Great Plains Dynamics GP is traditionally available in the Middle East and Arabic-speaking countries, and is easy to adopt in countries where the local language is based on Arabic characters. Local legislation and government financial reporting requirements are generally reasonable in the Arab world, so setting up sales tax or VAT for a specific country is not a challenge and could be done as part of the implementation of corporate ERP. We will concentrate on the technological aspects of supporting the Arabic language in the Great Plains:
1. Microsoft Dexterity technology and Arabic alphabet. Dexterity currently supports the ASCII table, where the representation of each letter is restricted to eight bits or one byte or data. And even if the Arabic characters may seem very sophisticated and similar to hieroglyphs, they are compatible with the ASCII table.
2. Microsoft SQL Server Arabic language support. MS SQL Server has so called code pages and collations. if you’re in the US and installing SQL Server, you’ll probably never answer the question: what’s my collation? The reason is simple: your default SQL Server installation defaults to your Windows Server locales, and if those locales are US-based, SQL Server assumes the defaults should be US English. If you are adding a GP company based in an Arab country to your US-based SQL Server, you must change the collation at the database level to support Arabic characters.
3. Arabic language support options in Great Plains. If you are a programmer, you probably know that you have two options. First, translate Dexterity’s string resources from English to Arabic and distribute Dynamics.dic with translated strings to local users. The second option would be to export the String resources to Modifier and distribute Forms.Dic to local users. The first option is more powerful, as it opens up unlimited possibilities for Dexterity customization, but it is also open to potential bugs in Dexterity’s business logic. We are favoring the second options: strings based on Arabic modifiers
4. Great Plains reports in Arabic. A similar concept applies to GP Report Writer and its main dictionary Reports.dic. Arabic skill string resources must be imported into Reports.dic. Feel free to modify reports as important as SOP Blank Invoice Form, or whatever you need to modify in Report Writer
5. Modules required to support Arabic letters. In the case of supporting it in Edit, you will need a Customization Site Enabler license
6. Switch from Arabic to English and vice versa. You must have two GP workstations installed on your user computer, one supports Arabic and the second supports US Standard English.
7. FRx Financial and Consolidated Reports. Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss Statement and Cash Flow Statement and their consolidated versions are immune to locale
8. GP support for countries where the Arabic alphabet is used, but the local language is not Arabic. the example would be Afghanistan, where the local language is Dari and is based on the Arabic alphabet (or Iran, where the local language, Farsi, is also based on Arabic). Here the recommended solution would be to translate the string resources from Dynamics.dic to Dari or Farsi respectively and import them into Forms.dic and Reports.dic