Microsoft Dynamics GP: French, Dutch & German versions – overview

Microsoft is on the way of Project Green realization.  Former Microsoft Great Plains, now Microsoft Dynamics GP version 9.0 is marching across the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa.  Historically, however there is the whole cluster of former Great Plains Software customers in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Poland.  With the acquisition of Navision Software, Denmark based software development company, Microsoft seems to be more active in promoting Navision in its traditional markets, such as Europe with its complex taxing system, payroll diversification and languages.  Great Plains Dexterity (the engine of Microsoft Dynamics GP) is not that flexible in multi-language support, plus being designed as database and computer graphical platform transferable – Dexterity foundation in our opinion doesn’t provide international environment flexibility, this is probably why Microsoft emphasizes Navision on emerging markets: Russia, Brazil, Eastern Europe, etc.  It seems that Microsoft will have German, French (mainland France, Quebec will have Canadian French version supported) and Dutch Great Plains version translated later in 2006 and version 9.0 has all the chances to be the final version of Great Plains – Microsoft Dynamics GP for these countries.  We specialize in Great Plains remote support Worldwide with substantial cost optimization and we do serve European clientele with traditional experience in Great Plains, now supporting Navision and Axapta technically challenging projects.  In this small article we will talk about the possibilities.

• Concerns.  Well – if you have GP as your corporate accounting system with substantial amount of customization and reporting, tuned for French legislation – your concern has all the rights for existence.  It is typical situation when Navision partner has very limited knowledge in Great Plains and GP->NAV conversion might be a nightmare.  Project Green should deemphasize application specifics and make all the application databases: GP, NAV, AX, SL, CRM be accessible through similar interface.
• Dexterity Customizations.  In our opinion, if you are in Europe – you should analyze and rethink your customization strategy.  You should probably move away from Dexterity toward web interfaces and even integrate your custom forms into MS Outlook (similar to Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Small Business Accounting)
• Migration.  At this point this is now decided yet.  Let’s wait and see where we will have to go.  Hopefully Project Green will stick to its schedule.

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