If you have Microsoft Great Plains and support it for your business and have light or heavy Great Plains customization, written in Dexterity, you need to know your options to upgrade Great Plains or migrate it from ctree / Pervasive to MS SQL / MSDE.

Great Plains Dexterity is a proprietary programming language / environment, which was created in the early 1990s to provide platform / database / graphical interface independence for Mac and Windows-based Great Plains Dynamics. Today it is a legacy and Microsoft Business Solutions is phasing out Dexterity.

However, Great Plains 7.5 and even 8.0 is a Dexterity-based app, so you have to deal with it and its customization.

Good news. Prior to version 7.0, Great Plains had plans to expand GP’s functionality and also change the table structure, forcing Dexterity customization to be partially parsed and rewritten with each update. No longer, the structure of GP remains the same, Microsoft is acquiring new modules and unifying its graphical interface to move all its ERP packages: Great Plains, Solomon, Navision and Axapta to the web-based Microsoft Business Portal.

Still bread. Dexterity has the ability to customize existing Great Plains screens, the so-called Great Plains Alternate Shapes. This was an upgrade issue in the past and remains now; there’s no way to do it at home (until you’re willing to pay for a full-time in-house developer, which is usually on the learning curve). You have to bring a consultant.

Recommended approach. You must have the strategy to migrate Dexterity customization to SQL, Crystal Reports, Custom Web Publishing – Visual Studio.net and slowly abandon Dexterity customization

1. SQL stored procedures: performance improvement. Consider replacing dexterity data manipulation with SQL stored procedures. Skill is a cursor-controlled language and is not efficient when processing large data sets.
2. Crystal reports. Take advantage of leading, open technology. Crystal Reports will eliminate the need for a thorough update of skill reports in the future. Base your Crystal report on SQL view or stored process
3. Perform a direct web post from your GP database. Use Visual Studio – It is easy to find specialists and have them on staff. We are in the world when web publishing is very easy.

Good luck and if you have any issues or concerns, we are here to help! If you want us to do the job, call us at 1-866-528-0577. [email protected]