Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal 10.0: Opening the door

It was not a big secret, that former versions of Business Portal for Great Plains, such as 3.0 and 2.5 had limitations in allowing you, software developer to modify existing business portal applications, such as HR & Employee Self Service, Order Management, Requisition Management.  With version 10.0 BP enables you to use Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP backoffice integration.  In the past, not sure if somebody used this techniques – you could create ASPX .Net application in Visual Studio 2005 (C# OR vb.NET), where you interact with GP database and object via eConnect and then integrate this .Net application into MS Dynamics GP Business Portal.  This approach would have certain known restrictions, however to some extent it should be considered as doing its job.

Business Portal highlights.  For those, who are new to BP implementation:

• Requisition Management.  This module is successor of former eRequisition.  Requisition Management is now BP module and you have to purchase Business Portal user licenses to get sufficient number of RM users (about $40 per user)
• HR & Employee self service.  If you have concerns of cost of mailing payroll checks direct deposit info to your employees – BP does the job by secured web lookup via Employee Self Service module
• Notifications.  Email notifications were lagging competition in BP 3.0, we need to further research 10.0.  Competitors, Ariett for instance were offering notification in HTML format with hyperlink to the Requisition Approval (in the case of ReqNet module) for decision maker, allowing her/him to bypass the necessity to login into ReqNet through Active Directory security realm