FRx 6.7 Adds a Report Manager

A new module for FRx, a financial reporting application offered by Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS), helps users build report books: collections of financial reports and other documents related to specific events, such as quarterly executive financial reviews. In addition, FRx 6.7 improves integration with Excel and offers new currency translation capabilities. These features will be available to customers of Axapta, Great Plains, and Solomon with the next major revisions of those products, planned for the third quarter of 2004 (for Great Plains and Solomon) and the second quarter of 2005 (for Axapta).

FRx integration with other Microsoft products is proceeding selectively. A Windows SharePoint Services–based report portal is slated for a future FRx release; however, no plans to integrate FRx with SQL Server Reporting Services have yet been announced.

A New Module, Feature Tweaks

FRx was acquired by Great Plains in its Feb. 2000 purchase of FRx Software. The product helps financial analysts and planners build detailed financial reports from data in companies’ general ledger systems and provides facilities for e-mail distribution and Intranet-based report publishing via an FRx report portal called WebPort. Report recipients can drill into and examine data within reports and export report data to other formats (such as Excel tables or OLAP cubes) for more detailed analysis and charting.