Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains has several options to enable web ordering.
Traditionally Great Plains Dynamics/eEnterprise had eOrder. This is an ASP-based ordering application, enabling you to place or retrieve your Sales Order Processing (SOP) Sales Orders over the web.
There were several drawbacks however with eOrder. You should be the customer in Great Plains company database to be able placing the orders. Also if you were planning to customize eOrder you could only do cosmetic style changes only if you wanted to alter
scripts on the ASP pages then you would have very serious eOrder upgrade issues. Upgrade simply wipes out your custom scripts and you had to reapply your customization to new version enriched ASP pages. Instead of following the way to move eOrder to ASPX or .Net platform.
MBS introduced eConnect, enabling web designer to connect eCommerce site to Great Plains backend. This is very elegant module and solution, however we are hearing a lot of complaints from developers on eConnect restrictions.
- SOP Invoice posting. It is not enabled in
eConnect. However you should probably first understand the architecture of
Microsoft Great Plains. Order takers supposed to enter Sales Order and submit
it (place in the batch and save) to the manager for approval (taking off
transfer/print/post holds). eConnect enables you to create or update Great
Plains objects, but it doesn’t allow you to process them (post) this would
open a gap in the security/approval cycle. - Order Transfer.
Again this is similar problem to the invoice posting. Both Order and
Invoice could be subject to holds and approvals. eCommerce logic might need
partial or full order transfer to invoice or even backorder, based on the item
availability status.
Why would you then need
to purchase eConnect? Maybe just go ahead and program the connection in SQL
stored procedures? The answer is eConnect allows you to allocate items in
Great Plains Inventory Control module. It would take you a lot of time (if you
are new to Great Plains tables structure and never coded in Great Plains
Dexterity). Plus eConnect allows you to create and update customer record in
Great Plains this is however relatively simple to imitate in the stored
procedure.
Then what is the
solution?
- Do not allow order
transfer and posting through eCommerce.
This is probably the best advise we could give you just create orders, or
invoices, leave them to the Great Plains user to approve and post. However in
some cases it is absolutely critical and required - Look for Invoice
posting stored proc on the market.
You are not the first and not the last one to face this dilemma somebody
already has it implemented (SOP10200, SOP10100, SOP30200, SOP30300 tables) - Small Business
Financials. In your case you
need the whole set of stored procedures to enable eCommerce
Great Plains version: more likely you are using eConnect
for Great Plains Standard or Great Plains Professional 7.5, 8.0 and in the
future 8.5 or 9.0
Good luck in e-Commerce developing and if you have
issues or concerns we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us
a call 1-866-528-0577!
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba
Spectrum Technologies USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization
company, serving clients in Chicago, California, Texas, Florida, New York,
Georgia, Arizona, Minnesota, UK, Australia and having locations in multiple
states and internationally (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is CMA, Great Plains Certified Master,
Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer. You can
contact Andrew:
andrewk@albaspectrum.com
Source: http://www.365articles.com
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