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Informative Articles

10 PROVEN TIPS TO SURVIVE A COMPUTER CRASH
10 PROVEN TIPS TO SURVIVE A COMPUTER CRASH By Eve Abbott, excerpted from her new book, How to Do Space Age Work with a Stone Age Brain TM COMPUTER CRASH Do these words strike fear into you? If not, maybe they should! A computer crash is at best...

Data Recovery - What Not to Do!
Data Recovery - What Not to Do! by Keith Thompson Data recovery is a tricky thing, and if you've somehow deleted or had your important files corrupted or lost due to human error, business espionage, faulty hardware or software or any...

Eliminating the Risk of Delivering Network-Ready Applications
The transition from development to production is a risky one. Distributed applications that look good on the developer's bench often under-perform in the production environment. Even apparently innocuous changes to an application can cause...

ESecurity
ESecurity Current Situation Up until recently, security was very much like teenage sex in that it was typified by lots of talk but no action. Companies declared their sites as secure simply because the credit card payment page was protected by...

Get Down With OCP: Evaluating DBA Job Applicants in an OCP World
Not long ago, weeding through DBA applicants with a tech interview was a straightforward process. You'd ask candidates 200 or so technical questions. If they got 100 correct answers, you knew they'd been around the block; 150 or more and you knew...

Great Plains Accounting Support – overview for IT specialist
Great Plains Accounting was popular accounting package for mid-size and small companies back in 1990th. As each product has its life time – it is almost over for Great Plains Accounting – Great Plains Software was purchased by Microsoft and...

How & Why GPS Offers Affordable Fleet Tracking
There are more and more companies that are turning to Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to find out where their fleet vehicles are or have been. GPS is a satellite-based navigation system that reports the location, speed and direction of...

Insure Your Information - Backup Software
There are so many ways to lose precious data stored on your hard disk - power loss or power surge, overheating, electrostatic discharge, virus attack, software failure, etc. Are you still thinking your data is safe? Don't! Backup! Backup early,...

Nucleus Kernel for NTFS Data Recovery Softwares
Nucleus Technologies.com offers a complete range of data recovery software and utilities for Windows, operating system and supports various file systems including FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5 Kernel for NTFS recovers data from deleted, formatted,...

Your Hard Disk Failed... Don't Panic !
Inability to access your data stored on the data storage device could be caused by many reasons, from those that are easy to fix to those which are completely impossible to fix. If the damage is irreversible then data loss will occur. The causes of...

 
 
 
Microsoft Great Plains: Customization Upgrade & Recovery – Visual Studio VB 6.0

Microsoft Great Plains, former Great Plains Software Dynamics, eEnterprise has very long, about 12 years customization & integration history.  In earlier 1990th – the customization tool was mostly Great Plains Dexterity, later on when Great Plains was successfully moved to MS SQL Server 6.5, 7.0 and 2000 – we see more historical custom projects done in SQL stored procedures and front ends coded in VB in Visual Studio 6.0.

This was probably wise and natural choice in that time (around 1997-2001), but if you consider Microsoft move to .Net platform and reshaping its own programming environments (ADO, OLE, VB, etc) – you would nowadays rather be nervous relying on VB 6.0 custom front end, calling stored procs via ADO.  Let’s consider your options:

  • Upgrade to .Net.  As natural it might sound and look, however it might not be feasible.  The reason is - .Net is the whole revolution to Windows object model (or its introduction, somewhat more revolutionary, than J2EE/EJB/Java).  Your old VB code is not object oriented in the sense of .Net and majority of technologies are now obsolete or in phase out mode
  • Move Front End to Web Application.  Or recreate simplified version as VB.Net or C#.Net web project.  If you think your stored procedures are still capable to do the job at the data manipulation level, you can redesign front end as web application.  This is preferred way for now, however as business owner you may not like the idea to redo it.
  • Complications.  You might have additional complications, such as tiered design, when your presentation layer is

     


    separated from business layer (or physically these two layers sit on different computers).  Then, somebody should carefully analyze and design the upgrade path for both.  Unfortunately business logic level may deploy third party vendors logic, and these flourishing ISV of late 1990th might be now out of business
  • Integrations.  If your Great Plains is integrated with Unix, Oracle, DB 2, Lotus Domino, Siebel or other third party application – you need to consider synchronous upgrade for integrated applications to avoid retuning integration piece twice.
  • Reporting.  Since version 6.0, Great Plains is very conservative to tables structure changes, so if your reporting was done in 1999 or later – more likely you are out of trouble and should use it as it is.

 

Happy customizing!  You can always appeal to us to help you with your system.  Give as a call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577, help@albaspectrum.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains, Microsoft CRM, Navision, Microsoft RMS, Microsoft Business Portal customization company, serving clients in Chicago, Boston, New York, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Toronto, Montreal, Brazil, Mexico, UK, Australia, Canada, UK, Europe, Russia an having small offices in multiple states and internationally.