Arabic script support in Microsoft Dynamics GP

Great Plains Dynamics GP is traditionally available in the Middle East and Arabic-speaking countries, plus it is easily adoptable in countries where the local language is based on Arabic characters. Generally, local legislation and government financial reporting requirements are 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 the corporate ERP. We will focus on the technological aspects of Arabic language support in Great Plains:

1. Microsoft Dexterity technology and Arabic alphabet. Currently, Dexterity supports the ASCII table, where the representation of each letter is restricted to eight bits or one byte or information. And even if the Arabic characters may look very sophisticated and similar to hieroglyphs, they comply with ASCII tables.

2. Microsoft SQL Server Arabic language support. MS SQL Server has so-called code pages and collations. If you are in the US and you are installing SQL Server, you will probably never answer the question: what is my collation? The reason is simple: your default SQL Server installation defaults to your Windows Server locales, and if those locales are based in the US, SQL Server assumes that the default values ​​should be US English. If you are adding an Arab country based GP company to your US headquarters 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 is to translate Dexterity 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 edit and distribute Forms.Dic to local users. The first option is more powerful as it has unlimited Dexterity customization possibilities open, but it is also open to potential bugs in Dexterity business logic. We’re favoring second options: modifier-based strings in Arabic

4. Great Plains reports in Arabic. A similar concept is applicable to GP Report Writer and its main dictionary Reports.dic. Arabic Skill Chain 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. If supported in Modifier, you will need a Customization Site Enabler license

6. Change from Arabic to English and vice versa. You must have two GP workstations installed on your user computer, one supports Arabic language and the second supports US standard English.

7. FRx financial and consolidated reports. The balance sheet, the income statement and the cash flow statement and their consolidated versions are immune to regional environments.

8. GP support for countries where Arabic 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 Dynamics.dic string resources to dari or farsi respectively and import them to Forms.dic and Reports.dic