At Professional Advantage (PA), as an ISV, we develop and support two Microsoft Dynamics GP add on products: Collections Management and Company Data Archive.
As both products have been extensively enhanced since their original development, let’ take a moment and look back on the journey each product has taken over the past decade to get where they are today.
First, we’ll dive into the background information and the path Collections Management has taken, dating back to the late 1990’s when the product was developed. Originally developed in 1997 by Professional Advantage, Microsoft OEM’d the product in 2000. This move by Microsoft was due to Collections’ growth potential and its key use in the Receivable Module which earned Collections Management a spot in the Microsoft Dynamics GP Receivable Module as a core product.
For the next 13-14 years, Microsoft maintained and supported the product as a core GP feature. However, in June of 2013, Microsoft transitioned Collections Management back to Professional Advantage after a 12-year licensing agreement and nearly 18 years since the product’s inception.
Building on the tremendous contribution by Microsoft, PA has been developing and supporting Collections Management since the product has been transitioned back. Thanks to our customer’s input and suggestions, we’ve been able to add new features into Collections Management, improving our solution to better serve our customers. Here are the upgrades we’ve made to Collections Management since that transition:
- Collection upgrades (GP 2013 – GP 2015)
- Collection upgrades (GP 2016)
- Collection Notes Enhancements (GP 2016)
Next, we look back on the second Microsoft Dynamics GP add-on product developed by Professional Advantage, Company Data Archive (CDA). CDA was originally developed back in the early 2000s.Originally designed to allow users to archive Core-Dynamics GP data, CDA provides an easy way to move historical information from your ‘live’ production company, to an ‘archive’ company. By archiving Dynamics GP data, users will:
- Experience faster Dynamics GP upgrades and performance
- Reduce hardware expenses
- Eliminate clutter in reports and inquiries
- Easily bulk archive and/or remove GP data from your live company
- Allow for easy viewing of historical data in your archive company
CDA has steadily evolved over time to make the archiving process as simple and quick as possible. Having evolved to allow users to pause and resume their archives, run a pre and post archive tool for index fragmentation, database health checks, apply document chain reporting, linked server archiving, and having the ability to archive other ISV 3rd party products with CDA Plus.
The next step for CDA? Automatic Archives – allowing users to set a specific date & time to have an archive automatically run. This will not require users to be logged in to perform the archive manually, rather they will be able to set the archive to run and pause it as needed during off-peak business hours, or on the weekend.
