If you attended our Dynamics GP or Dynamics SL events (the 2 events attracted almost 100 people) last month here in Minneapolis, you already learned these things.
You might still like the refresher course or having these items documented for you rather than “in one ear …”.
Before the session, many of the attendees were concerned about having to move from the comfort of FRx to the newness of Management Reporter.
From a user’s perspective, there are big technical improvements and nice features such as the long awaited “undo” capability, but for the most part the rows, columns and trees are the same.
Catalogs with FRx are now called Report Definitions with MR. That’s not a change that anyone is going to have a hard time adapting to.
Management Reporter is as easy to use as FRx. Sometimes it does not look as easy however because the demo data in the FRx demo database is different than the demo data in the sample database for Management Reporter.
Technical Improvements your IT Group and you will love:
Better speed: Report Generation takes place on the server, not the individual’s workstation. This frees up the client to continue designing reports instead of waiting for reports to complete.
Better multi-user environment: With the switch to IIS and SQL Server, there is no need to create shares for the sysdata and io_data. All of the building blocks, company information and generated reports are in the SQL database.
Better User Interface: The user interface of Management Reporter looks more like Dynamics SL or Dynamics GP, Outlook, etc. FRx looked like an entirely different program and an outdated one at that.
Active directory support: Once users are added to Management Reporter, any changes made to passwords by users are rolled forward. This equates to fewer login screens for the user.
64-bit support: It is hard to buy a 32-bit computer now. Management Reporter was built using a 64 bit environment. The IT department won’t need to maintain a separate machine for Management Reporter.
SQL Server Support: IT is more likely to ensure that the database is part of the database maintenance plan with a good backup. Also, no more corrupted spec files, or need to rebuild indexes to ensure new accounts are picked up.
For a more in-depth comparison, please visit Jan Harrigan’s post at FRxBuzz-http://www.frxbuzz.com/shootout-an-frx-and-management-reporter-comparison/.
