News from Convergence…

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It’s day three here in New Orleans, and the past few days have been full of sessions, meetings, demos, and newsworthy announcements!  I want to quickly recap just a few of them that our GP Insiders not attending may find interesting…

  • Extender gets a facelift: One of our most popular add-ons has always been Extender, which gives users the ability to easily add additional windows and fields to an existing GP form/window.  We are happy to announce that some very cool functionality will be added to Extender in our SP4 release (slated for a July drop), allowing you to add entirely independent forms to Microsoft Dynamics GP without having to attach them to an existing GP form/window!  This will open up entirely new ways for partners and end users to customize Dynamics GP, all within a completely NON developer user interface.  We’ve done a number of demos and a couple of sessions on this functionality this week, and so far the reaction has been VERY positive.  One more note about this…the price for the Extender module will be going up on August 1st (an increase of around $700), so BUY IT NOW!  That’s right folks, Extender is on sale right now so grab this great module before the price goes up to reflect the increased functionality coming in SP4. :)
  • Using Dynamics GP and CRM?   If so, you will be excited to hear we officially announced the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics GP this week!  The CRM Adapter will be an out of the box integration tool linking key data within CRM and Dynamics GP, and will be available late summer 2009.  This is a COMPLETELY new integration toolset, built from the ground up by members of the Fargo development team.  Similar to the Extender sessions/demos, we have gotten some great feedback this week on the new integration from our Partners and Customers.  I am sure we’ll go into this topic much more in a future post.
  • Version “11” progress: We are roughly 12-14 months away from the release of Microsoft Dynamics GP version “11” (this is the internal name…we’ll likely ship with a different moniker for this release), and we’ve been busy this week giving Partners and Customers a sneak-peak of some great functionality coming in this release.  Here are the big version “11” demos we’ve done this week:
    • Printing a GP form (such as a Sales Order) to Microsoft Office Word, along with giving users the ability to print any GP report/form to Word if they so choose.
    • Emailing groups of documents (such as Purchase Orders) with just the click of a button (tons of functionality behind this…stay tuned for more).
    • Allowing those you do business with to login to their own Customer or Vendor Portal, where they can view key information related to their transactions in Dynamics GP, or even make changes to select data within your system (a vendor updating the shipping dates on a PO for example).
    • Charts, graphs and gauges galore!  Entirely new charts, graphs and gauges will be available on both the Business Portal dashboards as well as the Dynamics GP homepage.
    • Want to get more details after viewing the new charts, graphs, or gauges? Version “11” will allow you to drill down from those graphical elements to reports that contain the detailed transaction data behind it, and then drill down all the way from those reports back into the Dynamics GP inquiry windows! 

Those are just a few of the newsworthy happenings going on this week at Convergence.  I’d keep going, but I’ve got to get over to the Convention Center for Kevin Schofield’s keynote.  Kevin is the GM of Microsoft Research and will be showcasing some of the awesome technology his group is creating behind the closed doors of MS Research.  It will be a fun glimpse into the future! 

Take care GP Insiders…we’ll catch you later!

AndyW