Released on = April 18, 2007, 3:47 pm

Press Release Author = Alba Spectrum Group

Industry = Computers

Press Release Summary = Typically retailers use combination of point of sale
software and ERP or accounting to automate financials. High-end ERP providers, such
as Oracle E-Business Suite, Navision, Axapta have their own POS module, and you
should evaluate these options to see if these ERP specific retail application fit
your business needs.

Press Release Body = Alba Spectrum Group, http://www.albaspectrum.com
help@albaspectrum.com 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918

Typically retailers use combination of point of sale software and ERP or accounting
to automate financials. High-end ERP providers, such as Oracle E-Business Suite,
Navision, Axapta have their own POS module, and you should evaluate these options to
see if these ERP specific retail application fit your business needs. Microsoft
Great Plains typically integrates with Microsoft Retail Management System (MS RMS).
You should consider the level of integration: do you plan just to pull transactions
from RMS to GP or you plan to control RMS inventory and purchasing plus all
financials from GP. The answer may vary, but these are the mayor first questions to
answer.
. Pushing transactions to RMS. This question might be considered as simple, however
we saw programmers, who were trying hard to manipulate RMS, especially on the store
level, by inserting records into RMS store database tables. This route leads
nowhere, because RMS will wipe out these 'illegal' records by analyzing its
historical processed worksheets. All communications between RMS headquarters module
and the stores are done through RMS worksheets. And this is good news for you - as
a programmer, you should program worksheet and mark it as approved to manipulate RMS
logic. You typically do it on the headquarters level - and RMS will propagate your
logic down to the stores
. Pulling transactions from RMS to GP. Here you have more flexibility and you can
directly populate Great Plains SQL tables or use business-validating logic of
eConnect. If you are Microsoft Visual Studio developer, you probably prefer
eConnect approach as it has Web Services interface. We heard questions about
eConnect performance, and we would like to confirm that eConnect deploys SQL stored
procedures and so should be very efficient
. Auto Posting. We were hearing multiple complains from GP developers about
eConnect limitations - one of them is inability to post Microsoft Great Plains sales
order processing batches automatically from custom logic. Well - the answer might
be doing your homework and look for eConnect extenstions, one of them is Alba
Spectrum posting server
. Microsoft Dexterity extensions. When you contract Microsoft Dynamics ISV partner,
you usually get Microsoft Great Plains Dexterity so-called chunk to be integrated
with your GP workstation to enable custom logic. Be sure that you are getting
DYNAMICS.DIC dictionary file with your customization scripts in it. This will be
required if in the future you will decide to switch to another Dynamics GP
customization partner to support or upgrade your alternate GP logic


Web Site = http://www.albaspectrum.com

Contact Details = Andrew Karasev http://www.albaspectrum.com help@albaspectrum.com
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