GP News from Convergence

I wanted to share some of the news coming out from Convergence 2009, and there is some very exciting news about upcoming features that will be available for Dynamics GP.

First the timeline:

Currently scheduled for July, 2009, Microsoft will be releasing Dynamics GP Service Pack 4. As with other Service Pack releases, SP4 for GP 10.0 will offer both “fixes” for known problems and the release of new features and functionality. Later in the summer of 2009, Microsoft will release a new Adapter for connecting Dynamics GP to Dynamics CRM. Finally, we are now approximately one year away from the next release of Dynamics GP, known internally as GP 11 (although I expect it will be released as Dynamics 2010, to follow the naming conventions for the Server and Office product lines).

Ok, no more waiting, here is the NEWS:

With SP4, GP 10.0 will now have a major expansion of the features of Extender. If you have not seen extender before, it is a very easy to use tool that has allowed GP users to create additional windows for capturing data not ready available in standard GP windows. Much more than simply a set of User-defined fields, Extender could create lists, dropdowns, links to other windows, checkboxes, etc. After the data had been captured, the data could then be exposed within the Smartlist for analysis and review. Now we get news that Extender will be expanded to allow for the creation of brand new windows NOT related to any existing GP windows. This will include both Master Data and transaction processing, essentially providing GP with an easy to use process for creating brand new functionality!

Connecting GP 10.0 to CRM 4.0, up til now, has required the use either eConnect, SmartConnect from eOne or the Scribe tool. At Convergence, Microsoft announced the upcoming release of a new adapter, written by the technical team if Fargo. This is an entirely new tool, written from a clean sheet approach, and is not a reworking of the previous Microsoft Adapter. I am very excited to see what the Fargo team has accomplished, but I have very high expectations for this tool.

Finally, some sneak previews of what we can expect in GP 11. Much tighter integrations between GP and Office Word as a report writer, mass emailing of outbound documents instead of the current one document at a time approach, and an expansion of the Customer Portal and the Vendor portal. I will be adding more details about GP 11 as they become available, hopefully as early as next month.

I must give credit to the new Dynamics GP community blog for sharing these details from Convergence. You can find the blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/gp/, and I highly recommend it to everyone in the GP community. Produced by the Microsoft Dynamics GP Product Management and Marketing team, it is a welcome addition to the GP community of bloggers, and should be an excellent resource for upcoming product details and questions.