Microsoft Great Plains or Dynamics GP software is an Enterprise Resource Planning software, that has many basic and advanced modules to help small to mid size businesses to automate their accounting processes. It also has many tools like Dexterity, eConnect, Visual Basic for Application, Integration Manager, Great Plains Visual Studio Sdk, Form and Report Modifiers, Crystal Report and other tools to help businesses to customize Great Plains to suit their way of doing business. Certain tools will require the business to purchase the corresponding licenses or registrations to use.
Dexterity is a tool that is used to create Great Plains and also allows Great Plains developers to customize forms, reports, and program flows. The modifications that Dexterity creates are just look-and-feel the way Great Plains does. For example, if the user adds a text box, combo box or list box to the Inventory Item Maintenance window or report, it will just look exactly like the existing text box or other controls. Because of Dexterity always use indexes for retrieving data from a Sq Server table, the performance is very fast under usual environment. That’s why Dexterity is one of the best tools for customizing Great Plains.
eConnect is another tool that is good for repeating data migration into Great Plains from other data source like Microsoft Excel, Access, text files, Xml files, and other data that are compliant with Odbc standard. eConnect is like a server object that usually requires a front end program like Visual Basic or C# to work with to convert outside data source like Xml files into Great Plains. Once setup, the user can run it as wishes or schedule it to run periodically.
Visual Basic for Application or VBA is a tool that works great with Great Plains forms usually. Because if a data field like Item Number and its Item Maintenance window are added to Visual Basic, then VBA can be used to refer to the data field and window and then changes the flow of the data for the form. For example, instead of moving from field 1 to field 2, VBA can change the flow from field 1 to field 4, or skips field 4 to field 7.
Integration Manager is another tool that is used for migrating data like Microsoft Excel, Access, text files, Xml files, and data that are compliant with Odbc standard into Great Plains. The user can designate the source, query, and destination for deciding how the data are brought in, formatted, and converted into Great Plains.
Great Plains Visual Studio Sdk is a relatively new tool to customize forms, reports, program flow, and codes for Great Plains. It usually requires a developer or developers to create a code project in Visual Studio with programming language like Visual Basic or C#. The developer then refers to Great Plains exposed data fields, table, form structures to write a program like Dexterity can do, but in a different language and way.
Form and Report Modifiers are for changing the windows and reports for Great Plains like adding a data field to a window or report, and other modifications. The developer can also write Crystal Report to access Great Plains database for creating custom reports.
Microsoft Great Plains or Dynamics GP provides many ways and tools for customizations. The user or developer can choose any of the tools, depends on what the requirement or specification of changes will be.

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