Was wondering how effective this package is ?

 

Daz,

Used it briefly before M$ bought it, its a large (and expensive) modular system though depends what your needs are.

Gary

 

who did M$ buy it off ?

 

I think the company was actually called Great Plains, M$ went on abit of spree buying two systems from Navision as well, theres plenty of accounting software out there it's just a case of finding whats best for your needs.

Gary

 

cheers Gary - I did think looking at the demo screens that it doesn't LOOK like a Microsoft product. Too much clutter.

Microsoft gets a lot of stuff WRONG but layout is normally spot on.

 

Agreed M$ do some nice UI stuff, we use Sage kinda have to and people rave about that but the UI has some real basic flaws which pi$$ me right off!

Gary

 

ha! u should try using FRx financial reporting (also bought by MS), n then tell me how pissed off you are!

 

Pegasus is full of bugs too!

 

I used to work for pegasus many moons ago, then went back several years later when I was freelance doing bug fixes to opera, capital gold is a great little entry level accounts package, much better than Sage Line 50 IMHO.

What are you looking for exactly Daz?

 

GaryK, I'm looking to write my own resource management package for a company I work for, but I want to design it in a generic way so it can be adopte by just about any production company.

I was wondering how widely used Microsoft's package is and what it does right and wrong.

 

Microsoft policy - just buy out the competition - end of problem.

People then think - Microsoft......Buy that, Must be good! when in fact its plain and simply the "old" Navision software - **** as it always was previously.

Shaun

 

Well M$ is not really a big name in accounts software, Sage are no.1 and rest of the market is split up between pegasus and 101 vendors. I've been doing add-ons to accounts systems for years but what most of the vendors do is offer a development kit or programme which normally costs a fair bit of cash, Ive done some stuff with Sage Line 50 and instant but from a commercial point of view you need to join the developers programme to actively develop it. I remember going to softworld a couple of years back talking to some so called 'experts' on the M$ stand about an SDK for their stuff and the muppets couldnt even answer basic questions!

Does the company already have great plains or the decision is going to be based on how easy it is to link into the accounts system?

Gary

 

Yeah, the MS package is a generic resource management package, and these typically only offer a subset of a typical accounts package like Sage, so yes MS aren't a big name in accounts. A product like Great Plains compliments and integrates into your existing accounts.

As you say, you simply find a way of getting the data OUT of the resource management app and get it IN to your accounts package <sage or pegasus or whatever>

I know Pegasus sits on FoxPro foundation (or at least it did) so its normally pretty painless getting the 2 apps to talk. Even Pegasus Senior had a middleware app called PegLink if I remember which was simple to utilise when transferring data.

 

Getting stuff out is never a problem, in fact I bypass the Sage SDK and get at the data using an ODBC driver. The problem is when you want to post transactions and need to take care of all the double entry stuff its sometimes nice to use an SDK that wraps up all this functionality for you. Pegasus Capital Gold has a fantastic SDK which is basically an OLE server which has every property and method you would need to read data and post any form of transaction.

Yes Opera does use FoxPro on the back end and I am sure there is an SDK for that too. Now Peg Senior thats going back a few years!

Gary