Great Plains eConnect Posting Dilemma

If you are eCommerce developer, who builds your web site with MS Visual Studio.Net editions and C#, VB and SQL scripting, you should know your options to post GP batches, especially in SOP module directly from your e-commerce application.  In this small article we would like to address this issue in the form of FAQ dialogue:

1. Microsoft Dexterity Posting Architecture.  Sales Order Processing module is tightly integrated with Inventory control and it assumes that you first create so-called work document: invoice, quotation, sales order or back order.  Then you have two options – you can post this invoice (or transfer sales order to invoice or back order) or place it in the batch for future posting.  In both scenarios posting is something that should be done by GP operator and it is not open for automations.  This is why eConnect doesn’t allow you to post GP transactions or batches
2. eConnect architecture.  eConnect was specially designed for eCommerce programmer and developers.  The core of eConnect is the set of encrypted SQL stored procedures, allowing you to create and change GP master objects: employees, customers, vendors, GL accounts, and transactions: SOP Invoices to give you example.  However eConnect doesn’t cross the border of Great Plains Dexterity limitations, including posting the documents
3. Integration Manager options.  Great Plains IM can feed documents to GP from your legacy applications, it can also help you with EDI (Electronic Documents Interchange).  However IM is restricted to Dex architecture, the same situation as eConnect,. Plus you should be aware that IM is currently on the way to be rewritten in eConnect for boosting IM performance as SQL stored procedures (eConnect base) are faster than Dexterity cursors
4. Posting Server as Extension to eConnect.  Albaspectrum Posting server deploys Dexterity native posting logic, it calls Dex posting procedures from Dex custom module.  All you as SQL or C# programmer need to do is deploy ADO.NET and place ecommerce batches, ready for posting in custom approved batches table. From this point custom Dex logic will do posting job