Intuit Partner Platform team blog

Intuit Anywhere Beta - come and get it!

Today, we're very excited to share with you that Intuit Anywhere is now in Beta, meaning you can get a hold of the bits and access the services to start integrating them into your SaaS apps.

 We’re obviously very excited with Intuit Anywhere and to now be at a place where we can share Beta with you - we truly believe that Intuit Anywhere will create brand new opportunities for our partners and awesome new experiences for our customers.

This morning, we walked through an example use case, involving MethodCRM, Mavenlink, Freshbooks and Bill.com. We showed how Intuit Anywhere was acting as the glue across these apps, letting the data flow from one app to the other, flowing into and out of QuickBooks: there was customer data being written and estimates being created in the CRM app, finding their way into QuickBooks Online, then the that same information being read in by another 3rd app - Mavenlink in this case - to create work items and deliverables, which can then later be used by other apps to invoice customer (such as Freshbooks) and bill and pay vendors (via Bill.com).

The walkthrough showed how all this allowed the customer to save time and money by avoiding double data entry, using multiple apps that work together - and doing so at the developer's sites, not through Intuit App Center - that's a really important point about Intuit Anywhere: we want to make IPP's data services available to apps without those apps having to be fully Federated into IPP...

The bluedot widget

We showed how the "bluedot widget" allows navigation across the Intuit Anywhere connected apps, and how it enabled a Single-Sign-On experience across the Intuit Anywhere apps.

We also showed how Intuit App Center acts as the destination where the customer is able to control which apps they've granted permissions to connect to their dats, and how they can control that access, revoking access as necessary.

All awesome time-saving features that developers can integrate into their apps and in turn offer to their own customers quickly and easily.

We demonstrated how Intuit Anywhere was acting as the glue across these different apps.

Then the Bill.com team showed a live demo of Intuit Anywhere that they have rolled out to a some of their customers as part of the early-adoption program. They also shared the customer feedback - all very positive feedback, really validating the value we're delivering to to developers and customers. It was awesome!

That was the customer facing story.

We then had the product team demonstrate how quickly and easily IPP developers can integrate Intuit Anywhere into their apps and get the data flowing between their apps and IPP data services APIs. All real bits, real services - they got an app integrated in minutes, real-time in front of the developer audience.

And you can get going yourself right now!

Before you head off and review the docs, here are a couple of very important pieces of info we shared this morning at IPP CloudJam since our initial announcement a few weeks back:

Intuit Anywhere - Pricing:

For each Intuit Anywhere connection, Intuit charges the developer $5 per company connected per month. There is no limit on the number of users – so an app that is connected to a company file can be used by multiple users.

Also, we’re not putting limits on how and if the developer want to charge customers for leveraging the Intuit Anywhere feature. Developers can choose to include the cost as part of their standard pricing, or pass the cost on to the customer as a monthly feature, or  add their own margin, so for example, charge the customer $10 per month, retain $5 and pass $5 to Intuit.

We want to keep this pricing as simple as possible and give developers the choice around the economic opportunities here.

Intuit Anywhere - Timing:

Today you'll be able to access a pre-release version of the bits and services you need to integrate the Intuit Anywhere experience and data into your app.

We plan to make the first set of Intuit Anywhere integrations available to end-customers in late September, with a phased roll-out of other Intuit Anywhere connected apps on a “First Ready / First to Go Live” basis.

Intuit Anywhere - Types of Apps Supported

Eventually (as the name suggests!), we want to make Intuit Anywhere available for all types of apps and services, and across every device.

To start with, we’re focused on enabling web-based SaaS apps that are sold to multiple customers – if you have a mobile extension for your SaaS app – that works too.

Over time, we’ll add support for custom apps and integration: examples are one-off integrations between QuickBooks and ERP systems, or other “behind the firewall” integrations. Stand-alone mobile and iPad apps and "desktop" applications won't be supported in the first instance, but we plan to. We don’t have a timescale to share for these, but if you are planning to use Intuit Anywhere for custom, mobile-only or desktop apps, we definitely want to hear from you and will update you once we have a roadmap to share.

