Dynamics Blogger – Blog Analytics for the year 2010

 
Personally, I could not contribute much to my blog for this year 2010 due to various reasons, one of which is primarily due to my job transition. However, readers continue to show their interest towards the blog which keeps me encouraging. I have been contributing to the community after being influenced by the fellow Dynamics Community legends like David Musgrave, Mariano Gomez, Mark Polino, Frank Hammelly, Victoria Yudin and several others. I learnt one thing that what we take from the community in the form of knowledge, we are also obliged to give the community the same knowledge what we acquire over the course of time.

Coming back to the Blog Analytics for my blog, My intention to publish the numbers here is to keep myself encouraging and help let others take notes on what topics users are interested to read and searching for so that the blog writing can be more focused on those topics.

One major observation that I made from my analysis that GP blog readers are specifically interested in trouble shooting articles. It is quite common. Whenever the user get struck on specific issue, we are used to bing or google it for probable answers which ultimately lead to the blog of the interest.

Here is the presentation on Dynamics Blogger Analytics.

1. Country Wise Readership Facts: United States brought the most visitors to the site as always, for most sites. US is followed by Canada, UK and India respectively.

2. Search Engine Wise Traffic Facts: Google is the clear winner which brought maximum visitors for the site.

3. Page wise Statistics: While page visits direct to site root are higher in number, the second highest numbers are brought to the site by the article “Send To: Mail Recipient (PDF) grayed out” followed by other articles.

4. Keyword Searches Facts: “kb971808” and “All call stacks are in use” are the Top two searches for this year.

Happy New Year 2011 to everyone!

Name one thing in GP that really sucks

An interesting question. Isn’t it? I borrowed this Q&A from LinkedIn Group Microsoft Dynamics GPS User Group. The dialogue is initiated by Ian Stewart, Dynamics GP expert and there are pretty interesting submissions by users. This is some kind of raw data that is vital and critical to Microsoft in fine tuning its product upgrades. Because, User feedback is the top most source for the success of any product. I’d say the end users are the actual testers of any application.

Key submissions by the users for the question above are summarized below

1. Payroll is not fun for one user though she doesn’t go into much detail as to why it is the case
2. Contract Management as they relate to RMAs’ is not fun  to another user.
3. One user doesn’t like the ‘save changes’ dialog boxes function through Dynamics GP.
4. Another user feels it frustrating since V2 that he cannot pick the printer on the fly. Though Named printers can be an alternative, yet.
5. Another user says Inventory Turns report doesn’t calculate correctly.

In my experience, I have seen most clients ask me two common features

1. Change the Font of the entire GP bigger including the forms and reports
2. Text reports replaced by Graphical reports.

Visit the original source here. Credits to Ian Stewart from Genesys Financial System Ltd. for the post.

Year-End Closing: Backup And Backup Data

“Prevention is Better than Cure”

We came to the Year-End of 2010 and we would see the Year-end closing Routine in Dynamics GP in most clients in the months to come based on their Year-end Audit schedules. Year-End Closing in Dynamics GP is all that simple it looks. It can also be a night mare if not handled properly. In general, Clients  depend on their Microsoft partners with the year-end process. This is always a safe bet relying on the subject-matter experts on clients side. However some clients do not want to go for Partners support and instead perform the Year-End process. If they have an in house GP consultant, yes, it helps. If not, Be wary of it.

MAKE SURE YOU TAKE A VALID BACKUP OF ALL COMPANIES AND DYNAMICS DATABASES BEFORE RUNNING THE YEAR-END ROUTINE. There is no exception to this task. You MUST take the backup. I have seen several clients experience problems who failed to take sufficient data backups. A classical example of what I have seen is the client thought the Year-end process went well, didn’t have any backup pre and post year-end routine. Continued posting transactions for the current year and after a month or so, realized the balances still popping up in Summary Inquiry and Detail Inquiry instead of them sitting in History Inquiry and History Detail. Cause was Year-end wasn’t complete and the balances were still in Open (GL20000) tables instead of History (GL30000) tables. This is one such example and there can be several other examples and experiences encountered by fellow consultants. Most clients would want to ring their Microsoft Partner buddies only when they experience issue and do not want to ring them before that.

My suggestion would be to have your Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner assist you in the Year-End process, be it an extra charge for you. Their expertise can always help you close the year smoothly than to run into issues later on.