Microsoft Dynamics GP Great Plains East European Options Overview For Consultant

Great Plains Software Dynamics and eEnterprise were popular in Europe, prior to Microsoft acquisition of Great Plains Software, and since then Microsoft acquired also such ERP as Navision with strong European market presence. In those days of Navision purchase, Microsoft Business Solutions made a decision to market Navision, or current name Dynamics NAV in Europe and sort of deemphasize Dynamics GP Great Plains. However Great Plains has pretty strong presence in Poland and UK, and taking into consideration European businesses interconnection, we could expect Polish or British companies would have a need to connect their Eastern European branches to their Great Plains ERP and MRP databases and reporting tools, such as FRx, Crystal Reports, SRS. This publication is written in the form of technical highlights:

1. Eastern European Alphabets and SQL Server collation. Eastern European languages adopted French and Spanish approaches in the beginning of 20th century in the sense of extending Latin alphabet characters with accents. In Microsoft SQL Server you can pick dictionary order with collation for the server as default, plus you can supersede these settings on the new database level and even for the specific table. In Eastern European alphabets, such as Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, etc – you will find so called accents, or tiny additions to the common Latin characters, to help reader modify the pronounce of the letter. The problem for British and Polish Great Plains installations is default Latin (UK) or Polish collateral which makes impossible to save different accents in your SQL database

2. ASCII table and its second register. Microsoft Dynamics GP is originally and currently written (meaning programmed) in Great Plains Dexterity, which in turn is the shell, developed in C programming language. C is of course partially operating system independent, however it is lagging behind the technology, especially when you are talking about such nuances as SQL Server DB collaterals and ASCII table international options. In order to force Dexterity application to properly work with the second register of ASCII table, you should consider to deploy either native Windows XP or better Vista, as Vista is available for large selection of the countries in Europe

3. Great Plains and Unicode. Here Dexterity is less powerful and you have to deploy characters entry interception utilities. In Europe, however, most if not all of the languages have ASCII and non Unicode nature