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Thursday, August 19, 2010

Dynamics GP Customizations (Best Practices, Extender, Macros, Modifier)

Dynamics GP has a trunk full of features, but there will be cases when you need to customize GP for certain specific business requirements or to optimize certain processes. This post covers some great references in the Dynamics GP community related to customizations in Dynamics GP. It covers topics like – when you should customize GP and when you should avoid customizing GP. It also includes some must read best practices when you do have customizations and various options like – Extender, Macros, Modifier.

Related categories on GPWindow are INTEGRATIONS which covers eConnect, Integration Manager, Table Import and Webservices and DEVELOPMENT which includes – Dexterity, Developer Toolkit, GP SDK, Tables Information, Testing, VBA and VS Tools for GP.

Getting Started with GP Customizations?

If you are getting started with customizations check out this post by Michael D. Johnson II for Good Reasons to Customize GP. In this post Michael explains how customizations help – by giving people time to work on more value added activities, saving money and eliminating redundancy.

On the flip side you will find MVP Mariano Gomez’s article -  Customizing Microsoft Dynamics GP? 5 Excuses You Will Want to Bury Once and For All! - in which he discusses customizations implemented for all the wrong reasons and makes suggestions on how to handle them. You can read David Musgrave’s thoughts about this here.

There is another wonderful post - Customizations that you do not need to do by Patrick Roth where he discusses 3 scenario’s in which you can avoid customizations - “Scenario 1: I need to be able to change the menu item names in Dynamics, Scenario 2: I need to change the Internet Information categories in the Internet Information window from what Dynamics GP uses, Scenario 3: I need to change the User Defined 1 prompt in the Customer Address Maintenance window to a specific value”. Patrick gives simple solutions.

Automating Distribution

There is a separate sub-section for Automating Distribution, for a reason. If you use customizations – you should review these articles to save you a lot of headaches. David Musgrave has written two very detailed articles -  Automating Distribution of Customizations Part 1 and Automating Distribution of Customizations Part 2. David discusses various configurations for Customizations – Everything Local, Everything shared, Dictionaries Shared, Custom Dictionary Shared and finally the best option- Everything local with automatic updates and explains it in detail. 

See the related funny posts here - The term "Musgravion" and Wikipedia and The famous David Musgrave.

Extender

In the Extender sub section, you will see posts related to creating Extender windows, modifying GP windows using extender with some examples and Reporting with Extender data. You can see some resourceful posts on Reporting on Extender data in GP, Adding Extender Data to SmartLists by Victoria Yudin, Transferring Extender customizations from one company database to another by Mariano Gomez. Mark has nice tip about Extender -  Weekly Dynamic: Deleting Extender Window Deletes Data as Well.

There’s this one great post for Adding Extender Windows to GL Transaction Entry Lines by David Musgrave where he talks in detail about an Extender window to capture additional information for distribution lines on the General Ledger Journal Entry window and the related - VBA - Displaying Extender Data for GL Transaction Lines on the GL Inquiry window. There are some troubleshooting help articles by Vaidy - Why Extender Information does not get transferred? and Creating Detail Window in Extender - Error & Resolution, and David - Removing Extender Data when deleting Transactions or Lines

You also might want to check out David’s posts about the new features that came in Extender with GP 10 SP 4 - Extender is coming, what now for the other customization tools.  See about 67 more articles related to Extender here  - Extender (67 Sub-Items)

Macros

In the Macros sub section, you will see posts to create macros to do various tasks in GP, scheduling macros to complete tasks in GP and some advance macro tips by MVP's. To get started with Macros, you can see this great post by Amy Walsh on using Macros in Dynamics GP.  There is a useful post by Mark Dynamics GP Macro Commands – where Mark has posted a useful command reference document by Kevin Gross. Mark also has a useful post about scheduling Macros - Weekly Review: Schedule Your Macros and one on tips for Macros Weekly Review: Advanced Macro Tips.

You can see a post - Macro to provide access to Transaction Dimension Codes to Users by Sivakumar Venkataraman(often required), some macro examples like Running a macro to automatically close GP and How to use Word Mail Merge and Macros to Import Data(My personal favorite) by David Musgrave. See other Macros related articles  here - Macros (16 Sub-Items)

Modifier

In the Modifier sub section, you will find posts related to expanding GP windows functionalities by using Modifier. Mariano Gomez (MVP) delivers a 3-day Online Modifier with Visual Basic for Applications workshop that will more than get you started with Modifier. Mariano also has the must read- Best practices for labeling customized windows with Modifier and VBA in Microsoft Dynamics GP.

You can see several example posts like Hybrid - Dynamically Populating a Modifier Added List Example, Expanding the GL Transaction Entry Scrolling Window, Reading and Writing Data with ADO Example, Extending the length of a Field Example, Adding a field to a scrolling window using ADO Example and more by David Musgrave.

There are useful articles here like - Creating Drop Down Lists using Modifier with VBA and Quick Lookups with Modifier & VBA by Michael D. Johnson II.

See the modifier articles linked here - Modifier (15 Sub-Items)

See all Microsoft Dynamics GP Customizations related articles here - CUSTOMIZATIONS (128 Sub-Items)

------ Via http://www.gpwindow.com/CUSTOMIZATIONS_/

Are there any articles related to the topics above that I missed ? If yes, add your comments.

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