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So, you can get going and start your integrations today. The team has worked very hard to make sure that the developer experience is quick and as simple as possible – the reality is that the grunt of the work developers will need to do will take place around the integration of the data into their app. If you've already begun this data integration - then that's great: Intuit Anywhere is using the exact same data service APIs that are live today on IPP, just using OAuth, so any work on the data integration will be totally ready to go when we go live with Intuit Anywhere.

As you can imagine, the developer experience is a top priority for us - we want to make it as quick and simple as it can possibly be.

And we want the customer experience to be awesome too - we want customers to trust the that the Intuit Anywhere experience will be secure and "just work", so each integration needs to meet technical requirements and pass a security assessment prior to going live.

Lastly, the point of the Beta is to learn and get your feedback, so we very much look forward to hearing from you as you start your Intuit Anywhere integrations.

So...if you like the sound of Intuit Anywhere, come and play with the Beta!

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Alex Barnett
Group Manager, Developer Relations

Combined QBO and QB Java Devkit released on Code.Intuit.com

Combined QBO and QB Java Devkit released - IPP Java DevKit

We are happy to announce that the initial version of the "combined" ipp-java-devkit is now available. The release version is 2.0.1. 

This is a major new release that adds QuickBooks Online support to the ipp-java-devkit plus many other new features. There are 74 tasks, features and bugs that are closed in this release. 

We encourage people to give it a try and offer feedback. We have been working with two internal Intuit teams that have helped us shake out issues over the past few weeks. One team is using Intuit Data Services for Quickbooks Desktop and has ported their application to the new library to take advantage of new services. The other team is porting their existing IPP app to integrate with QuickBooks Online. 

Here are some of the major release details. 

• An abstraction for the common interface that is supported by both QBO and IDS. 
• Ability to downcast to access platform specific features or "unsupported" fields. 
• Additional QBD specific services that are not currently supported by QBO. 
• Javadoc and IDE code assist for the client API that is supplemented by the detailed information from the annotations in the CDM. For example, QB and QBO field constraints. 
• Narrows the client interface to CDM fields that are actually supported. 
• Narrows the client services and entities to CDM objects that are actually supported (generating from JAXB give you everything). 
• Code generation of services to provide a uniform and consistent implementation of services. 
• No more NotImplementedException - it is banished forever. 
• Large suite of open source tests. 
• Open Source sample apps. We have removed the samples that were obsolete or not maintained. 

You can find additional information and download links on our project home page at code.intuit.com

Happy Coding!

The Intuit Partner Platform Team

 

Intuit Data Services for QuickBooks Online – Out of Beta!

Back in October 2010 we launched Intuit Data Services for QuickBooks Online in open beta with the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP). Since then, the QuickBooks Online (QBO) Web Services team has focused on developing new RESTful  APIs, stabilizing our platform, helping our first customers onboard onto Intuit Data Services (IDS) for QBO, and adding commonly requested functional enhancements to support you, our developers.

We’ve expanded our web services with five new publically available entity and transaction APIs during that time, and we have more new APIs and enhancements forthcoming. The broader team also added an IPP toolbar to the core product. It’s been a busy time for us and we have learned a lot – thanks for sticking with us through it all! There are always opportunities to improve, but with our v41 product release we reached our defined quality goals and have declared Intuit Data Services for QuickBooks Online ‘out of beta’!!

What does “Out of Beta” mean?

We looked to internal and external best practices to define our process for moving an API out of beta, and settled on quality criteria in three key areas: performance, test coverage, and defect management. Performance and test coverage in particular are key concerns for any best-in-class web service, and our APIs are doing well against our internal metrics.

While all our APIs have passed beta-level testing and performance criteria before being publicly exposed, we’ve focused our release-quality testing efforts on the Money-In APIs. This is where we saw the vast majority of usage during our beta, and we wanted to prioritize the completeness and stability of those APIs to enable your applications to go to market sooner. Money-Out APIs, as well as newly exposed APIs, will be transitioning out of beta on a case-by-case basis in the coming months. We encourage you to use all of our documented and released APIs, beta or not, and welcome your comments on them!

