Install SQL Server 2014: SSRS Configuration

Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

Microsoft SQL ServerIn this small series of posts I’m going to take a step through the installation of SQL Server 2014 and SSRS (the series index can be found at the bottom of each post).

In the last post, I stepped through the installation of SSRS. As I mentioned in that post, I prefer to do the configuration separately, as I have had problems with the automatic configuration.

To configure SSRS, launch Reporting Services Configuration Manager from the Windows Start screen.

The first window launched is the Reporting Services Configuration Connection one; ensure the Server Name is correct and that the Report Server Instance is the one to be configured and click Connect:

Reporting Services Configuration Connection

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Roadmap for Microsoft Dynamics GP

Ian Grieve3 minute read0 comment

Microsoft Dynamics GPI’m not sure where I got this image from, but roadmaps for Microsoft Dynamics GP seem to be fairly thin on the ground so I figured I’d do a post.

Roadmap for Microsoft Dynamics GP

Part of the reason for posting this, is that I have had a few conversations with prospects looking to move to a new ERP who have asked about the future of Dynamics GP and quoting competitors who have talked about doubts of its long term longevity.

This is all FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) relating back to the Project Green of 2007/2008 which was a plan to Microsoft to unify their ERPs into one product. It is also a plan that was abandoned back in 2008, but the fact it existed at one point is still used being used by competitors to try to blacken the name and future of Dynamics GP.

As you can see from the roadmap, above, there are plans for fairly rapid releases of Dynamics GP which include much new functionality (including a rewritten Web Client in HTML5 after the 2015 R2 release).

The Convergence conference also saw an announcement that Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 R2 was due in late May or early June. As the RTM came out at the start of December 2014, this would align with the discussed 6 month release schedule.

Microsoft will soon be releasing details on the new features available in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 R2, so keep an eye out for that.

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Install SQL Server 2014: SSRS Installation

Ian Grieve2 minute read6 Comments

Microsoft SQL ServerIn this small series of posts I’m going to take a step through the installation of SQL Server 2014 and SSRS (the series index can be found at the bottom of each post).

In the previous post I covered the installation of SQL Server itself; in this post I’m going to cover the installation of SSRS. While it is possible to have SSRS installed and configured automatically when SQL Server is installed, but I have experienced problems with SSRS when doing this so I usually install it separately. You would also do a separate installation of SSRS if you had a reporting server where you were doing an install of SSRS.

To install SSRS launch the setup.exe on the installation media, click on Installation in the navigation pane and then click on New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation:

SQL Server Installation Center

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Install SQL Server 2014: SQL Server Installation

Ian Grieve1 minute read3 Comments

Microsoft SQL ServerIn this small series of posts I’m going to take a step through the installation of SQL Server 2014 and SSRS (the series index can be found at the bottom of each post).

The first item I’m going to cover is SQL Server itself; I have had problems before installing and configuring SSRS at the same time as SQL Server, so I now always separate these into three separate steps.

The first part is to install SQL Server; do so in SQL Server Installation Center by launching the setup.exe from the installation media:

SQL Server Installation Center - Planning

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Install SQL Server 2014: Series Index

Ian Grieve1 minute read2 Comments

Microsoft SQL ServerI thought I had posted this a while ago, but it seems not. This is a short series on the installation of SQL Server 2014 as it would need to be installed for Microsoft Dynamics GP.

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Slow Opening Windows In Microsoft Dynamics GP

Ian Grieve3 minute read3 Comments

Microsoft Dynamics GPI recently implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP for a client who is a UK subsidiary of an American company. This client is a heavy user of the Inventory Control module with over 30,000 items (you’ll see the relevance of this soon).

Shortly after the go-live, users started reporting that windows were opening very slowly; for example, it was taking almost 2 minutes to open the Sales Transaction Entry window. I sat with one of the users and looked at the problem with them; it took a few minutes, due to the slowness, of checking various windows before realising that it was the windows with an Item Number field on them which were slow opening.

I did a quick search online and found a post on Dynamics Code Blocks by Tim Wappat where he had encountered a similar issue which was being caused by the AutoComplete function; this would make sense as by default the AutoComplete will remember 10,000 entries per field.

