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I’m not sure why I get a kick out of being snarky as I’m usually a very positive person in real life. But I do.

I’ve been waiting for for DynamicsWorld’s Microsoft Dynamics Most Influential People Top 100 list all year. I was hoping that maybe the fine folks at Dynamics World would see my great contribution to the Dynamics community over the past year and put me maybe 100 on the list. Alas, my random thoughts during my infrequent blog posts were not enough to convince anyone of my value to the community. I wonder if they expanded the list to 1000 I’d have a shot? Last years Awesome list can be found here in case anyone was wondering if they improved on their awesomeness over the year.

Reading over the list I must admit to only knowing a fraction of the winning nominees. Maybe it’s a UK thing versus a North America thing.

From here on out in this post I will refer to that other list as the “Other” list. No need to dig up painful memories for all those that were wrongfully omitted from the Other list.

So without further ado I now present the second annual “Doug Pitcher’s OFFICIAL 100 Most Famous, Awesome and Totaly Influential Dynamics People for 2012” or DPO100MFATIDP2012 for short.

1. Doug Pitcher – Once again, it’s my dang list so I’m putting my name at the top
2. Linda Rose – Until someone convinces me Linda is not the most intelligent and forward thinking person I’ve ever worked with she’ll stay at the top as well. There are other Dynamics hosting companies out there but there is only one Linda Rose.
3. David Musgrave – Until David actually makes the Dynamics world list I’ll keep him at the top of my list. I’ve actually had quite a fun time with David over the past year and him not being on that other list makes me really question it’s validity.
4. Mark Polino – Mark went out of his way to say hi to me at Convergence. Even if you are on the Other list I’ll let that slide. I think you should brand the “50 tips and tricks” phrase and sell it on eBay or something Mark. You’d make a gazillion with how well known that is now.
5. Mariano Gomez – I felt bad for Mariano this year as he slid to 66 from 30 on the Other list. You know you are losing your magic when you go on a free fall as bad as that.
6. Leslie Vail – An MVP and totally awesome person so of course she still gets her name in the spotlight. I don’t see her on the Other list this year so this only solidifies her position at the top
7. Nick Hoban – Still waiting for the MVP vote Nick. Would putting you higher on my Awesome list help?
8. Victoria Yudin – I make money off of sending customers to Victoria’s website. It’s not often I can’t find a solution to someone’s reporting questions by just referencing her blog. It’s not wrong to charge someone just for knowing where the answer to their question is, is it?
9. Kirill Tatarinov – When you are the big wig of MBS I guess it would make my Awesome list seem invalid if I didn’t put him on here.
10. Mohammad Daoud – Sorry Mohammad about your snubbing this year on the Other list. Try bribing your family to vote for you like Dwight Specht did last year.
11. Dwight Specht – Speak of the devil. He made the Other list last year but not this year which only improves his chance at getting a higher placement in my rankings. I sat with Dwight on a partner panel this year for the DYNAA. I felt like a little fish sitting next to a shark. He has quite an impressive aura around him.
12. Tami Jones- Our whole company is run by women and Tami fits the mould of dynamic take charge type person. She’s the backbone behind the RASP team and does a great job interacting with customers.
13. Doug White – Grumpiest guy I know but one heck of a systems architect. He’s the smart Doug in the company.
14. Colin Powell – Keynote speaker at Convergence so why not put him here.
15. Terry Heley – When I have payroll questions I turn to Terry. She’s a great MBS resource.
16. Steve Chapman – Steve is the all around social media king. 20000 twitter followers and 100’s of youtube videos. We have people calling in just to talk to the famous Steve Chapman.
17. Rebecca Bunas – AKA Rock Star. The phrase I’m with Rebecca works wonders.
18. Errol Schoenfish – I met Errol at Convergence in person and he knew who I was because I was with Rebecca. It helps to be with the band sometimes.
19. Julie Rague- Rebecca’s friend that puts up with me tagging along as they spend the night talking about girl things and the good ole days.
20. Mark Rockwell – Mellowed down on the outfits this year as they went for the bartender looks. That won’t get you any higher on my list Mark. Try a “Get out of the 70’s” theme next year and dress up as hippies and have the disco music pumping. That would get you some serious points on my list.
21. Tami Jones – She’s so cool I’m putting her on the list twice.
22. Katie Hasbargen – DYNAA program lead. Took over the main operational duties of the DYNAA this year. I was invited to go to a hockey game with the DYNAA this year and if that doesn’t get you on my Awesome list nothing will.
23. Don Morton – Football coach, mentor and site leader over the Dynamics Academic Alliance (DYNAA)
24. Bethany Eighmy – Part of the DYNAA team that brought myGPcloud to universities
25. Lyndsey Creamer – the other part of the DYNAA team that brought myGPcloud to universities
26. Jesse Byam – It’s blizzarding outside my office right now and I bet Jesse is still in shorts. We missed you at Convergence this year Jess.
27. Doug Kennedy – Rebecca and I ran into him coming back from the ball park in Atlanta. I started chatting with him and he admitted to not knowing who I was. But I was with Rebecca so he was still willing to talk to me.
28. Chris Dew – Our RASP booth was next to eOne this past year so I got to see how famous Chris really is. 1000’s of people flocked around him as he discussed the finer points of politics, the seperation of church and state, and how to resolve the conflict in the middle east. At least I assumed he was talking about that as there was a never ending flow of customers waiting to talk with him.
29. Francisco Garcia Hillyer – Second year in a row for Francisco on this list. He’s smarter than me so I need to keep him happy so he’ll help me when I get stuck with anything.
30. Terry Carlton – I still like Terry so he stays on the list by default.
31. Donte Kim – Nodus founder
32. Tim Cruickshank – Been on several customer panels over the past couple of years at Convergence relating to Manufacturing and healthcare. He also lets me hang out with him so I feel cool.
33. Vaidy Mohan – Still a blogging buddy. Maybe we’lll meet up eventually.
34. Cheryl Mortvedt – Fellow support person whom I usually team up with to beat up on unsuspecting Microsoft support people at the annual partner advantage meetings.
35. Todd Schultz- Chair of the DYNAA. Leading the way to bring myGPcloud to the academic setting.
36. Richard Whaley – I almost got ran over by Richard as he drove his stand up scooter thing around. Only Awesome people have one of those so I guess you can stay on the list.
37. Jennie Davis – The partner channel head hauncho. No partner event this past year so only said hi to Jennie in passing.
38. Mike Feori – Payroll specialist. When Terry doesn’t know the answer I turn to Mike.
39. Beat Bucher- Commented on my last Awesome list so gets a place on this years list. Hey, it’s my list and I can decide who is awesome or not.
40. Liane McIlraith – Most knowledgeable GP training and implementer and nicest person anyone knows. She actually yelled at someone this year….and then apologized for it. We were really proud of her up until the apology part.
41. Christina Philips – Another Blogger extraordinaire.
42. Melissa Sanders- She writes the payroll checks in our company so I need to be nice to her.
43. Carol Yacht- Dynamcis GP author of educational books. I’m scheduled to be on a panel with her next week at an educational conference. If you ask anyone about academic books her book is one of the main ones out there.
44. Frank Hamelly – I’m sorry Frank. You made the Other list this year so I just can’t put you as high on my list.
45. Anya Ciecierski – I still don’t know how to pronounce her name and since she made it on the Other list she gets to pull up the rear with Frank. Just having fun Anya. Please keep inviting us to your blogging luncheons and web training on how to write effective and useful blog posts.
46. Patrick Roth (Late addition)- Somehow I forgot about Patrick Roth. I didn’t see any comments from Patrick last year on my list so assumed he didn’t care if I thought he was awesome or not. 
47. John Lowther (Late Addition)- Anyone that references my awesome list on their blog must be awesome.