Even though we’ve already achieved release quality you should expect to see continuous improvement in performance and test coverage. Release-by-release we are tuning and optimizing our web services and database layers, and our test coverage grows daily – speed and stability will help our developers deliver better applications to the end user, and that’s good for all of us.

Where we are: Launched and Learning

We spent our first six months in open beta so that we could make sure we were solving both for our developers and for the end users of your (and our) applications. There were some big surprises and challenges, but we think the platform is headed in the right direction. We’ve got a backlog of feature and data requests, and it is revisited regularly when the team plans out our releases.

Just because we’ve moved our primary APIs out of beta doesn’t mean we’re done asking questions, listening to feedback, and trying to improve our services. Our team has adopted the mantra of “Launched and Learning” – we’ve launched, but want to make sure we continue to learn and improve the way we did during our open beta. Keep giving us your suggestions, comments, and feature requests – we want to make our APIs the best they can be for our developers, and we adjust our roadmaps based on our day-to-day learning.

There are currently nineteen APIs available for your use, and you can find out more about them at our documentation page.  Speaking of documentation – we’ve heard your comments and are hard at work improving our current documentation and processes to maintain quality for the future. The docs should have improved in detail, accuracy, and clarity over the last couple of releases, and you should expect more improvements soon.

There are already 6 great QBO-enabled applications live on the Intuit App Center, built by some awesome third party developers. A big thanks to Bill.com, Expensify, AuditMyBooks Analyzer, Quickbooks Dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Transaction Pro Importer and Full Slate for being early adopters! And there's more great apps in the works.

Where it’s headed

Over the next few months you can expect to see work on new APIs and enhancements continuing. Time Activity, Reporting, Jobs, and moving OAuth for QBO out of beta are all projects in the pipeline so you should be looking out for them soon. We’re still evolving our longer-term roadmap, so please let us know if you’ve got requests – you can get them on our radar by posting to our “Change Requests - QBO data” thread on the IDN Forums. There is a great group of developers building additional applications on top of our web services, and we hope to see them going live to customers soon.

If you haven’t already started developing with us, would you like to learn more? You can get started building apps for small businesses nationwide by reading our documentation page, and by checking out the Intuit Data Services for QuickBooks Online forum over at IDN. Let us know if you run into any problems by posting on the forums – we’re actively monitoring them and a QuickBooks Online web services engineer will get back to you as quickly as they can. We hope your application is the next to go live for on the Intuit App Center with Intuit Data Services for QuickBooks Online!

Thank You

Intuit Partner Platform and QuickBooks Online teams

Announcing IPP v2.14

Happy New Year! IPP v2.14 is now live and available for Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) partners. This release is another in a series focused on extending developer tools and data services, as well as improving the shopping, buying, and user experience for end customers on Intuit App Center.

IPP v2.14 CONTENTS

1. INTUIT APP CENTER END-USER ENHANCEMENTS

• Ability to serve customized IPP marketing landing pages from within QuickBooks
  IPP now has the ability to serve customized IPP marketing landing pages from within QuickBooks. Previously, the in-product placements for Intuit App Center took a user to the homepage. All users will now be taken to a landing page that can optionally be customized to the specific QuickBooks industry the user has selected (Finance, Construction, Services, etc.).
  This will present a more appropriate entry point to Intuit App Center from within QuickBooks and allow direct marketing exposure for select applications.
• 1-Click Sync / Simplified Data Setup
  Starting with QuickBooks 2011 R3 or later, IPP will have the ability to initiate QuickBooks file sync from the checkout process on Intuit App Center. Users with QuickBooks 2011 R3 or later will not need to switch back to QuickBooks from the Intuit App Center web flow to setup file sync. IPP will automatically detect a user starting from within QuickBooks and will launch Sync Manager using a custom protocol handler (quickbooks://).

Please review the release notes for more information on Intuit App Center Enhancements.