Which with over 30,000 items and a couple hundred sales orders being processed everyday meant the AutoComplete was quickly building up for each user.

Tim’s solution seemed to be a little more convoluted than I woulr have expected and involved deleting files in the Windows profile. I did a test with one of the users, by deleting the AutoComplete entries via User Preferences (Microsoft Dynamics GP menu » User Preferences) and clicking the AutoComplete button (ringed in red):

User Preferences

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Integration Manager – Cannot Create ActiveX Component

Ian Grieve2 minute read5 Comments

Microsoft Dynamics GPI’ve probably said this before, but Integration Manager can be both very useful and also most infuriating, because when you get an error the error message usually isn’t useful.

However, my most recent problem with Integration Manager did actually produce a useful error message:

Integration Manager - Integration 'Invoices' is not ready to run due to the following problems: The destination could not be initialized due to the following problem: Cannot create ActiveX component.

Integration Manager
Integration 'Invoices' is not ready to run due to the following problems: 
- The destination could not be initialized due to the following problem: 
Cannot create ActiveX component.

I did a search and found a most useful KB article from Microsoft which detailed the problem (Microsoft Dynamics GP hadn’t been written to the registry correctly) and also the solution.

I read the whole article and decided to try a shortcut of starting with step 3 of re-registering the Dynamics.exe. To do this open a Run or Command Prompt and type the following (this particular problem was encountered with Microsoft Dynamics GP 20103 R2): 

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics\GP2013\Dynamics.exe" /regsrver

When I retried the integration, it ran through without further problems.

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Transfer Old RM Statement Emails to New Email Fields

Ian Grieve1 minute read6 Comments

Microsoft Dynamics GPI’ve been involved with a recent upgrade of Microsoft Dynamics GP 10 to 2015. Two of the new features we helped introduce is the use of Word Templates and the Email Documents to replace the old statement email functionality which was dependent on Adobe Writer.

To help the client make the transition from the old to the new, I created an SQL script to transfer the email addresses from the table, RM00106 (RM Statement Emails) used by the old Adobe Writer to the SY01200 (Address Email Master) used by the Email Documents functionality.

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Registering dotNET DLLs

Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

WindowsIn the past when I have needed to manually register DLLs they have been C++ or VB ones which are registered using the regsrver command.

A recent project for a client was done using C# which requires the assembly to be registered using a different command. I am posting this here as a reminder to myself next time I need to do this.

When you register the assembly, you may receive a warning message about registering unsigned assemblies using the /codebase switch which is intended only with signed assemblies. If you trust the origin of the assembly then you can safely register the assembly and ignore the warning.

To register the .NET DLL, open a command prompt and type the following (the highlighted section is the name of the assembly being registered):

%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\regasm.exe reportprinter.dll /codebase

To unregister a .NET DLL type the following:

%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\regasm.exe reportprinter.dll /unregister

The highlighted section is the dll being registered or unregistered.

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Error Starting Virtual Machine On Client Hyper-V

Ian Grieve3 minute read1 Comment

Hyper-VI make a lot of use of virtual machines for both testing and demonstrating Microsoft Dynamics GP. As a company, when I joined, Perfect Image tended to use VMware (I’ll reserve comment, which I realise tells it’s own story), but more recently have started making more use of Microsoft Hyper-V, which is what I also use at home for testing and writing my blog and books.

After installing Hyper-V on my work laptop I created a virtual machine and clicked start. Unfortunately, I received the below error messages:

Hyper-V Manager

I did some digging around and found that although Hyper-V was installed, the hypervisor wasn’t running. Fortunately, the laptop I have does support Hyper-V and I only had to do one thing which was to enable the hypervisor by opening an elevated command prompt and type the following command:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

Once I had run the command I was able to start the virtual machine without further problem; at least with Hyper-V.

What I found was that with the hypervisor running, I wasn’t able to start a VMware virtual machine. So a second command can be used to disable the hypervisor for those times when I need to use a VMware virtual machine:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

Hopefully, I’ll be able to complete the transition away from VMWare very soon and stop toggling from one to the other.

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