The light at the end of the tunnel... Finishing the puzzle
The past few months at work I have been working on this never ending upgrade project. Well it will probably never be officially finished, but that is probably a good thing, since that is how the company got in it's technological mess in it's first place.
When I kicked off the project I never really imagined to what extent we would be pushing the boundaries and finding system limitations. It started off as an innocent software upgrade. Nothing is quite that simple though.
I inherited an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system that had not been touched upgrade wise in 9 years, the website was 6 years old, the newest desktop was over 5 years old, and on top of that there was a manual e-commerce system and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange).
That year we upgraded all of the desktops in the office, replaced the legacy PBX phone system with a VOIP one, which required that I needed to replace all of the network switches.
The ERP is hosted offsite and that hardware needed to be replaced as well and the server OS upgraded. Initially we said just upgrade the ERP and be done with it, but as we started to examine the system the workflow was severely broken down, The website was taking on SQL injection attacks, The e-commerce system just sent orders placed to an email address that required them to keyed by staff into the system. This was in addition to a relatively abandoned SharePoint 2003 site that only the sales team used for a bulletin board.
So needless to say a simple upgrade was out of the question. I was starting to get hammered with EDI requests from vendors and clients as well. In top of this security access wasn't tracked and the local shared drives was a bowl of spaghetti at best.
One would ask how we made it this far in this condition, and rightly so. We ended up biting the bullet and decided to tackle multiple issues as part of this process and embrace the cloud and social networking.
So we decided to implement and tie in true EDI and E-Commerce that was actually integrated into the system. The domino effect here meant that the old crusty website had to go. We are cleaning up all of the data in the ERP, changing the sales order process, and implementing an MRP system. Hopefully if all goes well the upgraded ERP will be up by September 30th. But sadly the e-commerce and website sites won't be ready just yet, and EDI will be a process that we ramp up over the rest of the year.
Last year Microsoft bought a company called Yammer, which is an enterprise social network that is cloud based. The goal is over the next few years for Microsoft to integrate it in with the rest of their line of business apps, which should include the whole Dynamics realm (it is already integrated with CRM).
We rolled Yammer out this summer and has been received pretty well and is a mild success so far. The next step is to on-board users to SharePoint Online. This is will be the single greatest feat if we can pull it off, since SharePoint can serve basically as an online file server, where people can work on the same files at the same time, and will also serve as the reporting server where all of the Business Intelligence reports will be published.
So what did I learn in the past year. Well Microsoft still owns the enterprise market and will for some time to come. Google Apps simply can not compete in this area for two main reasons. Google is absent in the ERP market (yes there are 3rd party apps in the Apps for Business store but I wouldn't call them enterprise ERP) and has nothing that compares to SharePoint/Skydrive Pro.....and no Google Drive is not SharePoint... SkyDrive sure.
As summer comes to an end and the leaves start to turn to reds, oranges and yellows, hopefully my mammoth project starts to wind down as well. Below are a list of products that we are using to make this all work.
Microsoft Dynamics GP (ERP)
Redtail Solutions (EDI)
K-eCommerce (website and e-commerce site)
Microsoft Office 365 (SharePoint Online)
Yammer (Social Network)
When I kicked off the project I never really imagined to what extent we would be pushing the boundaries and finding system limitations. It started off as an innocent software upgrade. Nothing is quite that simple though.
I inherited an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system that had not been touched upgrade wise in 9 years, the website was 6 years old, the newest desktop was over 5 years old, and on top of that there was a manual e-commerce system and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange).
That year we upgraded all of the desktops in the office, replaced the legacy PBX phone system with a VOIP one, which required that I needed to replace all of the network switches.
The ERP is hosted offsite and that hardware needed to be replaced as well and the server OS upgraded. Initially we said just upgrade the ERP and be done with it, but as we started to examine the system the workflow was severely broken down, The website was taking on SQL injection attacks, The e-commerce system just sent orders placed to an email address that required them to keyed by staff into the system. This was in addition to a relatively abandoned SharePoint 2003 site that only the sales team used for a bulletin board.
So needless to say a simple upgrade was out of the question. I was starting to get hammered with EDI requests from vendors and clients as well. In top of this security access wasn't tracked and the local shared drives was a bowl of spaghetti at best.
One would ask how we made it this far in this condition, and rightly so. We ended up biting the bullet and decided to tackle multiple issues as part of this process and embrace the cloud and social networking.
So we decided to implement and tie in true EDI and E-Commerce that was actually integrated into the system. The domino effect here meant that the old crusty website had to go. We are cleaning up all of the data in the ERP, changing the sales order process, and implementing an MRP system. Hopefully if all goes well the upgraded ERP will be up by September 30th. But sadly the e-commerce and website sites won't be ready just yet, and EDI will be a process that we ramp up over the rest of the year.
Last year Microsoft bought a company called Yammer, which is an enterprise social network that is cloud based. The goal is over the next few years for Microsoft to integrate it in with the rest of their line of business apps, which should include the whole Dynamics realm (it is already integrated with CRM).
We rolled Yammer out this summer and has been received pretty well and is a mild success so far. The next step is to on-board users to SharePoint Online. This is will be the single greatest feat if we can pull it off, since SharePoint can serve basically as an online file server, where people can work on the same files at the same time, and will also serve as the reporting server where all of the Business Intelligence reports will be published.
So what did I learn in the past year. Well Microsoft still owns the enterprise market and will for some time to come. Google Apps simply can not compete in this area for two main reasons. Google is absent in the ERP market (yes there are 3rd party apps in the Apps for Business store but I wouldn't call them enterprise ERP) and has nothing that compares to SharePoint/Skydrive Pro.....and no Google Drive is not SharePoint... SkyDrive sure.
As summer comes to an end and the leaves start to turn to reds, oranges and yellows, hopefully my mammoth project starts to wind down as well. Below are a list of products that we are using to make this all work.
Microsoft Dynamics GP (ERP)
Redtail Solutions (EDI)
K-eCommerce (website and e-commerce site)
Microsoft Office 365 (SharePoint Online)
Yammer (Social Network)