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September 26, 2005

An Update on the New Name for Great Plains

Microsoft had a Live Meeting type of meeting on the new Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0 – formerly Great Plains 9.0.

Being arithmetically challenged, I miscalculated the started time by one hour and tuned in just in time to download the slide show. Well at least I saved an hour of time.

Going through the slides their tact is the new name of Dynamics GP today. In 2008 they expect to finish Project Green (green for cash?) and all four current product lines, (Dynamics GP, Dynamics AX, Dynamics SL and Dynamics NAV) will be consolidated down to one product, Dynamics. That’s a very tall order and the deadline is only three years away.

They expect to have the new Dynamics GP logo on all product and new Dynamics GP brochures by November/ December of this year. I take that to mean that Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0 will like ship in the same time frame. I’m sure everyone will be overjoyed to do an upgrade over the year-end period.

I wish I could give you more, but that’s all I have for now. They’re supposed to have a Dynamics GP 9.0 sub site up as of today, but so far, I can locate it.

Posted by Ted at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2005

Client Upgrade

Let me talk about more uplifting items.

I recently completed a client upgrade from the Pervasive database to Great Plains on SQL server 8.0. Theirs was a fairly minimal installation. They’re running General Ledger, Payables Management and Bank Reconciliation.

I rather wish I could tell you how much of a struggle it was, but it went pretty smoothly. They use FRx extensively, but the FRx reports migrated very smoothly. The only problem was we couldn’t find one of the budgets for a while, but that was easily corrected.

Posted by Ted at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

SQL Server Price Change

Note to self. As of September 1, the price of SQL Server 2000 Runtime has changed. Previously it was $450 for the server and then $100 per user license. Now it is a straight $190 per user.

That little piece of news just cost me about $1,000. I am not pleased.

UPDATE: It turns out they are extending the old pricing to November 30. They are cutting me a credit memo. Yippe!

Posted by Ted at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

More on the New Name

Microsoft has given me a little more information about the name change. It seems they did their market research and found the name “Dynamics” tested very well. It tested well across international geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic environments.

Their feeling is, the new name will help to sell more software. I’m all for that. I have no basis for criticizing name changes. For those who have known us in the past, they know that Eastern Business Solutions was not our first name. I applaud their efforts to help us VARs sell more software.

With the new name I am reminded of the phrase, “The king is dead, long live the king.”

Posted by Ted at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

IRS Raises Mileage Rate

The IRS has raised the mileage rate to $0.485 per mile. If you keep track of your mileage, the IRS will let you deduct $0.485 per mile on your tax return.

Posted by Ted at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2005

Great Plains Service Pack 3 Released

Microsoft has just announced the release of Service Pack 3 for Great Plains 8.0. If you are current on your enhancement plan, you can download the service pack through CustomerSource. Of course, if you are NOT current on your enhancement plan, Service Pack 3 is unavailable.

To get a list of items they fixed with this service pack, click here.

Posted by Ted at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2005

Some Lessons from New Orleans

Glenn Reynolds has a very good post on some lessons he sees coming out of the disaster in New Orleans.

Posted by Ted at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2005

Great Plains Gets ANOTHER New Name

The marketing people at Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to change the product line names. Previously it was the Microsoft Business Solutions division and the four product lines were Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon.

That’s been changed. The new names are Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and Microsoft Dynamics SL.

The new release for Great Plains 9.0 this fall, is now Microsoft Dynamics GP. I don’t know if it’ll have a version number to or not.

Great Plains USED to be called Dynamics. Then they changed it to Great Plains. Now it’s back to Dynamics again. This is getting confusing.

Posted by Ted at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2005

What Kind of Backup Do You Have?

While watching the disaster from hurricane Katrina I would help but wonder about business and their IT departments. I think all my clients use tape to back up their data. What I wondered was, would tape have survived the floods.

One alternative or backup to tape is online backup. I friend has been using Data Deposit Box and likes it. In this instance you back up your data to their site. They charge you a monthly fee that, per megabyte, is cheaper for large amounts of data. 20GB of storage runs you a little under $70 per month.

In the case of New Orleans, many businesses may not be able to get back into their offices for several weeks at minimum. With an online backup system, you could set up in another office anywhere in the country, download your data and start operation.

I don’t know if this is a good solution for everyone, but I think it’s worth consideration.

Posted by Ted at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2005

How to Help the Hurricane Katrina Disaster Victims

FLOOD AID UPDATE: Here are some places you can donate to hurricane Katrina relief: American Red Cross

Catholic Charities is involved, and probably has lots of resources to draw on in the heavily Catholic New Orleans area.

Austin Bay is recommending Episcopal Relief and Development.

Liz at Rightalk suggests that animal lovers donate to the Humane Society.

Here's a link to Mennonite Disaster Services. The Sanity Inspector says they're highly efficient.

Reader Peter Viditto recommends The Mercy Corps

Here's the link for Methodist Relief.

Lisa Larkin recommends Operation Blessing.

The Salvation Army does good work. (WalMart just gave them a million dollars, but that's just the barest beginning of what's needed.)

Hugh Hewitt recommends Samaritan's Purse

Scott Ott recommends Southern Baptist Disaster Relief.

Here's the link for N.Z. Bear's Katrina relief aggregator page.

Here's FEMA's list of recommended charities.

From Instapundit

Posted by Ted at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

Even More on WinFS

I'm rather enthused over the new WinFS development. Here is an idea from the WinFS blog that might give you some insight into what WinFS can do.

A couple weeks back, I was sitting down with one of the Microsoft recruiters (Mary) and she was showing me her computer. I was amazed. See, Mary's problem is that she can have days where she has 5 candidates on campus simultaneously in different interview loops that consist of 6+ interviewers each. She also has a long list of candidates that are coming for loops in the next week, all of which require immediate attention. So the net of it is: Mary's mailbox is a nightmare. Throughout the day, she’s getting bombarded by email. She'll get a mail that a candidate missed his interview shuttle and needs to be picked up. Or a candidate got lost and wandered into BillG's office accidentally. So all day long, she sits at her computer and adds followup flags to her mail, just trying to stay one step ahead of the onslaught.

Enter WinFS. Now she goes into her recruiting app and builds a query. She calls it "candidates that are interviewing today". She comes back to her email, and selects "mail related to ” and selects “candidates that are interviewing today" as . She sets her mail app to color that set of messages bright red. And that's it. Each day, the list of "candidates that are interviewing today" gets automatically adjusted, and the right messages in her email are now marked red. And the best part is that the mail app and the recruiting app don’t need to know about each other – they just store items and queries in the filesystem and the other app picks them up and uses them.

I read that and say, "Ya, that's pretty cool." But then suppose you could do this? Suppose with the WinFS system you could come into your office in the morning and pull up a list of all customer you need to call for money? Or pull up a list of all orders scheduled to ship this week that you want to make sure go out the door?

That presumes I understand what WinFS does and I'm not sure of that.

Posted by Ted at 01:08 PM | Comments (0)