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.

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.

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!

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.”

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I have watched about half of the video and I’m not sure I fully understand all the ramifications of WinFS. It looks like a totally new way of looking at what is on your computer. In the past I have always through about files and where they are located. It looks like WinFS sort of takes files apart and lets you see not only what’s inside but to find data there too. It’s sort like a database system that sits on top of the current file storage system.

I would guess it’s going to expand how much space everything takes on a hard drive. But it should make it much easier to find data you are looking for.

Take a view of the video and see if you can figure out what it does and is it a step or leap forward?

I know practically nothing about WinFS except the hype. From what I read it appears to be a smart file storage system for your data. It allows you to more easily and quickly retrieve data from your computer. The WinFS is supposed to be available for both Windows XP and the Windows 2003 servers.

From what I read, it supposed to be the next best thing to sliced bread, but so far I know few details. If it’s as good as they claim, it could be a real blow to Mac.