E-commerce and Online Business Reference

Microsoft Dynamics GP, formerly also known as Great Plains Dynamics, eEnterprise, is flexible and powerful platform for eCommerce B2B and B2C Shopping Cart integration. If you are ecommerce programmer, please read this introduction level publication on integrating ecommerce shopping cart into SOP Invoice or Sales Order in Dynamics GP. Being bound by article genre rules, we will try to be reasonably laconic and balance technical (for developers and programming) and functional (for IT managers) information. We will pay some attention to Microsoft Dexterity and its possible role in GP eCommerce integrations:

1. Sales Order Processing Invoice or Sales Order as ecommerce shopping cart destination. In our opinion this object is the most natural for being considered as shopping cart destination in GP. SOP Transaction has document header, where you specify customer, doc number, dates, addresses, shipping info, tax and other document level info. Plus, it has Items lines, where you add your shopping cart items and link them with the information on availability in stock, allocation (when applicable), back ordering, or you can even have your line items as services, or non inventory items, where you are not bound by Inventory tracking. If you think SOP Transaction is the right object for ecommerce shopping cart integration, you need to choose the integration tool or technology

2. Dynamics GP Dexterity proprietary technology. We do not recommend you to do Microsoft Dexterity programming and customization in order to integrate eCommerce shopping cart, because other tools could do similar job without custom programming, especially Dynamics GP Integration Manager. If you have serious reasons to try Dexterity route, we recommend you to discuss Dexterity ecommerce integration with your Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner, or with experienced Dynamics GP Dexterity programmer. Dexterity might be the way to go, when you require that Great Plains becomes your master application, from where you initiate eCommerce shopping carts pulling, and where you define your Inventory Items, Price Lists, Discounts (Trade Discounts on Sales Invoice Document level) and Sales Campaigns and push these objects to your ecommerce web application

3. GP Integration Manager. If you are representing reasonably small or mid-size ecommerce retailer (B2B or B2C ecommerce) or wholesaler (B2B ecommerce) and you are sort of OK with the option of daily ecommerce to GP integration (one time per day) and your ecommerce transaction volume is below thousand new orders per day, we recommend you to review IM in details and only consider moving to the next step is you tried IM in and out and there is something special and important to your ecommerce business processes, that Integration Manager cannot do. OK, having said that, let’s review IM. This tool is end user friendly (you may still need Dynamics GP consultant, if you feel that your organization doesn’t have IT internal support). You start with creating Data Sources – we recommend you either to export ecommerce shopping carts into text (comma or tab delimited) files or even better Create Advanced ODBC Data Source, based on SQL View, including options to create cross platform SQL View in MS SQL Server, with linking to Oracle, MySQL/PHP/Linux, Microsoft Access, Lotus Notes. Second step – you link your Sources (you will need at least two for ecommerce shopping cart, as Document Header and Lines should be integrated). In IM you can also do VBA scripting and in these scripts you can address custom tables in GP via Microsoft ADO technology, if required. Plus, as additional (but not the last tip – call us for more info) tip you can schedule IM Integration to run every, let’s say, twenty minutes to make ecommerce to GP integration behave as it is in quasi real time

4. Dynamics GP eConnect. This integration tool and SDK could be deployed in Microsoft Visual Studio C#, VB.Net or other programming language project as libraries and help with Sample Codes (it is Software Development Kit). eConnect enables real time integration, as you can include eConnect libraries into ecommerce Web Application. If you are experienced or even making progress Microsoft Visual Studio Programmer, and you are familiar with C# (Microsoft Java blend) or VB and have some exposure to SQL Stored Procedures and XML – eConnect should be open for you to experiment. Initially eConnect was dedicated to Great Plains eCommerce programmers to integrate ecommerce web applications with Dynamics GP 7.0 and 7.5 (later on eConnect was expanded and now for Microsoft Dynamics GP version 10.0 it covers most of the core modules: GL, SOP, POP, Inventory Control, Receivable Management, Payable Management, Payroll, General Ledger, Project Accounting, etc.)

5. Direct SQL scripting for Dynamics GP ecommerce integration. If you try it from scratch – it might be too long way to come through all the errors and bumps, so we recommend you to consider Alba Spectrum Order Connector, which gives you intuitive set of SQL Stored Procedures to call directly from eCommerce web application to integrate shopping cart as GP SOP Invoice or Sales Order. If you would like to try it on your own and you need some intro on Microsoft Dynamics GP tables structure and data flow training, we are happy to offer this service USA Nationwide and Internationally

6. eConnect Automatic Batch Posting Extension. Yes, we have Alba Spectrum Posting Server, which does just that. By Dynamics GP architecture fundamental reasons, Batch Posting is in the hands of Dynamics GP users: batch should be reviewed, modified and approved for being posted (as Dynamics GP is mid-market Corporate ERP Platform)

7. Dynamics GP ecommerce in international environment. Microsoft Dynamics GP version 10.0 is localized and available in English speaking countries: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, UK. If is also localized in French Quebec province of Canada. There are reasonable localizations for Spanish speaking Central and South America and Caribbean. If your local country ecommerce requirements include Unicode characters support (China, Japan, Korea), Dynamics GP Dexterity doesn’t support Unicode out of the box. We recommend you to call us for the options available for your specific Unicode based language. There is reasonable support for Microsoft Dynamics GP in Arabic alphabet – for Saudi Arabia and all the Persian Gulf States, plus Egypt, Syria, Lebanon. If you are in Afghanistan – Dari language is based on Arabic alphabet and could be deployed on Microsoft Dynamics GP ecommerce platform with Arabic language support extension

Andrew Karasev asked:


Ecommerce integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP is possible on various levels.  If you are starting ecommerce project from the ground, you may look at packaged ecommerce products, available as custom add-ons to Dynamics GP.  However, and this is what we assume in this small publication, a lot of ecommerce businesses have their websites and the integration should be on the level of custom connectors: pushing new customers, new catalogs, new orders and probably payments to Great Plains.  Please, consider these tools and solutions:

1. eConnect.  It is set of stored procedures with interfaces for Microsoft Visual Studio ecommerce developer.  If you have programmers in staff, you should review eConnect with them and decide on the integration specifications.  One thing often comes to the question – eConnect doesn’t have functionality to post Great Plains batches, in order to post Dynamics GP batches directly from ecommerce portal, you should consider deployment of Alba Spectrum Posting Server

2. Order Connector.  This product is supported by Alba Spectrum.  It allows you to deploy simple ecommerce integration logic to Great Plains Sales Order Processing module.  If this is your case, Order Connector allows you to call its stored procedures directly, which might give certain performance gain over eConnect and you do not have to learn eConnect.  For small Great Plains Dynamics customers, who are on older GP versions: 8.0, 7.5 – you could also use Order Connector, and eConnect for those versions was in introduction phase

3. Integration Manager.  IM allows you to setup integration on the GP user level with some custom tweaks: VBA scripts.  It should solve your ecommerce integration needs, if real time integration is not required – you can either have GP user to call integration on demand or schedule IM via Windows macro routines (out of scope for this article)

4. Direct SQL Custom Stored Procedures.  This approach may look natural for SQL programmer, however in this scenario you will need to replicate GP business logic in your scripts.  Just consider the fact, that eConnect already did exactly this – it replicated Great Plains Dexterity code in encrypted SQL Stored Procedures, so maybe you should consider more efficient programming time spending simply by deploying eConnect instead.  However, this is possible approach and theoretically you can replicate data feeding to Dynamics GP tables as if it is done via user interface

5. If you have further questions or concerns, please feel free to call us: 1-866-528-0577, help@albaspectrum.com



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