Thursday, August 25, 2005

Small Business Webcast: The New Microsoft Small Business Accounting (Level 100)

Small Business Webcast: The New Microsoft Small Business Accounting (Level 100): "Small Business Webcast: The New Microsoft Small Business Accounting (Level 100)"

Click the above link to see a webcast with more inf on SBA06

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Microsoft Eyes Big Opportunity In Small Business - Forbes.com

Microsoft Eyes Big Opportunity In Small Business - Forbes.com:


"The research firm said, 'With more than 40million small businesses with one to 49 employees worldwide, the opportunity at the low end of the market still remains untapped. In the segment for SBA, market leader Intuit has only accumulated 2.5 million QuickBooks clients with approximately 350,000 to 400,000 new users per year.' "

Saturday, August 13, 2005

MSDE

MSDE, a subset of Microsoft SQL Server, is the underlying data engine for Microsoft SBA. This gives SBA several advantages over QuickBooks. Quickbooks uses its own proprietary database, which was originally developed for a one user system . This database does not function well when there are multiple users. For example, only one user can enter an invoice at a time, or create a purchase order. SBA does not have this limitation.

Also, since MSDE is an open database, development of third party applications becomes much simpler. I expect to see many third party apllications developed for SBA. I wil talk about some of my ideas for third party apps at a later time.

Another advantage of MSDE over QuickBooks' database is that you can use outside tools, such as Microsoft Excel, and Crystal Reports to access any data in the database. This makes it much easier to get the information you want to see, in the format you want to see it.


Can anyone think of any other advantages of the MSDE database?

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006

It looks like the initial release of this product will be around September 7. I have been fooling around with this software for a couple of months now, and feel like it has great potential to lure users away from Quickbooks and Peachtree. I'll be adding more posts soon too explain more about why I feel that Microsoft has finally hit the triple (not a home run) that will make this product a success.