If you are supporting Microsoft Dynamics GP in your organization (you may have Dynamics GP version 11.0, 10.0, 9.0, 8.0 or 7.5 or earlier Microsoft Great Plains 7.0 and even earlier Great Plains Dynamics and eEnteprise 6.0, 5.5) and you are now facing Great Plains customization project, this small article should help you in initial orientation.
Our goal is to orient you on the subject of Dexterity pluses and minuses and where you can deploy it in your software development project and where you have to look for alternative Dynamics GP programming tools:
1. Dexterity history. Great Plains Software introduced Great Plains Dexterity in earlier 1990th as its new graphical Corporate ERP application architecture for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh - Great Plains Dynamics and Dynamics C/S+. Dexterity was and still is the shell,
written in C programming language, which gives you (or at least was giving you at the time of introduction and few years after) Database and Computer Operating systems independence (who could know those funny day which OS will win and stay: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Solaris, Unix; or which DB platform is to stay: Btrieve, Ctree, Oracle, making first steps Microsoft SQL Server?).
2. Dexterity Customization distribution. Typically you work with Dynamics.Dic dictionary, where you include new Forms, Windows, Tables, Procedures, Functions, Triggers, and other resources, it is possible to alter existing Dexterity Forms and Windows. Then when you are done with modifications, you export Dex new logic (Extract.dic file) and this file is ready for packaging (you create so called Dexterity chink file). The chink file should be copied into user Dynamics GP folder - and next time user logins he or she will get the prompt to include new code. By accepting to include, Dexterity chunk will expand itself into new Dictionary file and will add new lines into Dynamics.set file
3. Dexterity Programming language. Dex has its own Sanscript semi proprietary scripting language. Dexterity Sanscript is probably not too complex to understand and begin programming. However the challenge is Dynamics GP tables structure and business logic (which is sometimes referred as Great Plains Dynamics GP Source Code Programming - you organization, or likely Microsoft Dynamics GP partner should have access to Dynamics.dic dictionary with Sanscript codes in it - if you are GP customer, your Dynamics.dic dictionary has all the Dex Sanscript codes stripped out)
4. Dexterity advantages. If you program add-ons in Dex, your logic is integrated into Dynamics GP User security realm. Dexterity also could help you with very intrinsic logic, such as Batches posting initiation from your external application (for example eCommerce eConnect - we have special product Posting Server, which deploys Dexterity and enables ecommerce web application direct batch posting to Microsoft Dynamics GP)
5. Dexterity challenges. It is not technically open source and it is not Object Oriented programming language. If you are generic Microsoft Visual Studio C# or VB .Net programmer, you should not expect Dexterity to be your next programming language over night, over the weekend, or even over the month. Dexterity is not open for Microsoft Dynamics GP customers (if you have challenging customization project, you should find Dynamics GP Partner, who has access to Dexterity Source Code)
6. Alternatives to Great Plains Dexterity. Microsoft Business Solutions places its Corporate ERP applications and their modification tools into the healthy competition. If you are not happy with GP Dexterity, please look at eConnect SDK for Microsoft Dynamics GP. eConnect is in fact the set of encrypted SQL Stored procedures and those procedures replicate (with some improvements, hopefully) Dexterity business logic, however eConnect only covers master records and work transaction, and it doesn't have functionality to post Dynamics GP work documents individually or in the batches
7. Dynamics GP Dexterity Challenges in International environment. If you read paragraph #1, C programming language in time probably had no idea about such requirements and internationalization options as Unicode (Chinese, Korean, Japanese hieroglyphs). What is going on currently with Dexterity. At the current version, 10.0 Dexterity doesn't support Unicode and if you need some support for Chinese characters, please call NJ Star and see if they could help you out with Dynamics GP Chinese characters entering
8. Please, feel free to call us: 1-866-528-0577, help@albaspectrum.com
