Monday is the General Availability (GA) release date of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0. 

The 12+ month development effort received tremendous praise from Beta customers and is the first of many Out of Box integrations Microsoft will provide amongst the Dynamics family (roadmap in place for CRM integrations to AX, NAV, and SL).  Some representative feedback from our Beta customers include:

• "I was pleasantly surprised to see how intuitive the user interface is"
• "Every integration tool I have worked with requires you to be a developer on some level, this one does not and is amazingly simple to use"
• "We took advantage of the wizard-based configuration tools to map all the required fields so that we could immediately start sharing information between Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM"

From the beginning the focus of this toolset was to provide an integration product that adhered to specific capabilities that are important to Dynamics customers. These include:

• Robust ERP to CRM integration that “just works”
• Easy install and deployment
• Minimizing architectural overhead
• A non-developer customization story
• Transparency when things may go wrong

Some Data Points:

1. The Adapter is FREE!!!  However, customers will need to have an active/current Microsoft Dynamics GP Enhancement/Support plan. In addition, the customer will also need an active/current Microsoft Dynamics CRM Software Assurance (SA) Support Plan.
2. The Adapter can be obtained by the partner organization placing the order for the customer through the standard Microsoft Dynamics GP ordering system.
3. The Adapter will not be compatible with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 or Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0 or any other previous versions of Microsoft Dynamics GP or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In order to utilize the Adapter, the customer is required to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Service Pack 4 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Update Rollup #5. This is a completely new tool, redesigned from the ground up.
4. The main integration engines/services used for the Adapter are web services to eConnect (web services to web services)

We are planning on sitting through the demo and details with Microsoft today.  I will report back on details. News of this was leaked out a few weeks ago. It will be interesting to see if they are really back in business. The last few stabs at this by Microsoft ended in disaster. We were all told at the CRMUG conference by MSFT execs that they were going to get back in the game, that this was not a lackluster solution. Since GP 10 uses a Web Services architecture now, it will be great to see what “engine” they will be using.  We were told that it is not Biztalk-based. I will report back to you with the results of our meeting.