2. PLATFORM ENHANCEMENTS

• Updated IPP Documentation: Static, Searchable Docs
  As an IPP Developer, you can now search the documentation using any external search engine, and all pages are static, wiki pages hosted on developer.intuit.com. These documents were converted from the previous framework that generated the docs dynamically, making them impossible for you to bookmark or for external search engines to index. We’ve also renamed some document titles for greater clarity and brevity. The old documentation will be available through the general Documentation page, but links on the site will point to the new documents.
• New Confidential Information Role
  We’ve created a new confidential information role. Company tax ID or social security number or Vendor tax ID or social security number will require this permission for viewing. Permission is allowed for Administrators.
• New Mappings for QBO Data
  The application setup process now includes selections that let you map your application’s roles and permissions to QuickBooks Online roles and permissions.

Please review the release notes for more information on Platform Enhancements.

3. INTUIT DATA SERVICES ENHANCEMENTS

• Expanded Data Services and Documentation for QuickBooks Online Data (Beta)
  Receive Payments for read, create and update operations is now available as an additional data entity. Developers can also now review expanded documentation within the Getting Started Guide, including greater details within new sub sections.

• Expanded Data Services for QuickBooks Desktop Data
  • New production quality APIs for the following data objects are being made available in this release:
    • New QuickBooks Desktop Entities and Operations: Accounts Receivable and Time (Money In
    • Class Read
    • Customer Type Read
    • Item Receipt Create and Update
    • Job Type Read
    • Other Charge Item Create and Update
    • Other Name Read
    • Sales Order Create and Update
    • Sales Rep Read
    • Ship Method Read
    • Unit of Measure Read
  • Data entities that contain small data sets do not support the full set of standard filters. These small entities include PaymentMethod, Terms, ShipMethod, CustomerType, JobType, VendorType, Class, UOM, CustomerMessage, and SalesTaxCode. They support only the ListIdSet, ActiveOnly, and Name filters and sorting.
  • TimeActivity Query has been enhanced to allow query for an ID set to narrow down the workers (employees and vendors) in the result set.
  • Expanded Reporting
    • Reports now available:
    • 1099 Report with QuickBooks Report Mappings
    • Standard Balance Sheet
  • Reports updated:
    • Profit & Loss Accrual report
    • This report has been updated to allow it to be rendered for companies that have cash basis as their accounting preference. The previous endpoint has been retained, but an additional query has been added to support the access to the reports for cash basis companies.
  • QuickBooks Custom Fields
    • QuickBooks Custom Fields read has been made available for customers using QuickBooks 2011. The feature will be made available for QuickBooks 2010 customers in Q1 2011. Read has been made available for Pro, Premier and Enterprise editions for names, items, transaction headers, and transaction lines.

Please review the release notes for more information on Intuit Data Services Enhancements.

4. SOFTWARE UPDATES / FIXES
For a complete list of software updates / fixes included in IPP v2.14, please review the Intuit Partner Platform release notes.

Announcing IPP Support for QuickBooks Online - Open Beta

It's been a while coming, but we're very excited to announce that the Intuit Partner Platform is now well on the way to expanding its support beyond the QuickBooks Desktop product to also support QuickBooks Online.

Today, the IPP Intuit Data Services for QuickBooks Online API is now available as an open beta for all developers building applications on IPP, and you will be able to start selling your QBO-integrated IPP apps through the Intuit App Center by January 2011.

About the QuickBooks Online Customer Base

Intuit’s small business customer base is increasingly moving online to manage their front and back office functions. Intuit has seen this trend firsthand with the impressive growth of QuickBooks Online. In one year, QuickBooks Online has doubled their customer base...and 80% of these customers have not previously used QuickBooks Desktop.

As an IPP developer you now have the opportunity to provide additional value through building applications that integrate with QuickBooks Online (QBO) data, filling key customer needs and providing great solutions to Intuit's fast growing QBO customer base.

We'll be driving a ton of users to your apps: with one click, a QuickBooks Online user will be able to immediately access (try and buy) a list of IPP apps that specifically integrate with QBO data - all while using their existing QBO username and password.

Benefits of Early Adoption

Our main PR launch is currently scheduled for January 2011. Get in early to be part of this exciting launch which will include direct access to our QuickBooks Online customers through in-product links.

