The obvious benefit is the price (It’s generally free!) The downside is it can be difficult to install, support and manage . We look at the pros and cons and offer you a few good resources and show you how to evaluate the packages your considering.

Opensource software is software that is developed by people with a real intereset in developing applications for everyone to use for free. The biggest repository of opensource software on the web is www.sourceforge.net.

Keypoints of open source software

1. It’s free to use and usually distributed for free. Some companies will package it up and make it a little easier to install, for this they charge a small fee. Other companies will sell the product but then give you free support for a limited time.

2. Most open source software is developed for the linux platform. Before considering adopting linux as an operating system you’ll need to make sure you have easy access to linux support people. One really good tech, who happens to be the same guy who sold you the software isn’t good enough. He’ll end up owning your business.

3. Because the operating systems and programming languages the software is developed in are themselves open source, installation, support and upgrades can be exceedingly difficult.

How to evaluate an open source solution.

Despite what your IT staff or consultant might say you want to evaluate any open source solution you’re considering. The depth of the evaluation is dependant on the complexity of the solution. An apache web server would be fairly quick to evaluate. A CRM solution for thirty sales people and several hundred customers is going to require at least a few weeks of testings.

The first step is to set up a test bed server. This can be an older server, just something reliable and fast enough to approximate real world results. As we’ve mentioned before most open source software is linux based so you’re going to need to decide on a linux distribution. Red Hat linux and Suse linux are two of the best and both are supported by the companies that distribute them. Suse linux is now owned by Novell. More than likely you’ll need a development environment and a sql server. Make sure the technican loads a distribution package to do this. The best for Apache, MYsql and PHP is Xampp which can be downloaded at apachefriends.org. Don’t let your techs tell you they’ve got a better way by just installing it piece by piece, you’ll end up paying for it later.

Have your techicians document the installation process, get the application stable and then step back from the test. If they’re spending every day with the end users resolving little problems it should be a red flag that the solution is not stable.

Make sure that the application you’re considering has some external support. This may be as simple as a forum of users but they’re needs to be a place you can go to for basic support issues. Also make sure the application has a user manual. Many open source packages are released with nothing more than a few sentences describing the installation process.

This next step is extremely important. You need to test for a failure. Have the techs rebuild the system from scratch and restore all of the data. If it’s not done within a day, that’s another red flag.

After the evaluation ask yourself these questions.

We’re most people able to take advantage of the software within a day or two? Was it easy to restore from the simulated crash? Were problems fixed in a timely manner? Did the software stay up and running throughout the test? Did they end users feel like they benefited from using the application?

Eric Gurr is a senior editor at Smbrsource. Contact Mr. Gurr at egurr@intralinkinc.com http://www.smbresource.com/opensource.html

When Great Plains Software introduced the first graphical accounting application for Mac and Windows in the beginning of 1990th it had Great Plains Dexterity customization tool, IDE and programming language. Dexterity design was based on several longevity principles: Graphical platform independence and database platform independence and easy switch from one DB to the other among the most important ones. Dexterity was written as a shell in C programming language, which was “platform independent” and at the same time very efficient in compilation (close to assembler). Since then we saw new tools and options:

• Modifier with VBA. This tool allows you place custom buttons and editable fields on the forms and attach VBA scripts to these buttons and fields. Theoretically you can deploy ADO and make a call to the database, but typically this would be given to Dexterity programmer. Also Modifier can deal with ReportWriter report – which is rarely used option, but you should be aware of it. Another usufull feature - calling Crystal Reports engine from VBA, so you can print custom Crystal Report - Invoice from SOP Entry screen, instead of regular Report Writer SOP Invoice Form.

• Continuum for VB and Delphi. We do not touch obvious features of Continuum, but would like to mention its advanced use. First – in Dexterity you can not easily target multiple modules (coming from different software vendors – those days Intellisol Advanced Purchase Order Processing, Project Accounting and ForeStar Fixed Assets). This feature could be addressed through Continuum generated VBA code with inclusion of Dexterity Scripts (Sanscript). The second nice feature of Continuum could be Great Plains Integration Manager custom apps, which allows you to switch Great Plains companies automatically and integrate the whole corporation during the night

• Dexterity SQL Support. When Great Plains C/S+ was introduced on MS SQL Server 6.5 platform – instead of using Dexterity cursors – you could use the way more efficient stored procedures and simply call them from Dexterity code. The negative side of this was – you can not have your custom piece running on Btrieve or Ctree platforms, where Dexterity cursors were the only way to work with the database

• Dexterity COM object support. This was new feature of Microsoft Great Plains Dexterity version 7.0. This feature allows you to call something nice, like web service from your COM object and in this case replace, say Great Plains tax engine with the one working from your web server, located in one place and serving numerous subscribers.

• eConnect. This tool was initially designed for eCommerce developer, who deploys Microsoft Great Plains as the back end/ERP. eConnect is SDK with SQL Stored Procedures and parameters descriptions.

• Extender. We’ll wait the next version – but even now it is very promising and it doesn’t require you to be programmer to customize Great Plains.

We encourage you to analyze your alternatives. You can always appeal to our help, give us a call: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), serving Microsoft Great Plains, CRM, Navision to mid-size and large clients in California, Illinois, New York, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan