Server Error in /lus Application error on Home Screen

New on the Dynamics GP2010 home screen is the "Connect" window. This widget dynamically populates with Microsoft Dynamics GP support information, user groups and links to general information.

One thing we noticed is with any of our test companies we always saw this error:

Well it turns out this is caused by special characters in the company name.

As many of you know, when you put the tag "<TEST>" into the company name you get a nice warning on login that this is a a test company. See this blog for details...

Unfortunately, the angle brackets cause the URL to the Dynamics Connect site to get malformed.

Here is the URL that Dynamics Connect is trying to access:

https://online.dynamics.com/lus/?se=popup&autorefresh=false&product=GPRoleCenter&version=11.00.0349.000&roleid=0&country=US&locale=EN-US&company=%3cTEST%3e&role=Basic+Home+Page

Notice the "&company" parameter  is "%3cTEST%3e". The %3c and %3e are the HEX equivilant codes for the ASCII characters that represent < and >

If you remove the characters it will open fine.

Here try to click this link: https://online.dynamics.com/lus/?se=popup&autorefresh=false&product=GPRoleCenter&version=11.00.0349.000&roleid=0&country=US&locale=EN-US&company=TEST&role=Basic+Home+Page

Unfortunately until Microsoft fixes this your only options are to either remove the "<TEST>" from your company name or remove the Dynamics Connect widget from your home screen in user preferences.

Alternatively if you had a DPI based firewall that scanned outgoing URLs, you could make some crazy rule to use URL rewritting, but that's really out of scope of this article :).

Thanks for reading, until next time....