A local manufacturer is undertaking a trial run, using real data, of our MISys Small Business Manufacturing/Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting combination (hereafter called SBM/SBA), and we'll be keeping an eye on their progress over the next 8-12 weeks. It's quite exciting! And I'll be sharing what I hear with whoever visits this blog. SBA is due for release in September, we'll be not too far behind them.

While we're waiting for that, anyone who would like to check out our online presentation of SBM, please just let me know at al@misysinc.com. Dave Brown has broken the presentation down by subject area--purchasing, production, work orders, master files, etc. so you can point and click your way through the areas of greatest interest to you. I'll send you a one week pass [easy to renew] which should be ample time to look through how the product works. We would appreciate your feedback once you view it.

Nice long article on Best-of-Breed solutions [aka BOB] (MISys is one, ya' know) here:

http://www.bfmag.com/magazine/archives/article.html?articleID=14448&pg=1

At the bottom of this page are other articles on this important subject...important to our partners who must try to convince our potential customers why BOB is the way to go, and important to our potential customers to know why their BOB choice has added value.

Also, one of my favorite movies is What about BOB, with Bill Murray.

Accounting 411 announces some wins for Sage Simply and Peachtree accounting, both on the list for easy integration with the new MISys SBM product. Read about it here

http://www.accountingsoftware411.com/AcctSoftware.nsf/00/pr98A9F1BACC4C4F458625704500136BD0

or just read below:

Peachtree by Sage Takes Top Honors in CPA Technology Advisor’s Annual Small Business Accounting Software Roundup


Both Peachtree and Simply Accounting praised for strong functionality

Irvine, Calif. - July 19, 2005 - Sage Software announced today that two of its small business accounting products, Peachtree Premium Accounting 2005 and Simply Accounting 2005, scored high honors in CPA Technology Advisor magazine’s annual small business accounting roundup, which appears in the publication’s June/July 2005 issue. Peachtree Premium took top honors, receiving 5 out of 5 stars, while Simply Accounting scored high marks, earning 4.5 out of 5 stars in the roundup.

All products were scored in six areas:
· Expandability;
· Modules & Scalability;
· Ease of Use;
· Training & Support;
· Reporting, and;
· Audit Trail, Integrity & Accountant Control Tools.

Peachtree Premium Accounting 2005 outscored its competition, earning top marks in five of the six areas reviewed. A long-standing favorite of accountants and small businesses alike, Sage Software recently launched its new Peachtree line for 2006, including two new vertical industry products for construction firms and nonprofit organizations.

Simply Accounting was also highly rated, earning a 4.5 rating overall. The bestselling small business accounting product in Canada, Simply Accounting also provides a broad set of core accounting functions for value-conscious small businesses in the US, where Peachtree is the company’s primary brand for small business accounting.

Sage Software offers small businesses the broadest selection of award-winning business management software that caters directly to their specific needs throughout the business lifecycle - from basic accounting for a start-up business, to feature-rich, industry-specific solutions for accounting, payroll, human resources management, customer relationship management, and others.

MISys looks forward to working more closely with these two quality small business accounting products in the future, and we'd certainly enjoy hearing from any of you out there with experiences with either Simply or Peachtree.

This recent article in Information Week http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=165700923&tid=13690 discusses the "boomlet" in open source business applications.

There are problems. Free is never free. Open source is like the free puppy, it explains, that you then have to feed for the next 10 years. You'll need to spend on consultants and programmers to adjust the product to your specific needs. In fact, if I read this correctly, that's how these companies are expecting to make their money---free program, lots of services. And you'd probably need a IT guru type on staff to stay on top of it.

Here's two paragraghs from the article:

Yet balancing commercial and community needs isn't easy. In fact, given the growing crowds of open-source startups, one of the biggest questions is this: Can this new crop of open-source entrepreneurs build successful businesses when their core software is built by an army of faceless code jockeys, with little interest in helping guys like Newton earn his next million? "There is a disincentive to contribute, and most of those vendors have difficulty building up a healthy number of outside engineers that give them the leverage of the open-source community when developing their products and services," says Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of one of open source's great successes, the Apache Web Server Project, and founder and chief technology officer of CollabNet Inc., a maker of software that helps programmers work together. "You see some developers who say, 'There's someone already getting paid to develop the complex stuff, so I'll leave that to them.'"


Yet the new breed of hybrid commercial, open-source startups depends on open-source programmers to contribute and test code, and to bring new ideas, so winning the respect of the fickle open-source developer community is vital. And even if a company succeeds in getting a mass of supportive programmers, it's difficult to manage toward business goals.

It was one thing to develop an international product like Linux that was going to be used by the IT community for their own needs, but it sounds like quite a different idea to get developers to contribute for free to help a private enterprise make a profit.

So, for a lot of per diems and probably a full timer staff position, a company can avoid paying for software licenses once (plus upgrades). It just doesn't make sense to me. And MISys does have a community of end-users and business partners, in the four figure range, often suggesting improvements or adding to the "wish list", and we do our best to respond to those requests. It seems to me a company becomes more dependent, not less, with open-source product that is supposedly but not really free. Am I wrong? I'd love to hear from you!

We're all excited here at MISys as we move towards Q4 and the release of our new MISys Small Business Manufacturing (SBM) product. This is not a replacement for our existing product that integrates seamlessly and deeply with the Sage ACCPAC Advantage Series product, this is an entirely new product line that augments our current offering.

If you need substantial integration as part of an entire ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, and if you need a powerful sophisticated financial package, you'll want to continue to look at the MISys/ACCPAC solution. We have been a development partner of ACCPAC for over 20 years, we know the Advantage Series product very well and we build our product using their SDK (Software Developer Kit). There is no question that ACCPAC Adv. Series is serious financial package for small to mid-size enterprises, and it is leagues ahead of simpler packages like its brother Simply, its cousin Peachtree (both also owned by Sage Software) or Quickbooks.

However, if you're like one of the many companies I speak with each week who have very modest needs on the financial end, needs Simply or Quickbooks can easily accomodate, but their manufacturing issues are of serious concern, then MISys SBM will be the obvious answer. Building on our 2o-plus years of manufacturing system development expertise, SBM will offer all the sophistication and business logic that our ACCPAC product offers, but it will not be tied to the ACCPAC Adv. Series system. Indeed, SBM will have a new look and feature set that comes from building off the Microsoft .NET development platform. It's easier to show you than explain it, so if you'd like to view our streaming video presentation on SBM, please let me know at al@misysinc.com. Any of you reading this post who have seen that presentation, please feel free to share your comments!

It is amazing to me how many different types of manufacturers use MISys. On a list of MISys reference sites before me I read

1. "agricultural harvesting equipment" to
   
2. "beverage bottler" to
   
3. "frozen yoghurt" to
   
4. "paint dispensers" to
   
5. "planetarium equipment" to
   
6. "pre-fab modular housing" to
   
7. "cheescake" to
   
8. "plastic additives" to
   
9. "infant formula supplement" to
10. "mulch and vermiculite"

I could go on and on (I didn't even get to electronics and high tech type products on the list) but it's just amazing the breadth and variety of products we see at MISys. We occassionally compete with a product like Diamond Manufacturing Pro, or whtever it was called, and sure, for the diamond manufacturing business it is probably going to be far more ideal than MISys (hence the name). And much more expensive, selling to a much smaller install base.

But the strength and beauty of MISys is that it is so adaptive to so many environments. I'd love to hear some stories from users and business partners of unique applications and environments of MISys.

Thanks for visiting, and have a wonderful Fourth of July wherever you are.