Dynamics GP Letter Writing Assistant experience

I had to re-enter the world of the Letter Writing Assistant (LWA) in Dynamics GP after a long hiatus.  This did not go well.

What we wanted was a letter to notify employees of the online pay stub service we were going to start using.  Perfect match for the LWA right?

I wanted to start with the Employee Memo that is already in GP.  It's blank but has a decent outline with the company name on top, addressed to an employee, and signed by the user.

To do this I opened the Letter Writing Assitant from Reports > Letter Writing Assistant.  Click Next from the "Welcome" window.  Choose "Customize the letters by adding new letters or changing existing letters."  From the Letter Maintenance window select Letter Category "Employee" and Create New Letter > "Start with existing Word document" and click Next.

Now things get murky here.  A window presents prompting for a "Document Name" with a folder browser beside it, and "OK" and "Cancel" buttons.  If you try to enter any document name, in fact any name at all or browse anywhere and type a file name you will receive the following error:

this file name is a reserved word or contains invalid characters

For this to work properly you need to browse to the GP Letters folder and chose an existing letter.  Doing so will open the existing letter in Word for editing.

If you truly want a "New Letter" you need to Save As a new letter name within the same Letters folder (i.e. for me it's the Letters\Employee folder.)  You can also navigate to the Letters folder and copy the existing letter to a new name first if you want.

I do believe this is a fairly dangerous way to create a "New Letter", as there is substantial risk you might accidently save over your existing letter if you forget to do the Save As with a new name soon enough.

So far a bit of a rough start in my view.  I will continue my journey in this world as we need to bring in data from an outside source to include in the letter.  That's a topic for another post.

Well the end result is, as many others have found, the Letter Writing Assistant in GP is fairly limited in the number of available fields.  As a result we are not able to utilize it for what we need.  Instead we will use Smartlist and Word mail-merge for this purpose.

"error retrieving/setting data - unable to retrieve notification monitor" message when attempting to access Site Settings

Just posted this on the Scribe message boards.

This is a new Insight 7.9.3 installation on Server 2016. ScribeInternal database is newly created on a remote SQL 2016 server. A domain user account is used for the Scribe services, all of which are running with no errors. UAC is off as is the domain firewall on the Scribe server.

The service account user is added to DCOM for the Scribe services and is a local admin on the box. The Scribe server name is correct in the appropriate Scribe tables. The Scribe service user is a sysadmin on the remote SQL server.

I will update with any resolution.

** Update

With the help of Scribe tech support we found that I used a dev domain service account user instead of the prod domain service account in the Scribe Console User group.

So this error shows up when your Scribe service account is not in the Scribe Console User group.

Using eConnect from Dexterity - Part 2

In Part 1 I introduced my reasons for using eConnect in Dexterity customizations of GP, and recommended installation of the eConnect SDK so you could obtain the (CHM) Programmer's Guide, which will be helpful in writing eConnect integrations.

Now I will introduce my basic framework for integrating the two technologies.

First, understand that, among other things, eConnect includes a bunch of stored procedures that are installed in every Dynamics GP database.

The Programmer's Guide will help identify which of these procedures you'll need.  When you figure out which you'll be using you can use SQL Management Studio to view the parameters you'll need to feed.

The above example shows the parameters needed to pass to the taGetNextJournalEntry eConnect procedure.  If you want to create Journal Entries in GP you can use this stored procedure to get the next number.  Oddly these "Next Number" stored procedures are not in the documentation.

You can reference these procedures directly from Dexterity, but I like to wrap them in my own stored procedures and call mine instead.

Notice the reference to taErrorCode in the Dynamics database.  Because I only want the next JE number I also take back any error information.  I follow this structure for all my eConnect procedure calls.  This makes the Dexterity call fairly simple:

Next time I will look at a transaction example.