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Friday, June 25, 2004
Great Plains
Microsoft Acquired Great Plains in the year 2000. After numerous modifications and changes, Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 was released on 21st of June 2004.Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 will deliver improved usability; richer functionality for distribution, manufacturing and project accounting; greater capabilities through integrations with Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal 2.5 and Microsoft Office 2003; and improved analytics.
The Look
Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 include the new look and feel that provide customers with a familiar, easy-to-use environment similar to Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, which can help boost employee productivity and minimize training costs.
Better For Distribution and Manufacturing
A more comprehensive view of inventory will help give customers tighter control over distribution and manufacturing processes. Time and effort spent on key accounting tasks will be reduced with the ability to use existing transactions as the basis for new ones, as well as to quickly void, delete, correct or change journal entries while maintaining full audit control.
Reporting
New reporting options provide businesses with greater control of the financial reporting process and better financial visibility through Microsoft Business Solutions for Analytics-FRx® 6.7. The improved analytics functionality gives customers four major enhancements: a new FRx Report Manager module, improvements to the FRx Currency Translation module, tighter integration with Microsoft Office Excel 2003, and upgraded support for the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) 2.0 taxonomy.
Key Features
Enhanced integration with other Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal and Microsoft Office is an additional key feature of Microsoft Great Plains 8.0. Microsoft Business Portal 2.5, used with Microsoft Great Plains 8.0, will further empower employees with new modules for online requisition management, expense entry and approval, and electronic delivery of sales documents to customers. Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 also builds on the Microsoft Office productivity foundation, enabling users to build template-based communications in Microsoft Word or easily attach maps and directions for sales, delivery and service call routes with Microsoft MapPoint®.
The Modules
- Financial Management
- Supply chain management
- Business Portal
- Human Resource management
- Manufacturing Series
- E-commerce
- Analytics and Reporting
- Customization & Integration Series
Technology
Written in C++, HTML, XML, Visusal basic, Dextirity.
MS-SQL server is the back-end RDBMS
Availability
Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 is available immediately in the United States and Canada through Microsoft Business Solutions reselling partners with Microsoft Business Portal 2.5. Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 would be available in the United Kingdom, Latin America and Africa, as well as in Australia and New Zealand.
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Solomon
Microsoft Business Solutions–Solomon is a robust, flexible solution built to meet the needs of project-centric and distribution-driven companies. The latest edition Solomon 5.0 is Recommended strongly for Construction and distribution industries.The product series
Solomon has a broad range of applications. Its product series includes financial series, advanced distribution series, project accounting, field service management, e-business series, customer relationship management and proffesional service automation.
Series Modules
Financial series
The financial series comprise of the following modules:
General ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, Payroll with direct deposit, advanced payroll, cash manager, currency manager, financial settlement translation and Multi Company.
The difference between Solomon financials and any other financials lies in the fact that it has the advanced payroll module which can handle union and family owned businesses.
Distribution series
The solomon distribution series has:
Order management, inventory management & inventory replenishment, purchasing, process manager, bill of materials, advanced shipment management, landed cost, drop ship and e-commerce gateway as the different modules.
Solomon scores over any other application in its ability for the process manager to check inventory availability real time. Multiple warehouse allocation saves shipping costs and time. e-commerce gateway comes with the EDI edition which enables you to check inventory levels and place orders with the vendors allocated. The drop ship module is for companies which does not have a physical inventory
Project Series
The project series is targeted towards construction industries with the following modules:
A project controller, time and expense for projects, analyzer, flexible billings, project budgeting, contract management, employee utilization and Microsoft project server 2002 integration.
The analyzer help you built rules for the project. Project budgeting gives the flexibility to change orders and the contract management helps change contracts for every change in the work order. The Microsoft Project server 2002 compliments well with the financials as it takes care of the schedulings and trackings.
Service series
The service series has service dispatches, service contracts, equipment maintenance and flat rates.
e-business series
This comes with the solomon desktop, application servers, communicators, web order systems and the business portal. The solomon series also comes with solomon customization tools, customization manager, VBA, tools for visual basic and an object model.
Reporting
Solomon comes with two options on reporting.
- Crystal report
- FRX financial report writer with
- desktop edition & proffesional edition.
Availability and pricing
Solomon offers a strong price/performance ratio in the mid-market. Pricing starts at $4,500 for a single user edition. Solomon has 25,000+ customers in more than 400 different industries, across 132 countries worldwide.
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