Microsoft great plains - Better Integration

Great Plains Integration
Better integration between business applications is a hallmark of efficiency. No matter what industry you're in, the task of pulling data from one application and entering it into another opens up the door to inefficiencies that waste time and money and often cause problems that take on a life of their own.
Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains has been upgraded to help your front office processes integrate with your back office operations. This release greatly improves your integration efficiency with Microsoft applications as you build out your IT infrastructure.
Businesses often talk about integration between applications, and spend a great deal of time and resources figuring out how to achieve front-to-back office connectivity without additional software, often called middleware. Getting your applications to communicate directly with each other gives your data a straighter—and less costly—path from the front to the back office and can increase efficiencies in a multitude of areas within your business.

Great Plains eliminates inefficiency

Inefficiency is not always obvious. One such example involves training employees to use different interfaces with different software applications. Not only is the learning curve longer and more complicated, employees must then redefine their thinking about data and mentally recalibrate where they enter, store, and retrieve information.
Another example is software upgrades. The more advanced a software application becomes, the more outdated other applications around it become. And storage becomes another major efficiency issue. The more places data is housed, the harder it gets to move it from one application to another. If the shipping department's data is not in sync with the accounting department's data, invoices may be sent long after the merchandise has shipped. With the release of Microsoft Great Plains 8.0, businesses gain new ways of integrating information with other Microsoft applications they may already be using.

Microsoft Great Plains Financial Integration

Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 pulls from and delivers data to general ledgers developed on Microsoft Business Solutions for Analytics–FRx because the two applications sit on top of each other as well as share the familiar Microsoft interface. "If your employees are using both programs, they do not have to work in two disparate environments," says Sandy Braun, senior product manager for Microsoft Great Plains. "In fact, in user testing, Microsoft found that similar interfaces let users do the same tasks in one-third the time."
Additionally, employees working in Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 can use Microsoft FRx to include documents from Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word to create financial report book summaries. Management has faster access to data and can make faster and more accurate business decisions without the typical delay of getting data from one business unit to another.
Productivity Integration
Another new feature is the letter-writing wizard. Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 creates letters and Word documents with embedded data. There's no need to go back and forth between the two applications. Using Microsoft Great Plains 8.0, for example, you can send letters to all your customers, employees, and vendors without having to reenter data into each letter from your Microsoft Great Plains application. Or, you can set an alert in the application to write letters to all customers who are overdue on their balance. Using the letter-writing feature, Microsoft Great Plains will populate the letters with names, addresses, and other relevant data without your employees having to first data mine the list from Microsoft Great Plains before creating a mail merge in Word.
Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 can also increase business efficiency in some unexpected ways. By integrating with Microsoft MapPoint, you can enter a group of orders that require delivery. The orders populate MapPoint and with a single click of the routing button, you quickly see what could be the most efficient route of the delivery truck.

Great Plains Integration Across Your Organization

Finally, Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 offers Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal 2.5 that can be integrated with Microsoft Office Accelerator for Sarbanes-Oxley through the common Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology platform. Key performance indicators and queries from Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 can be attached as evidence in the Sarbanes-Oxley Accelerator. For public companies that have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the ability to integrate business data into the Sarbanes-Oxley Accelerator can help improve controls and eliminate inefficiencies and inaccuracies that can be caused by dealing with non-integrated systems.
Microsoft Great Plains won't stop there. The development team is already talking about the next release and throwing ideas onto the table. One thing every member of the team recognizes is that efficiency centers on the ways employees use the software to get information, what they are able to do with it, and how quickly. Whether it's sending out thousands of "personalized" letters with just one click or giving a driver a better way to make deliveries, Microsoft Great Plains customers always want more information and want to be able to do more with it.

MailBasket Lite - A Free Catch-All   MailBasket Lite is a free utility from TurboGeeks that catches ALL emails that arrive at your server for a domain (e.g., anyone@TurboGeeks.Com) and redirects them to a single mailbox. It is similar in function to the example code that Microsoft provides in KnowledgeBase article 315631, however it includes a number of improvements. These improvements include:   The alternate delivery address can be within the domain that the message was originally sent to (e.g., any address "@turbogeeks.com" may be redirected to postmaster@turbogeeks.com) A configuration applet to set and update operating parameters is included An installation / uninstallation program is included Click on the link below to download MailBasket Lite.    Download MailBasket Lite

 

Exchange 2003 Servers

Also, before you deploy Windows 2003 DCs into a mixed environment of Exchange 2000 and Win2K, it’s important to correct an issue with the InetOrgPerson attributes in the schema. Check out Knowledge Base 325379, “How to upgrade Windows 2000 domain controllers to Windows Server 2003,” for details.

Now you face a more difficult decision: the choice of an operating system to use for your Exchange servers. The myriad combinations of Exchange and Windows server versions quickly start to blur. Here are the combinations that Microsoft supports: n Exchange 2003 Standard Edition on Windows 2003 Standard Edition. This combination supports four-way Xeon hyperthreaded processors, RPC over HTTP, advanced memory tuning, IIS 6 application pools, OWA compression, and shadow copy backups. You can run this configuration in a Win2K domain, if you wish.

Microsoft Exchange 2003 Migration

Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition

Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition. This gives the additional advantage of eight-node clustering and eight-way processing. Don’t waste money loading more than 4GB RAM because Exchange 2003 can’t and won’t use it.
Exchange 2003 Standard Edition on Win2K Standard Server. This combination is fully supported and works fine as long as you run Win2K SP3 or higher on the Exchange server and all DCs. You won’t get support for four-way Xeon multithreading because Win2K assigns a CPU license to each virtual processor, and Win2K Standard Server only supports four processors.
Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition on Win2K Enterprise Server. Technically, this combination is supported, but the only feature that Win2K Enterprise Server brings to the table in this situation is two-node clustering with inferior memory management compared to Windows 2003, so there’s hardly any reason to consider this as an alternative. california exchange microsoft migration server
The following combinations aren’t supported and shouldn’t be implemented, even if you can come up with a workaround:

Exchange 5.5 on Windows 2003

Exchange 5.5 on Windows 2003. If you try to install Exchange 5.5 on a Windows 2003 server, you’ll be blocked at the outset by a warning message from the OS. If you try to upgrade a Win2K server that already has Exchange 5.5 installed, you’ll be notified by Windows 2003 Setup that Exchange 5.5 isn’t supported.
Exchange 2000 on Windows 2003. Yes, I know that you’ll hear stories that you can upgrade a Win2K server to Windows 2003 and Exchange 2000 “works great.” You can believe those stories if you like, but do you really want to put your production Exchange servers into an unsupported configuration? I say no, and I’m sure you’ll agree. Microsoft Exchange Server Recovery

Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 on Windows 2003 Web Edition. The Web Edition of Windows 2003 was designed for Web services and doesn’t support any version of Exchange.
With all this in mind, you have a limited set of in-place upgrade options. You can’t do an in-place upgrade from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, even if you have Exchange 5.5 running on Win2K. You can upgrade from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003, but make sure you’re confident of your change control. You don’t want applications running on the Exchange 2000 server to cause compatibility or security problems when married to Exchange 2003. GroupWise to Exchange Migration back up

If you run Exchange 2000 as a component of Small Business Server 2000, you can do an in-place upgrade to SBS 2003. If you run Exchange 5.5 as a component of SBS 4.5, Microsoft has a 48-page document detailing the required steps for replacing an SBS 4.5 server with an SBS 2003 server.