Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Application Server... worth the money?

Hi,

I just received for a quote on SL 2011 Application Server.

I think I need it to help me with a problem I have on Project Financial Transaction Transfer. I like the idea of being able to schedule a task overnight, not depending on someone running the process, and having a strong audit hold and log of the process.

Is there someone who is familiar with this kind of setup? Should AS be a no-brainer?

I keep on thinking of other applications. The report routing scheme seems powerful. I don't think Quick Send is worth at all, I already use a B2B portal with my vendors and since I'm a construction contrator on large projects my invoices are few and far apart.

I worked for a company that used Application Server heavily for both processes and reports. It was certainly worth it! There were 3 SL companies each running 17 accounting reports that they wanted ready each morning upon arrival to the office, as well as printing Pick Sheets and running various processes throughout the day (Releasing batches was one). It saved everyone a lot of time being able to offload the reports and processes to the App Servers instead of running them live. This company also used a free program called BullZip to name documents with the name of the report, and then the time/date stamp after it in the title. This made the titles unique so SL would not overwrite the report each day. This allowed for a long history of documents.

It's pretty straight forward in the setup. Sending requests is pretty easy once you get the hang of it. There are a lot of items to check for as you go through the screens (scheduling, where to save the document, document format, frequency of when to run the report, etc.) so take it slow on the first few.

The grueling part is getting everything set up, but my advice there is to keep a spreadsheet of what jobs you schedule when as you put them in. Occasionally I would run into an issue where a job would just be stuck or not complete. In those cases I would delete the master job and re-create it. I never figured out why that would happen, but I can count on one hand how many times in 18 months I had to blast and recreate a job.

I found it to be a very valuable and powerful tool in the office. I hope that gives you an idea of how much can be done with App Server!

-Jenny

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