Well that’s more than 37. I guess I met 8 new people this year so my Awesome list is growing by leaps and bounds.

Did I miss anyone? I’m sure I did and am not above adding to the list if my attention is brought to a worthy candidate.

As always, chocolates and candy are an appropriate bribe if you want to nominate yourself and I’ll take the matter under consideration with my nomination committee.

Have a great year being Awesome everyone.

I’ve read a lot of articles on how moving Dynamics GP to the cloud will effect the Dynamics community. I’ve also read a post about how a cloud approach affects partners.

Let me share an experience that happened today to discuss a significant reason on why Dynamics GP customers should consider moving to a cloud deployment.

A client called in and stated she had no GL account information in her system.

I’ve seen it where security has made it so you can’t see any GL accounts so I ran with the normal troubleshooting steps to resolve that issue. Nothing worked. I queried the GL00100 table and sure enough nothing was in the account master table.

No sweat. Let’s restore from a backup from last night. The accountant was completely confident in her IT team as she confirmed just a few short weeks ago all backups were being preformed and all data was secure. She did this as I had mentioned the option of moving to the cloud as a way to minimize risk with botched backups. I specifically said “I’ve seen it time and time again. Something happens and you need to restore your company database. You go to your IT team and there is no backups being done so you loose several months worth of data.”

I received a call a few minutes later from a panicked IT manager stating no backups have been done since November 29th, 2011. That’s five months ago. The SQL backups had been failing and they had been backing up the same file for five months. They are using SQL Express so the notification of failed backups are non existent.

