One of our largest clients on Dynamics GP 2010 asked me why we have not been pushing them to Management Reporter especially since they just upgraded. When I shared with her that MR is improving dramatically and that the performance should be better than FRx within the year, she was quite happy with that answer. This division of a large bank has a lot of transactions and could not spare more time waiting for financial reports to process.
Please read the comments and especially the answers about Management Reporter from the Microsoft team. You can tell Microsoft is very committed to improving this product as it supports all 4 ERP platforms, Dynamics GP, Dynamics SL, Dynamics NAV, and Dynamics AX.
Attached is the link to this timely and helpful blog if you are an FRx user wondering why your partner is not encouraging you more to upgrade from FRx to Management Reporter.
The blog discusses important topics such as the one on everyone’s mind-performance. But it also discusses how Microsoft continues to integrate its products together in meaningful and helpful ways such as the link with Sharepoint, Lync, updates on release dates, and new features. It’s interesting that the “Undo” feature in Management Reporter is not mentioned as that is the feature that our clients like the most that have switched from FRx. Perhaps this is not mentioned on the blog below due to the fact that most of the content is about what is being updated rather than what is already in the existing product.
For those of you unfamiliar with FRx’s eventual replacement-Management Reporter, this financial report writer uses SQL Server as its backend database for storing rows, columns, and trees. Best of all it’s not very different from FRx from a learning curve AND the data elements convert with a program Microsoft created to do this for you. Our advice is to wait for the MR service pack where the speed of reports catches up to what you are used to with FRx. If you don’t have a lot of data, switching now will be no issue and you will get the “undo” feature along with a better database platform (one that for sure gets backed up consistently which does not always happen with FRx once ERP is moved to a different server or environment).
Management Reporter has a more up-to-date look and feel but some features such as webport are still missing. Do not upgrade to MR until you’ve discussed this with your partner as you may have some features in FRx you are currently using (such as what the Webport component delivers) that you cannot afford to have go away.
Jan Harrigan also has a nice blog on both FRx and Management Reporter for those of you that like simplicity “as the ultimate sophistication” in financial reporting. http://www.frxbuzz.com/
