Question

I am doing research about integrating a product into Dynamics Great Plains. I have worked with Dynamics CRM before but not with Great Plains. I have heard that GP is a different animal than CRM, even though they share the same “Dynamics” prefix, where do the similarities end, and where do the differences begin?

Has anyone had any experience with both? Are you able to describe some similarities and/or differences between the two? Any caveats, difficult parts, or pain points I should be looking out for in GP ?

I am interested about the entrance points into the product, and ease of extending the user interface.

When I worked with Dynamics CRM, I used a provided Web Service as the entrance point into the application. I read that GP has some sort of web service too, but I’ve also read that it supports something called eConnect (new to me).

That’s a lot of questions I put in here, I’m not looking for a specific answer for every single point, just wanted to get you thinking about the kind of information I am digging for.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is what I’ve found working with these two products:

• They are very different products that were acquired by Microsoft in separate acquistions.
• CRM uses a web UI, GP uses a fat windows client.
• Both have web service APIs, but you’ll find a lot less documentation and samples for GP.
• GP also has an API called eConnect, but the web service API is a lot easier to work with.
• CRM customizations make it pretty easy to extend both the data model and the user interface. It’s mostly just point and click, unless you need more sophisticated UI functionality using Javascript.
• The GP UI is called Dexterity which does support customizations. However, I’ve not had any experience with it.