Website Integration to Microsoft Dynamics GP Great Plains – overview for programmer

There are several third party tools on the market, which allow you to create from scratch new eCommerce web site and integrate it with Microsoft Dynamics GP.  However the reality of eCommerce business is often the fact that such eCommerce website is already in production and works fine – and there are no plans to redesign it in order to establish connection with back office ERP

So, here we would like to concentrate on integration options of existing and functional e-commerce application with GP

1. eConnect – this tool has set of stored procedures in its core, allowing you to create, update and delete such objects as master records: customer, vendor, employee, GL account, as well as so-called work transactions: SOP Invoice, POP Receivings Entry, RM Invoice, etc.  eConnect was specially developed and designed for eCommerce programmers in order to allow them connect ecommerce site via custom programming.  eConnect in some manner replicates Microsoft Dexterity procedures, however eConnect stored procedures (encrypted) are organized in object oriented fashion
2. Custom Stored Procedures.  In some cases, when integration is fairly simple, you may decide to create straight forward stored procedures to do the job, instead of deploying eConnect.  It might seem as natural developer choice, however we should warn you that you probably better consider eConnect option on the first place and then think about complexity of data records distribution in GP ERP
3. GP Integration Manager.  If your integration is not required to run in real time, you may design IM integrations to do the job over night.  If your ecommerce places internet orders to SQL Server, IM should use ODBC queries and advanced queries, when required
4. Posting SOP Batch.  eConnect, Integration Manager and SQL stored procedures could send records in work tables, such as SOP10100 and SOP10200.  However all these tools are inefficient in posting transactions from ecommerce web application.  Posting could be programmed with Albaspectrum Posting Server, which is Microsoft Dexterity custom module, giving instructions to GP to post approved batches

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