The initial news of FRx replacement by Management Reporter
Week before last, I attended Convergence, Microsoft Business Solution’s end user conference. Bottom line, I don’t have a ton of new information that I haven’t already conveyed in previous posts, but here’s what I do have.
As you may already know, FRx is being replaced by Management Reporter (a part of PerformancePoint Server). More on Management Reporter in a separate post.
So FRx as you know it now, version 6.7, is the final product. I’m getting conflicting information on this, but it sounds like there will be no more enhancements.
Support and bug fixes yes. Service pack 10 was in the process of being rolled out while Convergence was going on, and my understanding is that there will be one additional service pack after that, and then only hotfixes on an ‘as needed’ basis.
But they also said that support for new operating systems will be considered. And right now, 6.7 won’t work with the new beta US GAAP XBRL taxonomy, but they will evaluate whether it will ever be added. So this conflicts with the ‘couple more service packs then hotfixes only’ scenario. I don’t know which is right, but I can’t help but surmise that there will be no further enhancements like new XBRL or new operating systems.
Exactly how long support will continue is up in the air right now. I’ve heard varying things in the past, but the official story at Convergence was that the timeline for support is being worked out, and there simply wasn’t enough time to get it finished before Convergence.
The replacement product, Management Reporter, is a version 1 product. FRx has significantly more functionality, and I can’t see them ditching support before MR is considered a true replacement.
Non-MBS partners like Sage and Epicor (to name just a couple of the largest): your support may be determined by your software publisher’s support agreement with FRx. I’ve asked whether you can get support directly from FRx in the event that the support contract is not renewed, but I don’t have the answer yet.
As always, stay tuned!
I’m still betting it will be years. The connector for Dynamics GP for Management Reporter is months away and the ones for Dynamics NAV and SL are “in development”. I’ll be surprised if we see them in 2008. If MS still has this far to go with their own products it will be a while. I also got the sense at Convergence that v2 of Management Reporter was still a ways away.
I like what I saw of Management Reporter, it looked like an evolution of FRx. It just needs the missing features.
Mark