Today was the final day of the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Airlift in Fargo. So much information was presented today that I don't even know where to start!

The sessions today were all general sessions, with no breakouts. First was a Town Hall Q&A session with several of the key staff from Microsoft answering various questions. Second was a session on Perpetual Pricing by Pam Misialek. Last, was the "WOW" session that all week (& leading up to this conference) was promised to be content too valuable to leave early.

As I started to write this blog, I realized it is too long for one article so I'm splitting this into two parts.

Town Hall Q&A

So many questions, so little written down would summarize this session for me. I had to go back through my Twitter feed and the #GPAirlift13 hashtag to review what happened!

First off, the panel for this were the following people (and hopefully I didn't miss anyone):

  • Kevin Racer
  • Brian Meier
  • Gary Tronson
  • Daryl Anderson
  • Brian Roney
  • Theresa Nistler
  • Jay Manley
  • Pam Misialek
  • John O'Donnell

Here is a sampling of the questions asked and the answers as I noted them (meaning: I could be slightly off or have interpreted the answer differently than intended!).

  • Q: Is Report Writer going away?
    • A: No. Other parts of GP are starting to use SSRS but Report Writer still plays an important role and is used with the Word Templates.
  • Q: What's happening with FRx Forecaster?
    • A: Forecaster isn't going anywhere. There are no plans in the short term to merge it into Management Reporter. It sounded to me that it won't change much, it's not on the radar at the moment.
  • Q: Is there a plan to add something like a copy/paste from Excel to a Journal Entry in the future?
    • A: Yes and wait until the "WOW" part of the presentation. (Note: at a certain point, several questions were answered with "wait til the WOW part").
  • Q: Will intercompany be added to eConnect for things like Transaction Entry?
    • A: Wait for the WOW. Something better than eConnect and Web Services hinted at, at this point.  No new features are to be added to eConnect or Web Services, architectural changes are in progress.
  • Business Analyzer mobile app coming out in October/November timeframe.
  • Q: How is licensing going to be handled for mobile apps for GP?
    • A: Not sure, they are still working on that.
  • Q: Will Ribbons from the Web Client be added to the Desktop client?
    • A: eventually. Tabbed windows are being investigated as well.
  • Q: Can we get more documentation on UD functions in Report Writer?
    • A: (basically) No.
  • Q: (I think I have this correctly) Can service packs and hotfixes be scheduled better?
    • A: No. Except for at least 2 service packs per year on a half-year basis, hotfixes are released purely based on severity and cannot be scheduled.
  • Q: What are the plans for Business Portal?
    • A: Eventually it will go away. Sounds like no resources are being allocated to it at all, it will eventually be made compatible with Sharepoint 2013 but that's it. See the WOW section for more. (Note: I assume like all deprecated functionality, it won't be gone, just never updated at a certain point - existing clients will still be using it).
  • Q: What are the plans for PDK (Personal Data Keeper)?
    • A: Not sure. Ultimately they want to bring that functionality into the desktop and/or web client.  Possible companion app in the future.

That's a good sampling of the questions I caught. There were more that I completely missed and one can find a lot of references to this part of the session on Twitter.

Perpetual Pricing

I won't get into too many details on this session. A lot of this info is already on Partnersource and in my opinion, isn't intended for general blogging!

The goal of the Perpetual pricing module is to be simple and bring the price point down for small and mid-market companies. Ideally, it changes the selling approach from being based on price to based on value.