Recently, there have been issues with Dynamics GP and Word Templates, due to some changes to the most recent Microsoft Office build releases. Specifically, documents generated in Word Templates cannot be opened in Microsoft Word, for environments running a build of Microsoft Office from Sept 8/9th or newer. Today's post is an attempt to clarify what the situation is, and what is and is not affected and clarify some of the options.
Issue Recap
The Microsoft Office releases around September 8th and 9th, 2020 affected the ability for users to open Word Template generated documents. The details of the issues were posted on the Dynamics GP Team's support blog here. I will not recap all of the details in this post, the support team's post covers the details plus more recent workarounds to consider.
Who's affected?
The most commonly used Word Templates are Purchase Orders, Sales Invoices and EFT remittances. What specifically happens is users receiving those documents or users attempting to open those documents cannot open them. The error message, as indicated in the blog post linked above, states "Word experienced an error trying to open the file.".
The effects are both internal to the organization and external if sending docs out via the Email Document functionality in Dynamics GP.
Issue 1 - the users generating the documents cannot print/view them if they are on one of the affected builds of Office. That's a significant issue for organizations who need to print to mail documents to vendors or customers, or simply to be able to print/save copies of these documents for their internal use.
Issue 2 - if utilizing the Email Document functionality, users who receive those documents won't be able to open them either if they are using one of the affected builds of Microsoft Office.
It gets worse…
If previously generated documents are saved, or a user attempts to open previously emailed documents, they will be unable to. For example, a few of my clients pay me via EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer). When I went back to previous emails received from the customers, documents I was able to open in the past I could no longer open on this new build of Microsoft Office. The issue isn't occurring during the generation of the documents, it's the document format itself (the XML structure, from the latest support team update).
How to mitigate the risk part 1
If using the Email Document functionality in Dynamics GP, the best way to mitigate the risk for vendors and customers is to switch to email in PDF format only. The good news? Users do not need a special version of Adobe on a user's computer to do this, they merely need to ensure they have Office 2010 or later.
Here's where things get confusing…
In the olden days (saying this tongue in cheek), it was hammered into us (consultants) that customers needed to have full Adobe Writer/Distiller on a machine to utilize PDF functionality. Honestly, until this Word Template issue happened, I thought that was still the requirement for emailing Word Templates and I was guilty of implementing functionality like EFT at clients with emailed remittances and leaving them on the default format of Word .docx formats. Boy, I'm glad I was wrong.
If using the functionality in Dynamics GP to email Purchase Orders, EFT Remittances or Sales Documents, users do not need full Adobe to make this work. It uses Microsoft Office's PDF functionality to convert Word Templates to PDF and email them to customers or vendors. More importantly, there are NO error messages for the user generating these, even if users or recipients cannot even open the native Word template.
That's just plain weird, but a true story.
Now, when saving a report using the "File" shortcut to PDF, or the "Sent To" shortcut on a Report Writer report to send as PDF, those functions users DO need full Adobe. Sorry… this isn't all good news. 😄
How to mitigate the risk part 2
The above is only useful for the documents being emailed to others, not for the very common situation of needing to view/open/print the documents internally. It also doesn't help the users who are unable to open previously emailed documents.
For now, the best solution is to rollback the version of Microsoft Office to a supported build. Identify a few people in the office who need to be able to generate/save/print documents internally and only roll back for those people. They can then generate the Word Templates and print/save them to PDF. That's short-term at best though, although if rolling back and disabling future Office updates is satisfactory for a while, this solution could work until a fix is released for Dynamics GP.
That option isn't possible for all users/organizations I realize. The second best option right now is to look at the blog post linked above and look for the Sept 22/2020 update. There is information there about a batch-processing fix that could work. I have not tested this but the gist is it's "fixing" the XML in the Word Templates to be able to open the template/document.
Will this be fixed?
Initially, this was identified as an Office issue. It turns out the Office issue is addressing a security concern, which means it's now a Dynamics GP issue and how templates are generated needs to be fixed.
The plan at the moment is to have a fix ready for the rollout of GP 18.3, the October 2020 release of Dynamics GP. That's tentatively planned for October 1st but keep in mind this change may bump that release date by a few days. Those who are on Dynamics GP 2018 but haven't updated to 18.2 yet, consider updating to 18.2 and 18.3 when released if this affects the environment. It's an 18.x code base so it's not a major upgrade like it would be going from GP 2016 to GP 2018.
For those on Dynamics GP 2016, the Microsoft Dynamics GP team is looking at rolling it back to GP 2016 but no guarantees there until further information is published.
For those on older versions of Microsoft Dynamics GP, those are unsupported versions so unfortunately, this will not be fixed.
After all that I've said above, it may be time for someone to consider a reporting solution where the out-of-the-box reports can be replaced with SSRS and avoid Word Templates entirely. Two products I'm aware of that you can look into are Victoria Yudin's company Flexible Solutions (GP Reports Viewer), and Liaison Messenger.
Summary
In closing, there's not a lot of "good news" in this post. It's a bit of a crappy situation with no notice and very little in the way of permanent or easy solutions to fix it. Rolling back the version of Office is pretty painless, based on what I saw with a client who was affected. The bigger challenge is now that this isn't deemed something that will be fixed in a future Office build, organizations now have to decide between 3 no-so-great solutions - rolling back Office updates for the foreseeable future, updating Dynamics GP when a fix is released, or considering an ISV solution to replace Word Templates entirely.