As an early adopter of IPP's Intuit Data Services (IDS) for QBO API, you’ll also help shape our development roadmap. We’re very interested in learning what you need as we expand and evolve our offering.

We’re very interested in your feedback on documentation, the data objects you'd like supported, and API functionality. Discuss feedback at the IPP forum.

About the API

Many IPP developers are already familiar with the Intuit Data Services API that supports the QuickBooks Desktop data model. For QBO, we're following the same REST-based, broad data model, however there are some key differences.  Over time, we aim to make these differences even smaller.

The initial set of objects we have in the beta today are those that we plan to be in the final V1 release, and each today have full CRUD operations. These objects are:

• Account
• Bill
• BillPayment
• CashPurchase
• Check
• CreditCardCharge
• Customer
• Employee
• Estimate
• Invoice
• Item
• PaymentMethod
• SalesTerm
• Vendor

Filters and Sorts are available for each, see docs for details.

How to get more info on the open beta:

• Review the IPP Intuit Data Services (IDS) for QBO API documentation
• Attend the IPP IDS QBO API overview webinar (Friday, Oct 8, 2010 10AM-11AM PDT) - Register here
• Meet with the IPP team - Sign up for the IPP CloudJam at Intuit's offices, Nov 17-18 2010, Mountain View, CA - (We’ll be doing sessions on the QBO API).  Tickets are limited (we only have 25 left) so register asap.  

Thanks,
The Intuit Partner Platform Team

Announcing IPP v2.11

We’re excited to announce that IPP v2.11 is now live and available for IPP partners. This release is another in a series focused on extending developer tools and data services, as well as improving the shopping, buying, and user experience for end customers.

IPP v2.11 CONTENTS

1. SERVER BUSINESS LOGIC TOOLS AND SERVICES - BETA
Server Business Logic (SBL) enables developers to deploy server-side java servlets on IPP servers and publish their own APIs. Developers can also use SBL to replace client-side logic, which allows you to manage and maintain one set of code to support multiple client side applications that span devices and application instances.

For example, a web app, mobile app, and desktop plug-in can all rely on a single set of server-side logic for key functions. Processing data operations using IPP’s server- side business logic engine improves application performance and reduces network traffic. Key use cases supported include PDF or Excel output generation or aggregation of data calls, so that instead of six client-side calls an app can make one call to SBL, with SBL then retrieving and aggregating the data sets into a single client side response.

This release of IPP SBL includes the following capabilities:

• Tooling-integrated Eclipse plug-in
  • Right-click deploy
  • Continuous integration build-to-deploy
• Built-in authentication and identity
• Access to other web services
  • Internal proxy to Intuit data and auth services
  • Outbound proxy to access external services
• Managed container
• System monitors CPU, memory, returned bytes; if thresholds are exceeded, request is stopped

SBL is now available in public Beta. Review the documentation and register for the SBL webinar to learn more.  For those unable to attend the webinar, we’ll post it on the IPP Webinars page after it has aired.

2. OAUTH SERVICES - BETA
OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method across applications. OAuth is a simple way to publish and interact with protected data.

• OAuth support for unattended scenarios
  • Allows unattended scenarios for secure IPP data access and update when customer is not present within application enabling event driven or time based features
• Sign-in with integrated OAuth for Mobile and Desktop Connected Apps (gadget/plug-in)
  • IPP supports mobile and connected applications that work with web apps (i.e. not stand-alone). This release includes easy “sign-in” with mobile-optimized sign-in pages. Sign-in uses our new OAuth standard and allows long lived access tokens for use up to six months. In the future, IPP will expand this to include sign-up/account creation.

OAuth is now available in public Beta. Review the documentation and register for the OAuth webinar to learn more.  For those unable to attend the webinar, we’ll post it on the IPP Webinars page after it has aired.

3. INTUIT DATA SERVICES FOR QUICKBOOKS DESKTOP DATA
There are a number of new data sets. We’ve also made enhancements and improvements to Intuit Data Services (IDS) for QuickBooks desktop data.

