Integrating Microsoft Great Plains Accounting/ERP: RMS, CRM, eCommerce, Lotus Domino – overview for developer

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By: Andrew Karasev

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains has substantial market share among horizontal and vertical clientele in the USA, Canada (including French version for Quebec/Montreal), UK, Australia, New Zealand, Spanish speaking Latin and Central America, South Africa and Middle East. Nowadays ERP can not stay as it is off-the-shelf product – it requires integration with Legacy or newly implemented systems, such as CRM, Retail Management applications, custom in-house made business systems (transportation/cargo tracking, etc). The tendency is that if company uses Microsoft-driven computer park (Windows domain, SQL Servers, MS Exchange) the rest of the ERP/CRM applications are Windows-oriented. However you can have successful bridge between non-Microsoft ERP and Great Plains: Oracle, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, DB2 or others), usually it involves Java/CORBA/EJB/JSP type of expertise.

Microsoft RMS-Great Plains integration. There are few options – first one is to use standard integration, coming with MS RMS. It has Dexterity interface in Great Plains, does integration to single company at the time. Doesn’t integration on SOP/AR level, however. Second option is to use integration, maintained by Alba Spectrum Technologies – it integrates unlimited number of stores, SOP/AR/POP, posts through Bank Reconciliation module and so allows to track Check Books/Credit Card balances. This integration also has Dexterity interface for Stores-GP Companies mapping and could work as nightly or real time SQL Server routine
Microsoft CRM-Great Plains integration. This integration is maintained by Microsoft Business Solutions and allows you to synchronize SOP and Customers in Great Plains with Microsoft CRM Quotes and Orders. Microsoft CRM has open Microsoft CRM SDK and so you can customize and integrate Microsoft CRM at will, having C# or VB.Net in-house expertise. The above mentioned integration could be altered and tuned by programming MS BizTalk server (it can use either BizTalk runtime or regular license)
Microsoft Great Plains as Back office for eCommerce web-site. Here we need to mention interesting thing, The product, created and dedicated to eCommerce developers – Great Plains eConnect is often considered as a bit expensive and licensing-restricting solution. If your company is ISV and implements eCommerce product, integrating to Great Plains – you would rather prefer set of open and simple stored procedures, moving data to and retrieving from Microsoft Great Plains Sales Order Processing (SOP) module
Microsoft Great Plains integration with Oracle. Well – you can do it either from Oracle or from MS SQL Server side – in both cases you have linking tools and heterogeneous queries mechanisms
Microsoft Great Plains integration with Lotus Notes/Domino. – If you want Great Plains documents lookup from Lotus – you typically use ODBC connection to MS SQL Server. You need to know Great Plains tables structure (Tools->Resource Description->Tables in Great Plains)

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