Great Plains Customization - Sales Document Delivery by SQL Mail

Microsoft Dynamics GP or former Great Plains eEnterprise and Dynamics have multiple options for modification, integration, programming and reporting. In this small publication we would like to show you alternative way of delivering PDF printed Sales Documents to your customers via email. You should also be aware that in GP Business Portal you can achieve the same goal by first of all implementing Great Plains Business Portal and its Electronic Document Delivery module. In some cases you probably want to keep low profile and not to take BP implementation route.1. PDF Sales Batch Printing routine. This is fairly simple GP Dexterity programming task. What you do is this - you create Dex cursor, coming through each Invoice in the SOP batch and calling Dex Invoice printing procedures, where printing is done to the PDF file. Then you mark invoice as printed in your custom invoice printing and delivery status table. Please be aware that at this time, August 2008, GP Dynamics doesn't allow you to print documents is you do not purchase genuine Adobe PDF Standard, Smart PDF will not do the job.2. SQL Mail - emailing invoices. This step we recommend you to create as schedule SQL agent job, running every say five minutes. SQL job will allow you to resolve possible active directory user access and security issues. Please, read description of xp_sendmail extended stored procedure. Invoice will be read from the directory on the server. Please note that SQL mail doesn't understand network shares and reads data from SQL Server computer physical drives: C, D, etc. If send mail result for the particular invoice is success, you should mark this Sales document as delivered in your custom invoice printing and delivery status table.3. SQL mail activation on MS SQL Server box. The simplest way to deal with SQL mail activation is to install MS Office Outlook client and test email sending with active directory user, who launches MS SQL Server on your Server computer. This is again not the only way, so if you feel yourself comfortable to experiment with SMTP client installation and settings, you should stand out and do this.