July 01, 2005

Crystallizer

I was at a client site over the last few days and he’s trying out a Great Plains add-on called Crystallizer. Crystallizer allows you to print Crystal reports from inside Great Plains.

It also allows you to add security to those reports so only certain users can run certain reports. In addition you can batch your Crystal reports and print a whole bunch at one sitting.

Currently the client prints about 60 reports at month-end. I set up almost all his reports in Crystallizer and then combined them into a batch. Now he has only to load the printer with paper, start the reports running and go home for the weekend. It will make his month-end much less stressful.

Another advantage to Crystallizer is, you don’t need to have Crystal installed to run the reports. I have too many clients that have Crystal installed on multiple stations, even though they have only purchased one copy.

By federal copyright laws they are required to purchase the multi-user version of Crystal. The Crystallizer product takes care of the multi-user requirements.

I’m still learning all the in’s and out’s to the product, but so far it looks very good.

Posted by Ted at 01:21 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

Integrate your Great Plains to the web

I just went through the demo for eStore Advantage from Nodus Technologies.

It integrates Great Plains to the shopping cart on your web site. When a customer finishes his order on the web, it shows up almost instantly in Great Plains.

This is an expensive product - $12,000. But it also includes online credit card authorization for Great Plains as that is part of eStore Advantage. It is highly customizable. They don’t do the implementation, but they provide a lot of documentation on how to implement it.

In the demo, the customer email address was what distinguished them as a unique customer. But that was on the web site. The customer email address is NOT the customer number in Great Plains.

You can also push inventory information, (pricing, qty on hand) back up to the web site.

I will say this, it IS expensive, but it is very cool.

Posted by Ted at 12:45 PM