News

Dynamics GP 2013 Beta Released; Final Version Expected December

• By Gladys Rama
• September 13, 2012

The beta of Microsoft's Dynamics GP 2013 enterprise resource planning (ERP) product is now available to partners, Microsoft announced on Wednesday.

"We are very proud of the technology advancements in this release including making Dynamics GP more efficient for cloud deployments and providing our community of partners a transformation engine to move their 500+ industry solutions to the web," wrote Errol Schoenfish, Microsoft director of product management, in a blog post announcing the beta's availability.

Partners can download the Dynamics GP 2013 beta here. The final version is expected to be released this December, according to Schoenfish, confirming the timeline Microsoft announced at this summer's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC).

The beta includes "the introduction of the GP web client, 125+ functionality enhancements for our 43,000+  existing customers, and extending the rich integration Dynamics GP has with the Microsoft stack," Schoenfish said. PowerPoint slideshows detailing specific Dynamics GP 2013 features can be found on the Microsoft Dynamics GP blog here.

Some functionality is missing from the beta, such as the Business Portal function and some out-of-date SDKs, according this MSDN blog post. The blog notes that beta testers will not have an upgrade path to the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version of Dynamics GP 2013 when it becomes available: "The only upgrade support is for the selected live Technical Adoption Program Customers."

Dynamics GP 2013 is the second of Microsoft's ERP products to be offered with a cloud component via Windows Azure. The first, Dynamics NAV 2013, went into beta in May and is also expected to be released by year's end. Microsoft plans to eventually make all four of its Dynamics ERP products available both as on-premises and cloud-hosted offerings.

Both Dynamics GP 2013 and Dynamics NAV 2013 will have simplified pricing for SMB ERP products at release, Microsoft revealed at WPC. The company is also planning a pilot program for a pay-as-you-go model for both cloud-hosted and on-premises deployments.