New on the Dynamics GP 2010 home screen is the "Connect" window. This widget dynamically populates with Microsoft Dynamics GP support information, user groups,  and links to general information.

One thing we noticed is that with any of our test companies we always saw this error:

Well it turns out this is caused by special characters in the company name.

As many of you know, when you put the tag "<TEST>" into the company name you get a nice warning on login that this is a a test company. See this blog for details...

Unfortunately, the angle brackets cause the URL to the Dynamics Connect site to get malformed.

Here is the URL that Dynamics Connect is trying to access:

https://online.dynamics.com/lus/?se=popup&autorefresh=false&product=GPRoleCenter&version=11.00.0349.000&roleid=0&country=US&locale=EN-US&company=%3cTEST%3e&role=Basic+Home+Page

Notice the "&company" parameter  is "%3cTEST%3e". The %3c and %3e are the HEX equivalent codes for the ASCII characters that represent < and >

If you remove the characters it will open fine.

Here try to click this link: https://online.dynamics.com/lus/?se=popup&autorefresh=false&product=GPRoleCenter&version=11.00.0349.000&roleid=0&country=US&locale=EN-US&company=TEST&role=Basic+Home+Page

Unfortunately until Microsoft fixes this your only options are to either remove the "<TEST>" from your company name or remove the Dynamics Connect widget from your home screen in user preferences.

Alternatively if you had a DPI based firewall that scanned outgoing URLs, you could make some crazy rule to use URL rewriting, but that's really out of scope of this article :).

Thanks for reading, until next time....

WebSan Solutions Inc. is a Canadian Certified Dynamics Partner.

September 12, 2011 by Andrew King, WebSan Solutions, Inc.

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Tags: dynamics gp connect, dynamics home screen, Microsoft Dynamics GP Canada
Posted in User - ERP User Posts | 1 Comment »

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