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[David Musgrave]

In case you missed this article after the events at Community Summit 2022 in Orlando:

#MSDynGP Microsoft, Stop Scaring Microsoft Dynamics GP Customers

David Musgrave’s Winthrop Development Consultants Blog		remove preview
#MSDynGP Microsoft, Stop Scaring Microsoft Dynamics GP Customers You might have heard about the “announcement” made by Mike Morton (Vice President, Dynamics 365 Business Central and SMB, Microsoft) during the Microsoft Dynamics GP General Session and his subsequent retraction and clarification. I decided to write this article to provide my thoughts on what happened and the bigger issues it raises. View this on David Musgrave’s Winthrop Development Consultants Blog >

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David Musgrave MVP, GPUG All-Star

Managing Director
Winthrop Development Consultants

Perth, Western Australia

http://www.winthropdc.com
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[Dave Magalen]

David,
Thank you for the information.  I feel MS is doing this a lot lately.  We were evaluating our path forward with GP and integrating new sites into our existing GP when I came across an interesting article and wanted to get your opinion on this.

Due to the “fat client” that is GP, many of the people I have talked to, seen presentations at the Summit and including us, use some form of RDP to run GP.  I have usually seen RDS Farms or Windows 10/11 boxes/VMs for remotely running GP.  Along with that the Word templates and Excel exports require some form of Office installed.  This article (Windows Server end of support and Microsoft 365 Apps – Deploy Office | Microsoft Learn ) states that Office 365 support will end on servers in October of 2025.  Now I know this states up to Server 2022 and it is in preview at this point (mainly due to 2022 being relatively new), but do you think this is going to be a final cutoff?  The article states that we should move towards Windows 10/11 VMs or their hosted VMs.

I see 2 big issues with this approach along the same lines as your notes about pushing their own customers:

1. Lots of companies have built extensive RDS farms to support redundancy, uptime and languages.  So, MS is basically telling me to throw that all away and build something different.  Instead of having a couple servers to support many users, we would need to build a VM for each user (or 2 depending on remote connections)?  This would drive the cost of this approach up pretty high.

2. What they are pushing for will cost more money or be slower in the long run.  Pushing companies to use Windows 365 VMs or Azure VMs would jump our operating costs.  We would not be able to realize much savings if we have to keep multiple VMs online at all times to make sure users can access GP at any time they needed.  The other issue here is the fact that (like most I assume) we put our RDS farm on the same network (and VM hosts) as the SQL database to get the best performance.  I don’t see any advantage to hosting VMs in Azure when my database is on local hardware.  Seems like it would be the same performance as if I installed the GP client on user’s laptops, unless I spent more money and moved my SQL DBs to Azure (and made sure they were all hosted in the same location).

Do you have any insight into that article and whether it is just talking Server 2022 because it is the latest version, or are they really going to push us to use Win10/11 VMs after October 2025 due to the Office app requirements in GP?

I appreciate any thoughts and insight you have.

Thanks.

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Dave Magalen
dmagalen@auroraplastics.com
IT Manager – Aurora Plastics
Streetsboro OH
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[David Musgrave]

Hi Dave

This is the first that I have heard about this. While the official support has end dates, I doubt that the software will actually cease to function.

Sometimes, I really don’t understand why Microsoft keeps pushing people away from its products.

Does the community or someone from Microsoft have any thoughts?

Regards

David

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David Musgrave MVP, GPUG All-Star

Managing Director
Winthrop Development Consultants

Perth, Western Australia

http://www.winthropdc.com
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