The cat’s out of the bag: sounds like FRx will be around for a while. One can only hope!
Per Doug Henschen in an article for Network Computing yesterday “…the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and applications unit…will continue to develop its Forecaster and FRx products for forecasting, budgeting and financial reporting.” Here’s a link to the full article which contains a good bit of information regarding the recent announcement on the ‘reshuffling’ with PerformancePoint Server.
So that it seems that FRx and Forecaster and Management Reporter are returning to the Dynamics team. For the last year or so they’ve been with the Office team.
Much more information to come in the March 2009 timeframe, but I’ll post what I hear in the meantime. What great news!
Last Friday, Microsoft announced that in the summer of 2009, the PerformancePoint Server (PPS) brand will cease to exist. The significance of this is that PPS is the application that houses Management Reporter which is Microsoft’s replacement for FRx.
So if PPS is being discontinued, what happens with Management Reporter? Is FRx still alive? While I don’t know with certainty, I have some suspicions and I hope to hear more news this week.
And there should be a lot more news in the March 2009 timeframe. Stay tuned.
They keep it interesting, don’t they!
The last day for early registration for Convergence is rapidly approaching. Convergence is Microsoft’s conference for end users of its 4 ERPs (GP, SL, AX, and NAV). Anyway, until midnight pacific time on January 14th, the early registration fee is $1,195. After that, it goes up to $1,495. (Update on 1-14-09: the discount offer has been extended to January 21, 2009.)
(Update on 2/5/09: For Registration Alert Members, Microsoft is extending the Early Registration rate up until the event.)
It’s in New Orleans this year. New Orleans just happens to be one of my favorite places on earth, and I’ve been many many times, so I thought I’d share a couple of my favorite French Quarter haunts. More »
Today’s post is courtesy of Kim Leonard. Kim is on the support team for FRx at Microsoft in Denver and volunteered to provide this information. If you’re creating title pages manually in Word, this will be a fantastic time-saver. Thank you Kim!
To Create a Title Page using PORTRAIT Orientation
Row
These settings will vary depending on where the Title is to display on the page. The following settings will place a 3 line Title with blank rows, then a date, 3 more blank rows and additional notes in text on the page below the date: More »
I just found this workaround for the CS currency rounding issue. Found it on the FRx forum at microsoft.public.com. By default, FRx adds the currency format to the 1st row of every report. SP10 has not been allowing the rows with CS to round properly.
The commenter was wondering why some of her reports rounded on the 1st row and some did not. I have wondered the same thing! I haven’t tested this yet but wanted to get it out. Here you go:
“I discovered one difference that apparently changes how the 1st row currency symbol and the whole dollar rounding from the catalog affects the report. If the 1st line of the row is blank or has a DES format code, the 1st row of data rounds correctly with the currency symbol. If the 1st line of the row contains data it gives the decimal places and needs the workaround and will show $0 even if “Display blanks for zero amounts” is checked.
So I just added a blank NP line in the row and my first line now includes the $ and rounds to the whole dollar. Don’t know why that works but I’m thankful it does!”
I’m thankful that the commenter shared her discovery!
If you want to know more about the currency rounding issue, please see my post at FRx SP10: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.
Today’s post is a very quick overview of the setup of FRx’s currency translation module. This is an extra-cost add-on module used to, uh, translate foreign currencies.
More »
This post is another that comes from Jeff Cutting, a lead developer of FRx. It was originally posted as an answer to a question about FRx Security, Solomon and SP10 (in my SP10 post), but there is plenty of non-Solomon specific information. I thought it valuable enough to have its own post! Thank you Jeff. —Jan
I’m going to give an overall explanation of FRx security to help anyone that might be interested (for any GL), and then I will drill into the specifics for Solomon. More »
Earlier this week, I wrote about how to divide headcount by the period number. This post can be found at How To Divide Headcount by the Period Number. In the realm of “there’s more than one way to get downtown”, today I’ll revisit using the period number in calculations. Today’s method uses a link to Excel to pull in the period number.
This writeup is provided compliments of Jeff Cutting, a lead developer of FRx and its successor, Management Reporter. THANK YOU, Jeff! More »
This post is also compliments of Rick Tenorio, moderator of the newsgroup at microsoft.public.frx. Normally in departmental reporting, a P&L calculates percentage of sales by using the sales for that department. For instance, the Welding department calculates percent of sales by using Welding revenue. In this report, however, Rick’s client wanted every department to calculate percent of total sales.
This is a “% of Sales” report. Per Rick, “This report was requested by a client who wanted a report that would show the % of Sales amount exactly the same for each branch of the tree. (So no rollup for the balance.) I did not have this written up in detail, so I included the FRD file and the TDB file. (The tdb file is from FRx 6.7 sp10.)”
More »
Today’s post is compliments of Rick Tenorio. Rick is the moderator at the newsgroup at microsoft.public.frx, and he has collected a number of helpful and practical documents on using FRx. This initial post covers how to divide a headcount statistic by the period number in order to arrive at an average headcount.
Note that you can also use this technique to calculate average sales per period (use YTD revenue divided by the period number). I know a number of my clients do this in order to get an initial sense of whether their MTD revenue looks right. More »
