Dynamics GP hosted on Microsoft’s Cloud (Azure) as Remote App

Being in this business for 25 years, I am most impressed when software actually works as it should. Remote App is a greatly improved RDP or Remote Desktop. Remote App delivers the application within a Web Browser. We set up Dynamics GP to run as a Remote App on an Azure server. In fact, we moved GP from our office server to Microsoft’s Cloud (Azure). It runs faster and we don’t have to worry about equipment failures or hardware and network management. The servers in the Cloud get replicated 3 times by Microsoft; and we set up an off-site backup with Crash Plan, just in case.

I actually prefer running GP as a Remote App than as a Web Client. Some things don’t work yet in Web Client and it is very difficult to set up and debug. Remote App is basically RDP, which is has been robust for many years and everything works: GP , Management Reporter, Excel Reports, SSRS Reports, Smart Lists, Remote Printing, etc. It just works consistently.

We save cost by turning off the servers at night and turning them back on in the AM. We wrote some PowerShell scripts to do this as a scheduled automation. If we need to do maintenance on our servers, such as SQL backups or Management Reporter configuration, we can RDP into the server and do that.

Here are some screen shots to demonstrate Dynamics GP as a Remote App on Windows Azure:

Microsoft Windows Azure and Dynamics GP work well together in the Cloud.