Over the last week New Jersey Sage MAS 90 and SAP Business One consultant Mark Chinsky forwarded a cool (free) utility that I’d like to share.

Mark’s original message stated that he uses FileMon for Windows by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to see files that are being used by MAS 200. This real time utility is a powerful diagnostic tools for tracking down any number of issues including – hung files, system slowdowns, etc.

Using the program you can easily view precisely when each and ever file is opened, read, written or deleted.

Filters are available to keep the information reporting to a minimum and ensure you only see details that are relevant to your situation.

Former Sage Technical Support Wizard (that wasn’t his official title) Alnoor Cassim chimes in with the inside view of what he has used this handy utility for:

Right on! All the SysInternals tools from Mark Russinovich (all now part
of MS Technet) have been life savers when troubleshooting MAS 90/200.
I’m a major net promoter of these tools. I’d like to share a few ways
it’s helped me.

* Used Filemon to find ACCESS DENIED errors upon startup of MAS when the
Launcher was loading -> User didn’t have permission to rename some files
on their local machine upon startup

* Used Regmon to find ACCESS DENIED errors -> Led to positive proof of a
user registry permission problem for which IT guy of client insisted was
a MAS problem.

* Used Regmon to find ACCESS DENIED errors -> Led to discovery of a COM
failure bug in the MAS 4.0x Launcher, which was requiring Write access
to protected areas of the registry.

* Used psKill to kill orphaned pvxwin32.exe tasks on the MAS 200 server
that Task Manager could not terminate and so server didn’t have to be
rebooted

* Used Process Monitor to find bug in FAS 2008 uninstaller on an EES
implementation, that prevented FAS 2009 from being installed.

Today, Process Monitor is the tool that replaces Filemon and Regmon and
has a better UI.

I’ll stop there but I highly recommend these tools for the tech person
in the MAS consultant’s organization and of course to the clients’ IT
staff.

FRX Financial Reporting for MAS 90 appears to have gained a new lease on life. According to Mark Chinsky of Client’s First Business Solutions – New Jersey, the FRX Report Writer is back under development (or at least is being promoted as a solution by Microsoft) after being slated for discontinuation in favor of PerformancePoint Server.

Mark spotted an article in Network Computing that states in part:

Microsoft made a surprise announcement that presents good news and bad news for customers and partners who were developing on the PerformancePoint Server product. The good news is that the dashboarding, scorecarding and analytic capabilities of PerformancePoint are now being made available as free services to customers with an enterprise license of SharePoint Server. The bad news is that PerformancePoint and its planning functionality will no longer be offered as a separate product, though there will be a final “Service Pack3” upgrade to the planning functionality released this summer. Translation? Microsoft’s BI team is backing away from deep financial and operational performance management, ceding those opportunities to the Microsoft Dynamics unit and stranding some customers and partners in the process.

Microsoft says it is bundling high-demand PerformancePoint functionality like dashboarding, scorecarding and advanced analytics with SharePoint to better fulfill its longstanding goal of spreading business intelligence to the broadest possible base of users.

“By putting this functionality into SharePoint, it makes it available to exponentially more users,” said Kristina Kerr, Lead Product Manager, Microsoft Business Intelligence, in an interview with Intelligent Enterprise. Share “As for the financial budgeting and planning piece, we found that it involves very different buying behaviors, different people and different deployment scenarios, so we’re very deliberately splitting those two areas.”

A final upgrade of PerformancePoint may buy planning-focused customers and partners some time, but nobody wants to make long-range plans around a product without a road map. Thus, one of two paths forward Microsoft points to exploits what Kerr describes as “broad planning capabilities” it can offer with the combination of SQL Server, SharePoint Server and Excel.

“For example, we have an Excel add-in that exposes the analytic capabilities of SQL Server Analysis Services,” Kerr explained. “Analysis Services offers a function called Forecast, which is really predictive analytics based on historical trends. [That’s the kind of functionality] that’s suitable for scenarios that aren’t specific to the office of finance but that call for broad planning and forecasting capabilities.”

A second path forward for partners and customers interesting in planning is to work with the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and applications unit, which will continue to develop its Forecaster and FRX products for forecasting, budgeting and financial reporting.

via: 90Minds

Sage insiders share secret to debugging pesky MAS 90 and MAS 200 system level errors

FRX Report Writer for MAS 90 Still Alive

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