Dynamics,B2B,B2C,eCommerce,too computer Dynamics GP B2B, B2C eCommerce tools: Business Portal Order

----------------------------------------------------------Permission is granted for the below article to forward,reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as longas no changes a Gone are those times when the companies and the organisations didn't need a hi-tech system to handle them. Owing to the considerable increase in the business sector and thus, an enormous increase in the complexity of the organisational struc

eCommerce is very diversified and it is often too complexfor simple ecommerce product to cover numerous requirements, that businesses invarious industries might have.  MicrosoftBusiness Solutions offers Dynamics GP Business Portal Order Management (forGreat Plains 7.5 and earlier this product was known as eOrder, however it wasredesigned from scratches on Business Portal platform).  Business Portal is definitely cool directionand future technology orientation, however if you find it too limited incustomizability (the same limitation was applicable to eOrder, where you wouldhave to customize existing ASP pages in InterDev to adopt new logic, and everyversion upgrade required you to reapply these changes), then you should appealto Dynamics GP ISV community and try to find appropriate ecommerce extension,or connector product.  We made theresearch and figured out that ecommerce integration is underserved for bothDynamics GP Great Plains and Dynamics AX Axapta products, where at this timeyou can come to the conclusion, that third party add-ons have domination 1.       MicrosoftDynamics GP Business Portal, for B2B.  Ifyou have GP implemented you know the price of user license, it is comparable tok$1.  The idea of web base BusinessPortal is simple - you add ten times more users to Dynamics GP database via webapplication, where use license cost will be ten or even five percent of theregular GP user license.  BP could beconnected via internet browser and it is natural expectation that you wouldattract your USA country side, or international employees, B2B customers orVendors to your BP web site and have them do ERP, MRP, Sales and Purchasingroutines remotely.  Before we leave BPconsideration, we would like to mention about Electronic Document Deliverymodule for BP.  This module allows you toenable specific customers or vendors for their invoices to be delivered to themvia email.  In sort of kick off scenarioBusiness Portal requires infrastructure to be hosted internally, however withsome limitations it could be outsourced. If you are hosting Exchange Server (even in Windows 2008 Small BusinessServer scenarios), you should consider to get some knowledge about SSLCertificates for Microsoft Exchange 2007, 2003, this is especially applicablewhen you deploy OWA with MS Exchange 2007 2.       IfDynamics GP Business Portal Order Management is not doing the job - then pleasetry to think about connector approach, where you as Software Developer orecommerce programmer will have complete control and the product you about topurchase will help you as friendly connector or the library in your ecommerce application.  Our company Alba Spectrum offers OrderConnector to connect you ecommerce shopping cart to Dynamics GP Sales OrderProcessing documents: Sales Order, Invoice, Quote, Return, Back Order 3.       eConnectprogramming.  This software developmentkit was introduced in 2003 and at that time it was dedicated to ecommerceprogrammers, however it is now expanded to cover most of Great Plains masterrecords and work phase transactions. Before you dive into eConnect programming, please review GP IntegrationManager - this tool is also in process of being redesigned on eConnecttechnology, and it should be good option if you do not need real timeintegration, and batch integration one a day or every hour is OK.  There are options to schedule IntegrationManager integration to run automatically with Windows macro add-ons, availablefrom third party developers (in some cases free), or you can purchase IMscheduling tool from Microsoft Business Solutions.  Both IM and eConnect should be good options inB2B and B2C (business to business and business to customer) ecommercescenarios.  If you need advanced eConnectcustom ecommerce programming project done, please feel free to call us.  eConnect should be friendly to MicrosoftVisual Studio C#, VB developer with some excurse to XML and SQL Storedprocedures 4.       PostingServer. Alba Spectrum Porting Server or Autopost allows you to extend eConnectlogic with GP batches posting.  This istheoretically optional feature, however if you want to post your batchesdirectly from your ecommerce C# or VB.Net application Autopost allows you to dothe job 5.       B2Cecommerce additional notes.  We recommendyou not to invent the wheel and take one of the leading and usually reasonablypriced products as the base for you ecommerce web site,  shopping card and credit card or other sortsof payment processing.  Then, you shouldprogram integration in eConnect, or simply purchase connector to DynamicsGP.  We would be happy to resolve yourintegration to GP issues with our Order Connector or even tune it for advancedlogic.  In the case of small businessecommerce operations, you can export customer orders log to EDI compliant oreven text file, which could be then imported via Great Plains IntegrationManager.  You may think to get some helpin synchronizing GP Pricing and Promotion Campaigns on your ecommerce website 6.       eCommercefor legacy GP versions.  Theoreticallyecommerce integration is possible for Dynamics GP eConnect compliant versions(in our opinion GP 10.0 and 9.0, with some restrictions to GP 8.0).  eConnect was introduced for Great Plains 7.5in 2004.  We recommend production eConnectintegration for Dynamics GP 10.0 and 9.0, if you are on lower version, pleaseconsider to give us a call on upgrade scenarios and options 7.       Howto get help?  Please, feel free to callour office at 1-866-528-0577, if you are outside of USA: 1-630-961-5918, oremail us: [email protected]  We speakEnglish, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, including Brazilian Portuguese, Russian,Filipino.  Please, be aware that DynamicsGP is not UNICODE compliant application, and if you need help in having GPScreens to be translated to Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and other hieroglyphbased characters language, this is not possible.  We would be happy to create Chinese CrystalReports out of your Dynamics GP system with the help of third party Dynamics GPISV tools, such as NJ Star.  If you aretrying to consider Great Plains for your Brazilian subsidiary, we would have todiscourage you and ask you rather to consider SAP Business One, which islocalized for Brazil.  Great PlainsDynamics GP is also not localized for Russian market, we invite you to call usto help you understand ecommerce and Corporate ERP options in RussianFederation, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldova, Lithuania, Poland,Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia, Uzbekistan