Last night I attended the Orlando IT Professional Association (www.orlandoitpro.com) meeting at New Horizons. Vlad Mazek was gracious enough to supply us with pizzas and sodas, and recapped his recent experience at SMB Nation. Blain Barton, one of our TechNet presenters, did a great job introducing everyone to SQL 2005 and some of the new features and enhancements that we've got to look forward to! I'm slowly learning everyone's names, and it's awesome to see Microsoft Partners excited about what's out there. Associations like these help us learn from eachother as well as network. They are a great source of knowledge both technically and from a business standpoint.
Yesterday, I also announced to the group that Service Pack 1 for Business Contact Manager and Small Business Accounting Service Pack is available for download! One of the attendees remarked, "Already!?" and my reply amounted to the fact that Microsoft is SERIOUS about SBA. Throughout the Beta period and through feedback from you all, we've been improving SBA so that it can be the premier accounting package in the SMB space!
Some of the new enhancements include:
- We can now import Outlook Contacts into Business Contact Manager
- New Manual Payroll Check Tool – including the much anticipated Excel tool!
- Memorized Documents
- More flexible Cash Basis reporting
- Support for importing QB2005 data files
- For importing master records only QuickBooks 2002 through 2005: Basic, Pro, Premier, Enterprise, and Accountant
- For importing all data QuickBooks 2004 and 2005: Pro, Premier, Enterprise, and Accountant
- New Accountants Import Wizard – allows a accountants database to be imported into the current database!
- New Reporting tool for jobs and time and materials
- Ability to report on job estimates versus actual
- Ability to report jobs progress; invoices versus quotes
- Import Bank File dialog box - You can use the Import Bank File dialog box to import bank transactions into Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting:
- If the financial institution that you do business with is not listed in the Select a Financial Institution for Online Services page in the Online Banking Setup Wizard.
- If you have accounts that you have not set up for online banking.
- Imported bank files must be in the .ofx file format.
Also, we've received word that PSS will support the hosting of the SBA database on a SBS 2003 Standard Server!
You can download the Service Pack here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=93929CAC-37F3-4EE1-931B-807703037E89&displaylang=en
Hope to see you at a TS2 Event soon!