Month: September 2019

New features coming to Microsoft Dynamics GP in 2019

Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

Microsoft Dynamics GPThe new version of Microsoft Dynamics GP is coming in October this year and a trickle (hopefully) of new features has just been announced at the GP Tech Conference in Fargo, North Dakota.

The features have been announced in one of the sessions at the conference which I have unfortunately not been able to attend; the features listed below have been tweeted by attendees I follow on Twitter:

The first feature announced was a new long description (100 characters) on AP Transactions:

This will be nice as it is a common request from clients to have a longer description when entering an invoice.

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Edge Canary: Conclusion

Ian Grieve3 minute read0 comment

Edge CanaryMicrosoft have recently announced they are ditching the current version of their Edge browser in favour of a Chromium based browser. In this series, I am going to take a look at the Canary version of this new browser.

The bulk of this series was posted a while ago and I’ve continued using Edge Canary for a while now and thought it was time for a review.

Edge Canary is a fast browser; my main browser of choice is Vivaldi which I’ve always regarded as quite a fast browser, but my impression is that Edge Canary is faster on page loads. The feature set of Edge Chromium is continuing to progress; when I first used it, there was no dark mode, or themes, but these have since been intorduced although limited to light, dark and system.

Both browsers allow the use of the same extensions, but I’ll be sticking with Vivaldi as main browser. The main reason is that i prefer the behaviour and options available in Vivaldi.

In particular, you have a lot more control over tab behaviour in Vivaldi and when closing thr last tab Vivaldi will go back to the speed dial rather than closing as Edge does.

Force AnyConnect to remember profiles

Ian Grieve3 minute read4 Comments

Cisco AnyConnectI have quite a number of client systems I need to connect to using VPNs. While there is a large number of VPNs available, it is inevitable that I would have some used by more than one client. One such as Cisco AnyConnect.

By default AnyConnect will remember only the last VPN to which you connected, but it is possible to force it to remember multiple connections by adding a Profile.xml to the Profile folder located in C:\ProgramData\Cisco\Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client\Profile.

The xml file can contain a HostName and HostAddress (prior versions supported a User) which means I don’t have to look up the URL or IP address of a connection everytime I want to connect.

The XML file should contain the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<AnyConnectProfile xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/encoding/">
<ServerList>
     <HostEntry>
          <HostName>Connection 1</HostName>
          <HostAddress>162.168.1.125</HostAddress>
     </HostEntry>
</ServerList>
<ServerList>
     <HostEntry>
          <HostName>Connection 2</HostName>
          <HostAddress>192.168.1.152</HostAddress>
     </HostEntry>
</ServerList>
</AnyConnectProfile>

With the connection information saved into the xml file, you’ll be able to access them through a drop down list in AnyConnect.

The information above is based on this post by Pandiyan Murugan; I’m reposting so that I can find it easily.

SSRS requires that you use local SQL Server relational databases… error

Ian Grieve3 minute read0 comment

Microsoft SQL ServerMicrosoft Dynamics GP ships with a set of default reports which can be deployed into SQL Server Reporting Services; before doing the deploy, there is a setting in the SSRS web.config file which needs to be changed to avoid a maximum request length error.

Recently, when performing an upgrade of a clients system to Microsoft Dynamics GP 23018 R2, the deployment of the reports went fine, but we encountered a problem while testing the deployed reports:

SSRS reports error message

The client had a licenced version of SQL Server 2018 Web Edition which worked in all other respects; the SSRS service was running locally on the SQL Server which was hosting the databases for both SSRS and Microsoft Dynamics GP itself.

This wasn’t something I’ve encountered before, but, fortunately, a colleague had. The problem is not with the Web Edition itself, but rather with the data connection deployed by Microsoft Dynamics GP for the reports. When the data connections are deployed, there is a space created preceding the Data Source name:

Connection settings in SSRS Manager

The fix is to go through all of the datab connections and remove the space after the equals sign, so that, in the example above, Data Source= IG-SQL2017-01\GP... becomes Data Source=IG-SQL2017-01\GP....

Remove Microsoft Word Index Entries

Ian Grieve2 minute read5 Comments

Microsoft WordI’ve written a few books over the last few years; I use Microsoft Word as it is easy to work in and easy to convert to PDF. Some of the books I have written have been self published. Doing it this ways means that I need to do all of the layout and formatting, such as creating the index.

On occasion, I have had a need to remove the index and re-add; this is most often when I am writing a new edition of a book. I’ve done a fair bit of searching for ways of doing this and have used a couple of different approaches.

One of the early approaches I came across was to use VBA to strip the index entries out, but more recently I found another, much simpler, way of doing it using find and replace.

Press Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace dialog; in the Find what box, type ^d XE:

Find and replace

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Copy Account Categories Between Microsoft Dynamics GP Companies

Ian Grieve1 minute read2 Comments

Microsoft Dynamics GPWhen implementing Microsoft Dynamics GP for a new client, they usually have very similar setup between companies. While you can use the Professional Services Tools Library tool Company Copy, you sometimes need to replicate data which was configured after this function had been used.

I’ve previously posted scripts to copy segments and financial calendars; today’s script will copy Account Categories to a new company ensuring you have the categories in both companies:

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Move Management Reporter To A New Domain

Ian Grieve3 minute read2 Comments

Microsoft Dynamics GPA client recently ran into problems with Management Reporter whereby they had a large number of building blocks accidentally deleted from one building block group. While the easiest solution would be to restore the Management Reporter database to before the blocks were deleted, this was not possible.

The client in question has a lot of users across different businesses each it their own building block groups and were in the middle of year end. LOsing all the management accounts so far produced ad interrupting all business units to fix an issue in one of them was not possible. To make things worse, their test system was being rebuilt after some year end testing so we couldn’t use this to restore the database and export the building blocks.

The solution was therefore a little more long winded and took several steps:

  1. Copy a backup of the Management Reporter database prior to the deletion and restore to my test system.
  2. Run the copy the Management Reporter 2012 database to a new server script from Microsoft
  3. Use the after you make changes to your domain, you no longer have permission to access Management Reporter; this script was needed as the domain on my demo system is totally different to the originating one.
  4. Export required building blocks.
  5. Import exported building blocks back into client system.

The above took a while due to the size of the database which had to be copied to my test system and restored, but was actually quite straightforward.