Integration Manager Error – Object Reference Not Set To An Instance Of An Object

Sometimes I find Integration Manager to be very trying. It can be a very useful tool but it can also be incredibly frustrating.

A client we have taken over support for logged a call about an integration they couldn’t run and hadn’t been able to run for a couple of months after their upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010. The error message they were receiving was this;

Integration Manager – Object reference not set to an instance of an object

I spent a while checking out several possibilities and ended up creating a new journal integration to see if the problem was general or specific. The integration I created worked fine so I returned to the original which had the problem and found the answer.

I find error messages unrelated to the actual problem to be frustrating and Integration Manager has far more than it’s fair share of these errors and this one is another of them.

I eventually tracked down the problem to the permissions of the folder to which the integration was saving its log files. I confirmed this by trying to manually create a text file into the folder and received the following message;

Unable to create file – Unable to create the file ‘New Text Document.txt’. Access is denied.

Once the permissions to the folder were updated to give access to the user running the integration, the integration ran without problem.