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Author: Jen Kuntz

Are you using what you’ve purchased?

Today’s #TipTuesday isn’t a technical tip, it’s more of a business tip. I’ve written this to be specific to Dynamics GP, although what I describe may apply to other applications and software licensing. I have not worked with licensing on any other ERP packages to know if this might be a general rule of thumb or not.

If you’ve been using Dynamics GP for any length of time, it might be worth revisiting what you’re registered for and have paid for, module/functionality-wise. It’s probably worth taking a look at this every couple of years post-implementation, particularly if you paid for things up-front with the intention of phased implementations later. Every year is probably too frequent, but every couple of years allows you time to evaluate if your master plans have changed, if you still plan to implement what you thought you would at the time of purchase.

The math works out that, on average, every 5 years you are re-purchasing your Dynamics GP software (based on a rough average of 20% annual enhancement from ISVs). This doesn’t apply to subscription-based licensing, which is paid by the month, but the vast majority of users of Dynamics GP are not on subscription licensing (or that would be my guess).

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Excel Paste Special – Operations

Today’s #TipTuesday is an Excel tip. Did you know there are some funky Paste Special options beyond the basics like Paste Values, Paste Formats etc.? I find if you were to ask most Excel users what Paste Special is, the majority will answer “pasting values instead of formulas”. While that’s definitely true, there are also Paste Operations.

There are random circumstances where I’ve found this to be useful in a pinch and today was one of them. I was working on some Fixed Assets stuff, and my data had asset cost and accumulated amortization both as positive values. I wanted to do some Pivot Table analysis with it, to validate some Net Book Value info, without fussing with formulas. Paste Special Operations to the rescue!

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How to set a longer password on Office 365

This is a belated #TipTuesday, posted a day later than usual! Recently, support for longer passwords in Office 365 was announced but oddly enough, in some places the password change dialog boxes still limit you to 16 characters. Here’s how I worked around this.

Standard “password reset” feature – 16 char limit

Here’s a screenshot of a password reset window in my Office 365 tenant, and it clearly states my password must be between 8 and 16 characters. Hmm. My assumption is this will be noticed and rectified fairly quickly as it’s inconsistent with the next part I’m going to show you.

O365 error password can't exceed 16 characters.

Workaround: “Forgot my password”

The current workaround is use the Forgot My Password link when you log into Office 365. If you use MFA/2FA like I do, simply cancel out of the dialog box that prompts to send a notification code and then click on Forgot my password.

Next, there may be one or two steps requiring you to verify with either an authenticator app code or text message or both depending on your organization’s MFA/2FA setup. I had to do both. Once I was past that part, the standard “choose a new password” section came up. Now I can select a password up to 256 characters.

Select a password window

That’s it! As I mention above, it’s very likely this will be corrected soon… but until then, this may help if you want to secure your account with a longer-than-16-character password.

SQL Alerts with HTML email body

Today’s #TipTuesday is a bit different from my normal type of post. In the course of monitoring some integrations, I had wanted to change the emails I get when there were issues. What I inherited was email alerts with attachments, without any data that I could use as an Outlook filter to tell me if something was ok or not. I had to open the attachment to see if there were errors. I wanted to find something better.

What I’m writing about today is what I’ve pieced together from various searches and unfortunately, while I got the pieces from various other blogs, I’ve changed so many things and re-worked this so many times, I no longer even have the references of those that helped me get to the point of what I’m sharing today. I wish I could link to them to thank them.

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In search of the perfect credit card

A few months ago, I started re-evaluating the credit cards I was using, and checking into the benefits they offer. I was planning a big trip and have never really paid attention too much to the benefits other than the basic rewards they offer (cash back or travel points in various programs etc.). I knew friends who had used some of the warranty extension kinds of benefits, but that’s about it. It seemed like most cards advertise the same stuff – extending the warranty on certain purchases, concierge services, car rental insurance coverage, some insurances on trip cancellations and things like that. It all sounded the same to me.

I decided to make some changes, cancelling a basic card I had and looking for something with better rewards. Who knew that months later I would have gone through 3 different “new” credit cards to find the “right” one for me? I realize now how many things I never took into consideration that can make or break your experience with a credit card. Here is my story and some lessons learned that may help you too.

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SmartList stuck on My Reports pane

Today’s #TipTuesday post is about troubleshooting an issue with the My Reports home page area/pane and how to remove SmartList favourites from there. The specific scenario here related to favourites that were “stuck” in MyReports after an upgrade to GP 2013 a few years ago. I was reminded of this when I saw this post on the Microsoft Dynamics community forum and someone asked me if I kept the scripts I used to fix this issue.

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eConnect Distributions: Double Trouble?

Today’s #TipTuesday post is yet another integration-related post. In my case, it’s about Payables Transaction Entry and distributions doubling up. This tip will (or should) also hold true for other eConnect nodes that have optional GL distributions as most behave in the same default manner I describe below.

I was building a Payables Transaction integration for the first time in a long time. In my case, I am passing in GL distributions so I was mapping both the “PM Transaction Insert” node as well as the “PM Distributions” node. All was going super smoothly and the integration was a success, until I looked at the resulting transaction!

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SmartConnect, Variables & Quotes

Today’s #TipTuesday title is a little obscure but it’s 2 tips in 1! I’ve been building some integrations lately, as I alluded to in my last post. Today’s tip, and next week’s tip, are all coming out of some things I ran into today that gave me some great topics to share! Woohoo!

This tip is about eOne Solutions’ SmartConnect again, and while I am integrating into Dynamics GP ultimately, this tip is purely about a quirk with SmartConnect that is easy to miss.

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Object reference not set to an instance of an object

Today’s #TipTuesday is about one of the many things this error message could relate to, and it’s in the context of Dynamics GP and SmartConnect/eConnect integrations (not development, where it can also occur regularly for many other reasons). This error came up when I was attempting to preview my data in the Data Source section of the SmartConnect map and I couldn’t move past it until I figured out the cause.

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