The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Microsoft Solomon and Microsoft Dexterity

Microsoft Solomon and Microsoft Dexterity

Has anyone got any experience of these (suspiciously similar) technologies ?

Solomon: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnmbssol/html/mbs_soldevtools.asp

Dexterity: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnmbssbm/html/mbs_sbmdevtools.asp

Both seem to be talking about the same thing and both MSDN articles are dated 2nd July 2003.

Anyway, does anyone have first-hand experience of these ?

Steve Jones (UK)
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Tch. Another Microsoft guerrila marketer.

;-)
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

I doubt Microsoft would need guerilla marketing. They do enough gorilla marketing. :)

sgf
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Solomon is one of the Accounting/ERP packages sold by Great Plains, the company which Microsoft purchased a year or so ago and is the basis for the Microsoft Business Solutions divisions. It is written in Visual Basic and can be customized using VBA internally or using a Visual Basic toolkit to write components that talk to it using COM.

Dexterity is a C type language that was invented by Great Plains and what two other Accounting/ERP products they sell, Dynamics and Small Business Manager (SBM being a Dynamics lite for very small businesses). Both these products can be customized to some extent using VBA and a built in forms Modifier. However, for heavy duty customization of these applications, Dexterity is more full featured and usually used. Some sorts of customization are not possible using VBA and require Dexterity.

This all off the top of my head. If you have more questions, feel free to ask. If you'd like more specific info, I can dig up some links.

Jason
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

>>Dexterity is a C type language that was invented by
>>Great Plains and what two other Accounting/ERP
>>products they sell, Dynamics and Small Business
>>Manager (SBM being a Dynamics lite for very small
>>businesses)

Basically, what I meant to say is that the two products, Dynamics and Small Business Manager are written in Dexterity.

Jason
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

The finance people at the company I consult for use solomon. As someone else said, it is a great plains accounting package. Not sure what Dexterity is.

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Thanks guys. I wondered if it was one of MS's acquisitions.

Do you have any knowledge of how easy it is to use, especially the customizing aspects ? Is it something that generally requires IT/developer resources, or can high-level Users attempt it themselves ?

Steve Jones (UK)
Wednesday, February 11, 2004