After restoring the database to a test company with the files they provided we discovered the backup was actually from November 4th, 2011 which just so happen to be before their year end close and all their audit adjustments were entered, six months ago. We also verified the other 5 companies they have had not been being backed up as well.

Without a backup we are left trying to figure out what happened and determine how to resolve. Come to find out the accounting manager mistakenly used the clear data option instead of the check links function on all the financial tables in GP. We are now in the process of recreating all GL tables and CM tables back to November 4th, 2011. But the GL information will have to be recreated from that point on by running posting reports from all sub modules and GL entries being re-entered. There just so happens to have been quite a bit of activity done in this company since November (approximately 10 million in sales). This would have been no big deal with a valid backup in place.

How would moving to the cloud fix a situation like this? Backups are monitored and verified. Every Monday our hosting company (RoseASP) randomly takes a backup of an existing customer and restores it to a test company. The backup is verified and the customer can go in and verify the data as well. The hosting company is interested and concerned about each customers backup plan and goes through several steps to ensure there is a disaster plan in place.

It is now 1 am in the morning and I have been working on fixing this mess since 11 am yesterday morning. There is a lot of data and the insert scripts take a long time and there is no DTS tool with SQL Express. I have copied over each table with an insert script for each GL and CM table individually. I guess I’m in part writing this post because I’m grumpy and I feel like saying “I told you so.”

One good thing has come about this situation. The client is now sold on moving to the cloud. They should be moved over by next week.

These two events are the major annual parties that have thousands of participants every year. I have been to many events in the past but I thought I’d start ranking the parties against each other so if you are a person that only has one good party in you a year you’ll know which one to attend.

The Rock and Rave was fantastic this year if bowling, pool and networking with you’re fellow convergence teammates.

Timmy K was a king of Lucky Strike.

Tim was good at pool but we found Steve S. A. was a shark. I personally saw him clear the table and I didn’t even get to take one shot.

Of course Rebecca was in the middle of it all.

 

The spot is usually some type of band or dance location. If you like to bust a move like Jeff below this is a great event.

If you’re not ready to kick up your heels it’s still worth coming by and checking out the scene.

I’m a sucker for dancing but I love bowling and pool. I’d give the edge to Rock and Rave this year.

What do you think?

The past couple of days have been great. If you haven’t seen our team walking around in our bright orange shirts you might be the only one.

Here’s some of our team trying to give away free stuff.

The famous Steve Chapman is a hit every where. We’ve had his followers come by and wait around for him to return from his various activities.

 

I think we are going to have his followers start handing out freebies so we don’t have to take them all home.

It was a great day. Everyone I talked with indicated business has picked up over the last couple of years so that is great news for the Dynamics community. Spent the morning in partner meetings then spent the afternoon working as a booth babe. Come to think of it, there weren’t that many people coming by. Maybe I scared everyone off instead of attracting. I’ll do some pushups and hope for better traffic today.

One big announcement is MBS has now made the Professional Service Tools Library open for partners to use with clients. That’s wonderful news as the tools have typically cost around $1,000 per tool in the past.

There was a lot of people at Minute Maid Park for opening ceremonies. We took the clubhouse tour which was great.

 

Rebecca’s son is really into baseball and weightlifting. She was sure to send many photo’s to him to make him jealous.

 

Me in the clubhouse.

I’m pretty sure that’s Fab Melo but I only caught a glimpse of him.

There he is again.

Here’s some fellow tour attendees. Albert looks to be having a good time.

The Red Sox must have prompted the sign above.

Daughtry rocking out.

It was a pretty fun concert and great event. Thanks MBS.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen David Musgrave in person and I thought I saw him from afar. Being the friendly person that I am I went up to him and asked “Are you David Musgrave?” It just so happen not to be David Musgrave. It actually was Mariano Gomez.

Mariano was quite polite in the whole encounter and happened to point me to the real David Musgrave.

It was an honest mistake. Don’t these two fine looking fellows look like twins? It must have been the facial hair that confused me.

OK, I’ll come clean. David actually dared me to ask Mariano that question much to the delight of all present.

I can honestly say that was the highlight of the day. That and hearing everyone yell at the Microsoft executives about all the things they don’t like about the ERP channel.

Convergence is almost in full swing. Partners are meeting today to get some pre Convergence instructions from Microsoft. Everything in the GP sessions is about the new GP web client that is going to be available for GP2012. I’ve been to a lot of Convergences and, in my opinion, sessions that include discussions about products that aren’t released yet are fairly silly. People ask questions about how things are going to work and the presenter pretends to know exactly how the product will end up looking. At least the presenter is fair enough to say “We don’t have any idea how we are going to do the email integration for the web client”.

