My friend and fellow MVP Belinda Allen was working on a business intelligence book for Dynamics GP based on actual visualizations built for GP users. She was kind enough to invite me in to help a little. Now the book is in the home stretch and you can pre-order it from Packt.
There’s going to be a name adjustment dropping the 2013 because these techniques work all the way back to version 10 and forward to beyond 2015. That’s just part of the fun of creating a book. You change a lot of stuff until you get it right, but I didn’t want to wait for the change to tell you it was coming! I really suck at keeping presents a secret.
As I’ve worked through this with Belinda there are a few things I love about the approach of this book including:
1) These are real world scenarios used in real businesses so they’ve been well thought through.
2) The examples are diverse enough that they can be helpful in answering the age old question: “What do you put on your dashboard?” You’ll find some ideas that you haven’t thought about yet.
3) There are some long views in here because we do cool stuff. That reminds me of my geeky youth typing long programs into a Commodore 64 from some nerd magazine and hoping that I typed it right so that the program would run. Sigh.
4) The book includes downloads of those long views (and the short views too) so that when the nostalgia of typing long commands wears off you can jump forward into the brave new world of today.
5) Belinda is an absolute freak about putting arrows in the screenshots so you know exactly what you are supposed to click on and in what order. By freak I mean that we’re forcing her into 12 step program once the book is final.
Real World Business Intelligence for Dynamics GP is also a nice follow up to Building Dashboards with Dynamics GP and Excel. If you’ve built a dashboard or two and you’re hungry for more, this is the perfect companion. If you’re looking to get started, buy them together.