Great Plains Accounting Migration to Microsoft Gre

Great Plains Accounting Migration to Microsoft Great Plains overview for IT Specialist

by: Andrew Karasev

This is short article, written in question/answer/FAQ style to give IT Specialist/developer/programmer balanced top level information on Great Plains Accounting migration to Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains. If you have Great Plains Accounting as main accounting and ERP system you need to know some technical details on the migration to Great Plains and what is going on behind the scenes. As of right now it is reasonable to upgrade to Microsoft Great Plains 8.0

Is migration required? Not actually, but you have to consider these factors

Great Plains Accounting is in phasing out Great Plains Software began this process back in 1995, when it did introduce Great Plains Dynamics and then Great Plains Dynamics/CS+.

Old Btrieve platform Microsoft Business Solutions is pulling out all itกs products from Btrive/Pervasive SQL.2000/Ctree.

Following the Technology and Microsoft rules Microsoft wants you to be on the newest platform and provides you the best support when you follow this rule

What is migration in the language of technology?

Migration reads Btrieve tables of Great Plains Accounting and moves the data to Microsoft Great Plains tables

Do I need consultant? As our experience indicates you have to have a consultant to do GPA>Great Plains migration. There are two options to choose from

You can call Microsoft Business Solutions they can do migration for you they will ask you to forward them your btrieve files and theyกll send you back the backup of SQL database where your migrated data sits with instructions on how to install Great Plains and restore data from backup

You can use Great Plains VAR/Partner in this case your cost is usually lower but you need to do due diligence find the partner who has experience and has done at least couple of migrations

Good luck with migration and if you have issues or concerns – we are here to help, weกve done 200 migrations! If you want us to do the job give us a call 18665280577! [email protected]

About The Author

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, based in Chicago, California, Arizona, Minnesota, Texas, Florida, New York, Washington, Georgia, Canada, UK, Australia and having locations in multiple states and internationally (www.albaspectrum.com), he is CMA, Great Plains Certified Master, Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer. You can contact Andrew: [email protected]

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 18, 2004

by Andrew Karasev

Great Plains Accounting Support – overview for IT

Great Plains Accounting Support – overview for IT specialist

by: Andrew Karasev

Great Plains Accounting was popular accounting package for midsize and small companies back in 1990th. As each product has its life time – it is almost over for Great Plains Accounting – Great Plains Software was purchased by Microsoft and incorporated into its business systems subdivision: Microsoft Business Solutions. Support for Great Plains Accounting was discontinued several years ago. Great Plains Accounting is btrieve based application and typical installation has GPDATA (with all the database files in) and GPCODE (with executable code – this code is copied over the network and is executed on each workstation). Typical problems we see with GPA:

No Techknowledge database for customers. In the case of Great Plains or Great Plains Dynamics/eEnterprise – customer can do selfsupport. You need to login to Customer Source and open techknowledge database and try to get your problem found there with the solution. Great Plains Accounting techknowledge database is not available for former GPA customer – you should call to your Microsoft Business Solutions Partner to have them access to proprietary information.

Old Hardware. Great Plains Accounting typical system sits on Windows NT 4.0 (sometimes on Windows NT 3.5 or Novell). It was probably installed 5 or more years ago and sits in the very old computer hardware. You may expect (and we see it with our oldtimers GPA customers) hard disk failures and RAM failures. We have to do regular fixes – simply reinstalling either code base or database portions or both.

Workstation Locks and crashes – btrieve origin of the system architecture uses brtieve files to store current processes status (batch posting, for example) in the file, controlled by posting workstation. In the case of the crash you often see the error message, like: ขUnable to access btrieve file for transaction recovery. Must run Btrieve first.ข Multiple scenarios might be applied for recovery. In this exact case you have to delete of rename BTR.TRN file to BTR.OLD this file controls posting process and will be recreated next time you post

We (and Microsoft Business Solutions itself) strongly recommend you to migrate from Great Plains Accounting to Microsoft Great Plains standard 8.0 (budget version) or Microsoft Great Plains 8.0

Happy supporting! if you want us to do the job give us a call 16309615918 or 18665280577! [email protected]

About The Author

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer.

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 09

by Andrew Karasev