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 challenging and could be done as part of the implementation of corporate ERP. We will focus on the technological aspects of Arabic language support on 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 look 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 you’re 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 that the defaults should be US English. If you are adding a GP company based in an Arabic 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’re 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 Dexterity customization possibilities, but is also open to possible errors in Dexterity’s business logic. We are favoring the second options: strings based on Arabic modifiers

4. Reports from the Great Plains in Arabic. A similar concept applies to GP Report Writer and its main dictionary Reports.dic. Arabic skill string resources need to be imported into Reports.dic. Feel free to modify such important reports as SOP Blank Invoice Form, or whatever you need to modify in Report Writer

5. Modules needed to support Arabic letters. To support 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 language and the second supports US Standard English.

7. FRx Consolidated and Financial Reports. Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss Statement and Statement of Cash Flow and their consolidated versions are immune to locale settings

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 script (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