between the applications.
As regards bespoke customisation, Dynamics GP2010 is compatible with the industry standard Visual Studio development tool, which in itself allows for any customisations to be easily separated from the core code making upgrades easier. Workflow functionality is provided by Windows Workflow Foundation, workflows can be created via SharePoint which means that non finance users can be involved in a process without necessarily needing a finance system licence. SharePoint opens up yet further licence saving possibilities, as relevant financial data can be published directly to SharePoint, for example purchase orders or cost centre budgets.
In addition, Microsoft is talking more and more about ‘unified communications’ (http://www.microsoft.com/uc/default.mspx). It is not hard to envisage this type of technology becoming an everyday reality across multiple systems including your finance system. Some of this technology is already available with GP2010, for example; if you have instant message with Outlook via Microsoft Office Communicator, you can enable single click access to your customer record within GP2010 to update that record. This can be viewed as a ‘nice to have’ for some organisations perhaps, however a number of the other areas of functionality outlined above are very much mainstream and make GP2010 an extremely viable proposition right now.
The world of finance systems has changed and technology advances such as those described above provide a powerful case to invest in a new system such as Microsoft Dynamics – GP2010. If your current system is constraining you then it may well be time to take a closer look at alternatives.
