Mark Polino's Blog, page 350

Belinda, the GP CSI: GL Summary Trial Balance made easy with Excel Pivot Tables

Belinda the GP CSI has a great video on the GL Summary Trial Balance made easy with Excel Pivot Tables.

Confessions of a Young Consultant: Old School vs. New School | DynamicsCare

Kelsey continues a look a her Confessions of a Young Consultant: Old School vs. New School.

Management Reporter - Understanding how Report Viewer is Unique - Dynamics Corporate Performance Management

Dynamics Corporate Performance Management talks to customers to to get an Understanding how Report Viewer is Unique.

SQL Script to Report against multiple GP Companies | iSolutions

iSolutions shows off a SQL Script to Report against multiple GP Companies.

GP Resources

More good reviews for the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Cookbook from the Microsoft Dynamics GP Discussion site.

The money quote "This is a must have book in your consultant's tool kit."

Weekly Dynamic: Asset ID's Beginning With "Z" Don't Appear on Some Reports

We found a bug the other day that I swear I've seen reported somewhere but I can't find it so I'm noting here for everyone. I have reported this to MS via PartnerSource and MS Connect.

For Dynamics GP 10 SP 5 and GP 2010 SP 1 at least, if the Fixed Asset ID begins with the letter "Z" the asset will not appear on at least some reports. I haven't test this with R2 yet. To duplicate in Fabrikam, create a new fixed assets starting with the letter Z like Z1234 and assign it to structure 100. Create a second asset starting with the letter Y like Y1234 and assign it to structure 100.

Run the Inventory by Structure ID report using structure 100 as the only limiting criteria. Item Y1234 will appear on the report, item Z1234 will not.

Microsoft has indicated that this is a known bug reported in KB 863264  but the KB seems to be unavailable. No wonder I couldn't find it. MS is working to update the KB to ensure that it's available. There are no plans to fix this issue. If you want it fixed, vote for it on MS Connect.

You've two options to deal with this:

1) Add a Fixed Asset ID end range of "ZZZZZZZZ" to reports

2) Change the Fixed Asset ID via SQL. Fortunately, FA uses asset indexes, not the ID to link assets in various tables so the change only needs to happen in one table. However, some ISV solutions use the Fixed Asset ID (like Multi-Entity Management from Binary Stream) so you'll need to check those too.

Vacation

I'm on vacation for the next couple of weeks. For those of you who don't know what that means, I don't either. I'm going to try to find out. It's road trip time with the family so posting will be more sporadic.

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 R2 SRS Reports - Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP

Get a look at all of the available Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 R2 SRS Reports courtesy of Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP

Dynamics GP - Learn & Discuss: Microsoft KB Articles - Is it really confidential?

Vaidy digs into Microsoft KB articles and asks "Is it really confidential?"

I'm glad Vaidy brought this up, I've had the same types of questions come up and I generally agree with Vaidy's stance. If something is in the wild any way (some has blogged on it, written an article, etc) or if I've solved something without a KB and then found the KB later, I'll blog about something with a link to the Knowledge Base article. If the KB gave me the answer, I'll point to it instead of spelling it out.

Here is the problem from my point of view:

Microsoft probably marks way too many items as confidential Searching the KB is still very bad so we want to help folks with issues and when we see a solution we want to share and promote a solution. Heaven knows we'll probably never find that KB again. But Microsoft makes money of CustomerSource and PartnerSource and the fact that access is behind a password. If you don't pay for enhancement/support, you don't get CustomerSource.

I'm not knocking Microsoft for that, they have a right to charge for access to support and these articles are definitely support related. I've had people ask for items and when I point them to the KB they tell me that they're not on a support plan and don't have access to CustomerSource. Unfortunately, the answer is tough luck. Even in my book there are a few cases where I point to the KB to go beyond the book.

As partners of both our clients and Microsoft we sometimes have to walk a fine line here. There is certainly nothing wrong with pointing someone to a KB. Nor is there anything wrong with pointing someone to a non-kb resource that answers their questions. However, I wonder about folks who reproduce wholesale KB's for public consumption. Then again, there are partners out there who have taken my 50 tips content, ripped of the I.B.I.S. name and presented it as their own. There are also people who steal my book and try to offer it for free so I'm not sure why I'm surprised at a little CustomerSouce scraping.

Packt book review challenge

The publisher of my books, Packt Publishing is starting a review challenge. If you have your own blog and write a review of a Packt book like the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Cookbook, the Lite Edition or Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Reporting, for example, you could win electronic access to all of Packt's books via a year long subscription to PacktLib.

The details are easy and there are complete instructions and requirements at the Packt book review challenge.