MADISON, MO -- Flagship Technologies' leading software product
line is ManagePLUS™,
a farm accounting add-on for QuickBooks and Quicken. This news
release clarifies the company's plans for future upgrades and
changes in ManagePLUS, as described today by company president Mark
Wilsdorf.
As detailed in an earlier news release,
Flagship Technologies has discontinued future upgrades of the ManagePLUS
for Quicken™ product because of soft demand for
Quicken-related products and other reasons. ManagePLUS for Quicken
continues to be available for purchase by users who request it, but
it will not be updated for compatibility with Quicken releases newer
than Quicken 2000.
The company does plan to continue updating and enhancing
the ManagePLUS for QuickBooks™
product, however, and for good reason: sales of
QuickBooks-related agricultural software and training
materials has been solid: "...about 20% above our
expectations for 2001," according to Wilsdorf. But needed
updates in the ManagePLUS for QuickBooks™ program itself are
temporarily "on hold" because of unique circumstances in
the QuickBooks-related software development picture.
"ManagePLUS for QuickBooks has been available since
1996," said Wilsdorf. "Since that time we've added a few
features, plus minor compatibility updates as each new version of
QuickBooks was released. But the core software of ManagePLUS is
roughly five years old--and that's getting fairly old for commercial
software. To make the kinds of changes and feature additions we
want, ManagePLUS needs a major rewrite--we cannot continue to simply
'patch' our core ManagePLUS software to accommodate changes in
QuickBooks and Microsoft's recent releases of the Windows operating
system. This has been especially true since the release of Windows
2000, and now, Windows XP--ManagePLUS doesn't work properly with
either of those versions of Windows."
Wilsdorf continued, "Intuit [the maker of QuickBooks]
recently released a Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows
programs like ManagePLUS to access QuickBooks data, and do it more
easily than with the techniques we had to use when ManagePLUS was
originally created. That will make a rewrite of ManagePLUS, using
the SDK technology, much easier. But here's the problem: some
features we need are missing from the first release of the
QuickBooks SDK. And further complicating our rewrite decision is the
fact that Intuit has hinted those features will be added to the SDK
this year. What all this means is that it might be very bad timing
to do a major rewrite of ManagePLUS right now. That would require us
to devote months of development effort to creating data access
methods which will likely be a part of the QuickBooks SDK by the end
of 2002."
"So we face a choice among three difficult alternatives. (1)
We could just update ManagePLUS as we have in the past to work with
the new QuickBooks 2002. But that wouldn't solve its problems of not
working with Windows 2000 and XP--both of which are beginning to
represent a significant portion of potential new ManagePLUS users.
(2) We could begin a major rewrite of ManagePLUS now, but with the
likelihood of squandering a lot of development resources--programmer
cost--to create features which may be had 'for free' this coming
fall. (3) We could wait until later in 2002 to begin rewriting
ManagePLUS, hoping that by then Intuit will have added the features
we need to the QuickBooks SDK."
"The bottom line is that we've decided on option (3)--to
wait before starting a ManagePLUS rewrite. The positive parts of
this option are that we should be able to complete the rewrite at
lower cost and with more advanced features. The downside is that we
will have broken continuity for those ManagePLUS users who purchase
QuickBooks 2002. They will have to do without ManagePLUS for now.
But remember, simply updating ManagePLUS for QuickBooks 2002
wouldn't have helped folks who are now running Windows 2000 or XP
anyway, so updating ManagePLUS right now wouldn't have been a
perfect choice either. We only hope our ManagePLUS customers will
understand our dilemma and that the wait won't cause problems for
them."
ManagePLUS for QuickBooks™
will continue to be available for QuickBooks and QuickBooks Pro
versions 5, 6, 99, 2000, and 2001, until it is updated or rewritten
to accommodate the newest QuickBooks releases.
About Flagship Technologies
Flagship Technologies, Inc., is located at Madison, Missouri. The
company's primary focus is on developing and marketing agricultural
software products, including ManagePLUS
for QuickBooks™ and ManagePLUS
for Quicken™, farm accounting add-ons for QuickBooks and
Quicken, as well as other software products and training materials.
The company can be contacted by these means:
ManagePLUS is a trademark of Flagship
Technologies, Inc. QuickBooks and Quicken are registered trademarks
of Intuit.
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