They did announce the new web client will convert all Report Writer reports to Word automatically. I not sure I heard that right. It sounds kind of unbelievable to me that Report Writer reports will convert? Anyone else hear anything on that side of things?

I did see Mark Polino from a far but I wasn’t wearing my dazzling orange shirt so he probably didn’t recognize me.

Met up with the Rose crew. Always good to see everyone as I’m not in the office all that much so I’m more like a nebulous cloud team member.

Our RoseASP booth is up and looking good. Make sure you come by and get some good swag.

One of my favourite posts from last year was when I recognized all the really cool people in the Dynamics community that made or didn’t make a so called official most influential list.

I’m still getting comments and emails from people who feel ripped off as they are not included on my list. (Who wouldn’t feel ripped off. It is an OFFICIAL list and if you’re not on it you’re not that awesome.) I think the other top 100 list comes out in the May time frame so my list usually follows shortly after so I can make sure to right the wrongs of the whole ordeal.

So with that in mind I would think that one of your goals at Convergence this year should be to land a spot on Doug Pitcher’s OFFICIAL 100 most famous, awesome and totally influential Dynamics people for 2012.  There is lots of room on my list as I only made it to 37 people last year and it would be nice to get somewhere near 100 this year.

So remember to go out of your way to introduce yourself to me at convergence this year.

It shouldn’t be that hard to find me. I’ll be wearing a dazzling neon orange shirt that looks like this.

I’m not sure what kind of pants really match a shirt like this? But hey, when you’re awesome it doesn’t really matter does it?

Just in from Terry Heley.

MBS has released their Year End update for GP 10 and 2010. See links below.

As a word of caution. I’d wait a while before jumping on the update wagon. I’ve found over the years that if you wait for a while everyone else will work out the inevitable quarks with any update.

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Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 – 11.0.1860

Year-end page, live in 1 hour

https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/downloads/taxupdates/usgpye2010.htm?printpage=false

Direct link(get it now) —- MicrosoftDynamicsGP11-KB2599505-ENU.msp

https://mbs2.microsoft.com/fileexchange/?fileID=9dbf6526-a035-4294-b8c7-20476b166cd7

Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 – 10.0.1779

Year-end page, live in 1 hour

https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/downloads/taxupdates/usgpye10.htm?printpage=false

Direct link(get it now) —– MicrosoftDynamicsGP-KB2599501-v10-ENU.exe

https://mbs2.microsoft.com/fileexchange/?fileID=d33159ca-14b2-4f96-81d2-aca4af914978

Please make note of this 10 information J (also noted on our pages)

Microsoft will provide a 2012 Year-End Update to all U.S and Canadian Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Customers. Microsoft will also provide Round 1 U.S. tax tables for the 2013 Payroll reporting year. Following these releases, no additional code update will be released for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0, due to end of Mainstream Support in the Support Lifecycle for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0. Technical support for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10 will continue to be provided through the Extended Support phase which will end on 10/10/2017. If you are currently using Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0, you must upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 or Microsoft Dynamics GP 12 (Due to release in December 2012) to receive any further regulatory and or code updates following the January 2013 Round 1 Tax Update.

Also, new this year a year-end video!!! This goes with the slides I have attached.

https://mbs2.microsoft.com/fileexchange/?fileID=d4485b9c-39e7-4389-a756-501a019b9f31

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Thanks Terry.

I had a weird one the other day. A client called up and said their year end close was a foul. The year end close report indicated it did not tie out. I stopped them immediately from processing and had them restore to a backup and we tried it again. Same issue. I’ve seen a lot of issues relating to year end close but not for a while. I remember in older versions of GP if you double clicked on the close year button it would close out two years. The funniest year end close thing I ever saw was someone closing out four years, and didn’t have a backup. We had to contact MBS to open the years back up for them at a high price tag.

So after verifying the numbers looked correct on the TB I decided to bring in MBS to look at it and they scratched their head a bit and finally admitted this was the third time they’ve seen it this week. The year end close actually processed correctly but the report was off.

After troubleshooting the cause MBS thinks they have it figured out.

Here is the fix MBS sent to me.

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In our testing, it looked like the GL40000 (GL Setup) table is not consistent with what you see in the General Ledger setup window.
If you have ever selected to close to divisional account segments and clicked OK, the DIVACTSG field in the GL40000 table is updated.
If you then go back into the window and uncheck the option to close to divisional account segments, the table does not get updated and still holds a value other than 0 in the DIVACTSG column.
To correct, please run the following update statement and try the year end close again on your TEST system and you should hopefully find that the issue is resolved:
update GL40000 set DIVACTSG = 0

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Many users probably won’t notice this until they go to close out their year in January. This client upgraded to GP 2010 a few months back and they have a late fiscal year end so ran across the issue early.