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What other Microsoft products work with Dynamics GP?
It might surprise some people how pervasive Microsoft products really are in the business community. Microsoft is the largest Business Software Company in the World. If you are using a PC to view this, there is over a 90% chance it is running on Windows, and if this is your work PC it is even higher - and that is just the start. When you really take stock, it is very likely Dynamics GP Works Like and Works With the many other Microsoft applications your people and organization use every day.
It is likely you are Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel, and Outlook as your primary ‘Personal Productivity’ software tools (as Microsoft likes to call them). Microsoft Dynamics GP enables you to draw on the functionality of these familiar programs to organize business data and perform your everyday tasks.
For example, from within Microsoft Word, you can build queries that will extract data directly from Microsoft Dynamics GP to create mail-merged customer or vendor letters, such as purchase orders and invoices.
From Microsoft Excel, sophisticated queries can be made into the GP business data, producing real-time financial and other reports for in-depth analyses. With Microsoft Excel, data from Microsoft Dynamics GP can be sent directly into a familiar spreadsheet template to produce powerful yet user-friendly reports.
So for example, Finance professionals can review budgeted versus actual figures, cash flow and customer payables, and other metrics to track performance. These reports can be set up to provide an Excel-based solution that not only displays automatically refreshed real-time data from Dynamics but also enables the user to insert data back into Microsoft Dynamics.
If there is one very noticeable change in how we conduct business over the last 10-15 years, it is our nearly complete reliance on email. Not only has email become the primary method of communication, but Microsoft Outlook has become the essential application that very nearly everyone working in a business organization uses to continuously exchange vital information with their coworkers, vendors, customers and other business partners. And Microsoft Exchange is the product business relies on for this critical mission because its proven cost effective reliability.
Integration with the Windows Active Directory opens up Outlook email as an integrated messaging tool for automatically communicating your essential business information including exception alerts, management reports and transaction documents such as Purchase Orders and Invoices. Wouldn’t that be helpful?
Microsoft Windows is the dominating client operating system with over 90% market share. Microsoft Windows Server is now on the sixth generation with steadily improving performance reliability and scalability. You can rely on Windows Server to manage your Dynamics GP application.
Windows active directory efficiently shares and manages information about your network
resources and users so you can quickly provide your users with access to the Microsoft
Dynamics application areas that they’re entitled to with one-time authentication. And it
maintains your personal settings when you need to work remotely.
The ability to securely and reliably store, manage and distribute data out to users is the key to any business application. SQL Server 2008 provides businesses with a high performance database platform that’s reliable, scalable, and easy to manage.
SQL Server Reporting Services in Microsoft Dynamics GP reports that are designed to work within Dynamics GP. And the SQL Server Reporting Services wizard simplifies even further the deployment of many SQL Server Reporting Services Reports.
The reports you use are then easily accessible, including one click access from your personalized My Reports list of frequently reports. Then from within the report, quickly access essential information in Dynamics GP with the ability to drill down to details within reports.
Dynamics GP comes with a pre-built application to deploy Dynamics GP data onto the web called Business Portal. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server works directly Business Portal so you can pull data from both SharePoint libraries and lists, as well as from Dynamics GP. Navigation is consistent and seamless across the two applications.
In addition to data management, industry standard XML web services enable information exchange between SharePoint, Dynamics GP and other applications. You can create dashboards of related information collected together and displayed in one place.
And of course you can publish various reports pulled from Dynamics GP data including SSRS, Excel and Management Reporter. These reports can then be easily accessed, circulated using workflow, and collaborated on across the organization no matter where people are physically located.
Dynamics GP system can be extended by using several different technologies, including several tools in the .NET development environment. New windows with the same look-and-feel of the core Dynamics GP system can be created and application triggers can be coded to augment the existing functionality.
The Dynamics GP Developer’s Toolkit contains .NET Web services and the eConnect API to allow external applications to interface with Dynamics GP thru completely automated, loosely coupled data exchanges. The Dynamics GP runtime engine runs on the .NET Framework. The efficiency of the .NET Framework, including its standard Microsoft development tools and the rest of the Microsoft Application Platform greatly simplifies creation and deployment of services-enabled solutions.
The key asset that lies at the center of every business is customers. CRM is a technology that allows organizations to track and leverage every customer interaction to maximize revenue opportunities and improve customer loyalty. It helps organizations to better acquire, manage, serve, and extract value from their customers while improving operational efficiency.
Microsoft provides an integration adaptor to exchange information between Dynamics GP and CRM. In some cases, the GP application is the system of record (Products, Pricing, Unit of Measure, Sales Invoices, etc.). In the case of Sales Orders, these documents can be created in either system. For Dynamics CRM Accounts and Contacts and Dynamics GP Customers, these master records can be created and maintained in either system. Updates to records in either system will trigger a subsequent update in the other application to maintain unified, accurate and up to date information across the organization.
The very short answer: Compatibility and Integration with the best and most popular infrastructure and personal productivity products available.
Microsoft makes significant investments in delivering products and technologies that work together so you don’t need to worry about compatibility and integration challenges. Instead, you can focus on managing your business or organization and improving your operations.
Microsoft Dynamics GP business software achieves this for you automatically by bringing your critical business data together with the other Microsoft products and technologies to provide you with a wide choice of capabilities to best facilitate your daily activities.
Leverage your Microsoft Dynamics GP business data with other highly popular and best-of-class Microsoft products and technologies that work even Better, Together. Contact Crestwood Associates, your Chicago, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana source for consulting and support of Dynamics GP and it's supporting technologies.
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