When It’s Time to Upgrade an Outdated, Customized Microsoft Dynamics GP System…Who You Gonna Call?

One of my favorite movies of the 80's is GhostBusters, but the one thing that actually stood out for me during that time was the movie's theme song by the same name, interpreted by Ray Parker, Jr. Part of the lyrics is as follows:

"If there's something weird
and it don't look good,
Who you gonna call? - Ghostbusters!"

As I write this article, there are numerous organizations still running versions of Dynamics GP that pre-date the days of Microsoft. Some of you engaged independent software developers or internal IT resources to build specific functionality - also known as customizations - to address specific business needs or to fill some functionality gap at the time. Now that your company has mustered the will to perform an upgrade after so many years, you are coming to the realization that the development resources who worked on the original customization project have moved to another city, or the internal IT resources you engaged have not been with the company for the past 5 years.

Complicating this picture - no one seems to be able to find the source code for the specific customizations that were created at the time. This is not all that uncommon of a situation. I have run into this a number of times and still see the questions on user and partner forums.

And, as the theme song of the GhostBusters movie would have you ask, who you gonna call? In fact, you wish Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Bill Murray could all come to the rescue.

Typically, when I am approached by customers upgrading from such old ...