Microsoft Dynamics GP 9 SP3 Upgrade Path To 2010 R2

I did a bit of searching and couldn’t find a specific declaration of the upgrade path from Microsoft Dynamics GP 9 SP3 to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 R2.

After reading around and trying to work out the correct path, I decided the likely upgrade path would be GP 9 SP3 > GP 10 SP5 > GP 2010 R2, but I would try GP 9 SP3 > GP 2010 R2 and see if it would work (although I was extremely skeptical) as this would save some time on the upgrades if it was possible.

I created a test environment containing SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2008 R2, and clients for GP 9 SP3, 10 SP5 and 2010 R2 (I expected to need the GP 10 client so I installed it now as GP 10 will not install if GP 2010 is present; Dexterity Shared Components 10 will not install if v11 is present) and then restored the GP 9 SP3 database into SQL 2008 R2.

When I ran GP Utilities for GP 2010 R2 I received, as expected, the following error;

DUInstall.log (%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Dynamics\GP2010\Data) contained the following error messages;

So, as I strongly suspected; GP 9 SP3 cannot be upgraded in one fell swoop to GP 2010 R2.

Well, this is why I installed the GP 10 SP5 client as well. I fired up this client, used Utilities to upgrade the database to 10 and then used GP 2010 R2’s Utilities to complete the upgrade. After which we had a fully working GP 2010 R2 environment.