As part of our ongoing efforts to better understand the needs of our partners, Scribe held a series of conference calls earlier this year with a number of partners who focus in the Dynamics GP space. Based upon those conversations as well as ideas, voting, and survey results in OpenMind, Scribe added several GP-centric product improvements to the roadmap.
Generic GP Migration Samples
A common theme were heard from our partners was the need for more tools to assist partners in migrating their customers to Dynamics GP.
When Scribe designs and develops templates, we've historically focused on end-to-end templates – that is, templates that both extract information from the source system as well as insert those data into the target system. For example, we have a migration template that extracts information from QuickBooks and loads that information into Dynamics GP. This approach works great when Scribe provides an out-of-the-box template for the specific systems for which partners need to perform a migration. Unfortunately, that is not always case. Often partners must pull information from legacy systems, custom-built applications, or other applications for which Scribe does not provide a template.
Partners with whom we spoke advocated for half templates – that is, migration templates that use as their source a generic data format such as a .csv file with a known layout, and provide rich functionality to load those data into Dynamics GP. Such templates would allow partners to leverage prebuilt migration logic regardless of the source system in question. The partners indicated that they were happy to take on the responsibility of extracting the information out of the source system and transforming it to match the common data file format – using Scribe or whichever other tools made the most sense for the task at hand. Internally we've referred to such a template approach as a "generic" migration template because it can be used as a tool to migrate data from virtually any source system.
Scribe has just released its first generic migration template for Dynamics GP. You can find the Dynamics GP migration under the samples section of the template download page.
Additionally, we have provided several brief video tutorials. Mike Bates is our in house integration expert. He builds and maintains virtually all of Scribe's templates. In these video Mike walks through installing and configuring the migration, and provides a high level overview of their functionality:
Links to the movies can also be found on the download page using the link shown above.
We'd love further feedback on whether this style of template is useful to our partners, and whether the video tutorials are better and easier to
digest than written guides.
A "Real" GP Publisher
Existing GP Integration templates utilize publisher capabilities to allow Scribe to detect when records are updated within Dynamics GP, and publish those changes to Scribe in near real-time. Unlike other adapters, the Dynamics GP adapter didn't have a "real" publisher. Instead, GP integration templates utilized the general purpose query publisher capabilities. While functional, the lack of a true publisher made GP integration templates more difficult to install and harder to configure – and partners who are building their own integration templates require a higher degree of effort to deliver event-based logic.
This is about to change with the upcoming release of the Scribe Adapter for Dynamics GP version 4.0. Version 4.0 of the Scribe Adapter for Dynamics GP will provide a true publisher, similar in nature to the publishers provided by other adapters (such as the Adapter for Dynamics CRM and the Adapter for Dynamics NAV).
The new publisher provided in version 4.0 will allow partners and users to more easily create real-time integrations as well as install and configure GP integration templates.
The Scribe Adapter for Dynamics GP 4.0 is scheduled to ship in late Q
4, 2009.
