There seems to be some general confusion regarding the current naming of SmartConnect, which I want to clarify here.
The current build of SmartConnect is called SmartConnect 2010. The functionality contained in SmartConnect has been de-coupled from Microsoft Dynamics GP releases. This means that all of the functioanlity of SmartConnect 2010 is available on both Microsoft Dynamcis GP 2010 and Microsoft Dynamics GP v10.
What this means is that you do not need to wait until you upgrade to GP2010, to benefit from all the new functionality available in SmartConnect 2010. You can install SmartConenct 2010 for your GP10 clients today.
Now – there are still two seperate downlaods for SmartConnect 2010 – one that specifically installs onto GP v10 and one that specifically installs into GP2010. The reason for two downloads is that there are differences in the both eConnect and the way we need to install SmartConnect to the differnet versions of GP. Other than background install differences the functionality of SmartConnect 2010 is identical regardless of the version of GP you are running.
This means that moving forward, the Serivce Pack for SmartConnect 2010 will be available to both Dynamics GP v10 and Dynamics GP2010.
One very important thing to note, that I will blog about often over the next few weeks is to read the upgrade instructions before going to any version of SmartConnect 2010. The most important step is that you must first upgrade to SmartConnect v51 – before upgrading to SmsartConnect 2010. If you do not upgrade to V51 first, your maps will NOT upgrade and you will spend the best part of a day trying to resolve the issues. There are some significant backend changes with SmartConnect 2010 that require you to be on V51 prior to the upgrade.