Setting up Test and Historical Companies

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David MeegoI did not start this thread, but I thought I would give a bit of insight into the subject.

Vaidy Mohan on his blog posted about Test Company Message while logging on to Dynamics GP. 

I initially thought he was talking about the sample company date dialog which is discussed in my post Hiding the Fabrikam sample company date dialog.

After some discussion with my good friend Robert Cavill (previously a GP consultant, now GP Administrator at a customer site), I realised that the dialog Vaidy was talking about was not the date dialog, but a separate dialog entirely.

That got me curious and so I opened Dexterity and a source code dictionary. I then used the resource explorer to search for "<TEST>" in the messages.  It was found as message ID 1877.  Using the references button, I found the uprconvhistory global procedure which is called by the OK Button change script on the Switch Company form.  This procedure was changed in Feb 2004 (for v8.00 onwards) to look at the Company Name to see if it contains message 1877 "<TEST>" or message 1878 "<HISTORICAL>" and will then display one of two warning dialogs:

  • Warning Dialog 1734: This company is set up for testing only. Do not use this company when processing live data.
     
  • Warning Dialog 1735: This company is used for storing historical information only. Do not use this company when processing current-year data.

Robert tested this on his system and said that this is really useful and should be a Knowledge Base (KB) article. So I searched the Knowledge Base system and found the following article.  It is "hidden" by the fact it refers to Payroll, which is not used outside of North America, but the concept of changing the Company Names works well.

How to create a test or historical company in Payroll or in Canadian Payroll in Microsoft Dynamics GP (KB 885542) Secure Link

I think having a dialog after login in conjunction with the colour coding for Test and Historical companies would be the ideal solution.  Use the link below for the VBA code to change the background colours for each company.

Hybrid - Changing Screen Colours Depending on Company Example

So thanks Vaidy for bringing this to our notice and to Robert for prompting me to investigate further.

[Edit] This feature is now available from Administrator Settings window of the Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP, have a look at the Support Debugging Tool Build 11 released post for more info.

David

05-Jun-2009: Added link to Support Debugging Tool Build 11.