Great Plains Dynamics GP is traditionally available within the Middle East and in Arabic speaking countries, plus it is definitely adoptable within the countries, where local language is predicated on Arabic characters. Typically local laws and government financial reporting requirements are reasonable in Arabic World, so Sales or VAT tax setup for specific country just isn’t a challenge and it might be done as a part of Corporate ERP implementation. We are going to focus on technology features of supporting Arabic language in Great Plains:
1. Microsoft Dexterity technology and Arabic alphabet. Currently Dexterity supports ASCII table, where each letter representation is restricted to eight bits or one byte or information. And even when Arabic characters could look very sophisticated and much like hieroglyphs, they’re ASCII table compliant
2. Microsoft SQL Server Arabic Language support. MS SQL Server has so-called code pages and collations. should you are in USA and you’re installing SQL Server, you will likely never answer the query – what’s my collation. The rationale is easy – your default SQL Server installation takes defaults from you Windows Server locals, and if those locals are US based, SQL Server assumes that defaults needs to be US English. In the event you are adding Arabic country based GP company to your American Headquarters SQL Server – you must change collation on the database level to support Arabic characters
3. Arabic Language support options in Great Plains. In the event you are programmer – you most likely know that you may have two options. First is to translate Dexterity string resources from English into Arabic and distribute Dynamics.Dic with translated strings to local users. Second option could be to export String resources to Modifier and distribute Forms.Dic to local users. First option is more powerful, because it has unlimited Dexterity customization possibilities open, but it’s also open to potential bugs in Dexterity business logic. We’re favoring the second options – Modifier based strings in Arabic
4. Great Plains Reports in Arabic. Similar concept is applicable to GP Report Author and its important dictionary Reports.dic. Dexterity string resources in Arabic needs to be imported into Reports.dic. Be at liberty to switch such vital reports as SOP Blank Invoice Form, or whatever it’s essential be modified in Report Author
5. Modules required to support Arabic letters. Within the case of supporting it in Modifier – you will want Customization Site Enabler license
6. Switching from Arabic to English and back. You’ve got to have two GP workstations installed in your user computer, one is with Arabic language supporting and the second with standard US English
7. FRx Financial and Consolidated Reporting. Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss Statement and Statement of Money Flow and their consolidated versions are regional settings immune
8. GP support for the countries, where Arabic alphabet is in use, but local language just isn’t Arabic. the instance could be Afghanistan, where local language is Dari and it is predicated on Arabic alphabet (or Iran, where local language, Farsi can be based on Arabic). Here the advisable solution could be to translate Dynamics.dic string resources to Dari or Farsi respectively and import them into Forms.dic and Reports.dic