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Great Plains Upgrade: notes from the field – Alba Spectrum

In this small article we would like to share our Microsoft Dynamics GP version update experience, where upgrade was done for relatively large GP databases: over 70GB the largest company and we had 5 companies of similar size. Upgrade path was 7.5->9.0 service pack 2 and then to 10.0 service pack 1. In any case latest service pack is recommended if you move your GP version to 10.0. We understand that upgrade to 10.0 was really enabled for the majority of Great Plains customers only in November 2007, when Microsoft Business Solutions released GP 10.0 SP1
1. Prior to 10.0 SP 1 upgrade. When SP1 was not yet released, we tried probing upgrade and got issues with POP10100 table, which was pretty “popular” issue, known in 7.5 to 9.0 upgrade. Also Microsoft upgrade 9.0 SP2 to 10.0 (no service pack) took substantially longer than upgrade from 7.5 to 10.0. In our case in moving to version 10.0 we got upgrade issues for table IV10200. So, our recommendation – don’t even try upgrade to 10.0 without service pack applied to your 10.0 upgrading workstation.
2. Service Pack 1 fixes. First of all – the upgrade performance increased – the upgrade time was reduced from over 20 hour to about 5 hours. Next – the problem with IV10200 disappeared.
3. Check Links recommendation. In our case check links prior to upgrade would take several days to run, which was not practical. However when upgrade was done and we went into production on version 10.0, we saw multiple places where check links would be a help: drilling down to GL open transactions, trying to open query to PM posted documents are two places. We immediately scheduled checklinks to run over next few weekends to cure all the companies. Warning for customers with custom integrations, where data is moved to GP through SQL stored procedures – in your case check links may find integration business logic validation issues, so check with your custom integration developers if check links is safe thing to try
4. FRx. This time the decision was made to move FRx to Citrix 32 bit (as you may know it is not fully compatible with 64 bit Citrix at this time). FRx 6.7 move was surprisingly difficult – we got a lot of problems, related to Citrix security restrictions. Also we got issues related to export to Excel – as Microsof recommended – there should not be spaces in path and file name, otherwise export to Excel produces errors
5. GP Security migration. As Microsoft explained – in order to migrate old-fashioned security for users from 9.0 to new security model in 10.0, you GP workstation installation path should not have spaces – which was a bit surprising as regular upgrade process creates GP workstation in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics\GP, and this path obviously has spaces. Please be aware about security upgrade problem
6. Reports problems. Also, we got issue with Purchase Order Blank form. By whatever reason temp table, which is replacement to POP10100 had empty company name, and ship to address fields. In order to work around we had to replace this table in ship to address calculated fields with Site master table – this did the job, however it took us several hours to analyze the problem as not every PO was printed with blank ship to address. Company name was blanked on every report, until we replaced it with Company Name global field. Also – this seems to be more often happening problem for 10.0 than it was happening for earlier versions – Reports.dic becomes corrupt after several modifications of one of the reports – the cure is simple: you make a copy of “corrupt” Reports.dic and import reports into fresh Reports.dic. The corruption in our cases behaved in the inability to add new text fields – these new field were immediately turned to unknown field, when we moved cursor out of them
7. GP Integration Manager in Citrix. IM didn’t manifest any issues, when it was moved to Citrix 32 bit (the reason to stop it at 32 was eConnect .Net components compatibility)

Andrew Karasev, Alba Spectrum Group, http://www.albaspectrum.com , help@albaspectrum.com. 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918, serving GP customers USA and Canada Nationwide, local service in Chicago and Houston. We specialize in technically challenging GP upgrade, integration, customization projects, including GP support for large corporations. We also do Great Plains Dexterity programming: upgrade Dex modifications, Dexterity custom reporting, Crystal Reports. Give us a call if you need in-depth Great Plains technical expertise