All of the new objects and behaviors listed below work with v2 of the IDS API. Developers must use v2 of the IDS API to utilize these new services. Previous IDS versions (e.g. v1) are supported but will not include new objects/behaviors; developers are urged to migrate to the latest API version at their earliest convenience.

The following data elements and methods have been exposed via REST API as well as added to the IPP Flex framework. These data elements and methods previously released in BETA quality as part of previous releases.
New IDN objects / methods now in production quality:

• Names
  • Company update
• Accounts Receivable and Items (money in)
  • Invoice update
  • Estimate update
  • Sales tax code read
• Time
  • Timeactivity create and update

Other IDS enhancements available:

• Reporting data services
  Developers can now access summary report data for the following reports:
  • Profit and Loss Standard Report
  • A previous bug has been fixed now allowing access to a standard P&L report
  • Custom Transaction Detail report
• Transaction numbering generator
  IDS now generates unique transaction document numbering in the cloud for web applications. This allows QuickBooks users to distinguish transactions created outside of QuickBooks desktop. It generates a web-based number that will be separate from QuickBooks desktop — a unique prefix-based numbering with a sequential numerical increment for each transaction type with one shared schema per realm.
• Random Access Iterator
  Random Access Iterator allows requests for a designated number of query results in output, allowing support for scenarios in which devices or connections timeout. This provides seamless re-requests for query output. This feature is especially valuable to provide an enhanced experience for mobile data scenarios.

For more information on IDS capabilities, please review the platform release notes.

4. INTUIT APP CENTER END-USER ENHANCEMENTS
Enhancements have been made to Intuit App Center improving the end-user experience. This release includes enhancements to detect existing accounts earlier in the process and enhancements to prevent users from creating additional accounts.

• Action Required: Updated and finalized new toolbar design
  Design for the new toolbar has been updated and finalized. Developers will have time after the release of 2.11 to do final testing (please contact developer relations for information on the new toolbar). The new toolbar will be enabled for all end-users once it has been tested and verified by developers.
• Redesigned Sign-Up/Sign-In (SUSI) first screen
  The first SUSI screen has been redesigned incorporating both the login and new account functions. Users now follow a single flow with both options (instead of separate flows previously). This change detects an existing account in the first step; previously users would go down the new account flow and would only be notified of an existing account after completing the new account screen.
• Improvements in detecting and notifying users of existing accounts
  The new account page has also been enhanced to detect existing accounts upon exit of the first email address field. Users are prompted with a “speech bubble” on detection of existing account and can go back to login or recover a forgotten password.
• Improvements in messaging IE6 as an unsupported browser
  The end-user messaging for unsupported browsers has been redesigned from a pop-up to a separate web page. Because the default settings for IE6 blocked pop-ups, users would only see the unsupported browser messaging by viewing the alert from the alert bar. Now the messaging is displayed in a standard web page and not subject to pop-up blocker settings.
• Upcoming changes to streamline QuickBooks data setup
  A new streamlined data setup process will be released as part of a forthcoming QuickBooks update (currently targeting end of October). The update will enable a handoff between IPP and QuickBooks to launch data setup directly from IPP. Current QuickBooks data setup is initiated from QuickBooks and requires manual intervention by the user.

Visit the Intuit App Center.

5. SOFTWARE UPDATES / FIXES
For a complete list of software updates / fixes included in IPP v2.11, please review the Intuit Partner Platform release notes here.

Announcing IPP v2.8

The Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) team is excited to announce that IPP v2.8 is now live and available for IPP partners. This release is one in a series focused on extending developer tools and data services, as well as improving the shopping, buying, and user experience of end customers on Intuit App Center.

IPP v2.8 CONTENTS

• Production-Quality IPP Intuit Data Services Enhancements
  • New Create (and in some cases Update) access to many Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and General Ledger objects
  • Enhanced Query and Sorting filters
  • Several new QuickBooks reporting data service
• New and Improved Developer Tools / Services
  • FlashBuilder 4.0 and ANT Support
• Coming Soon: IE6.0 Deprecation
• Software Updates / Fixes

PRODUCTION-QUALITY IPP IDS ENHANCEMENTS

There are a number of new data sets, enhancements, and improvements to IPP Intuit Data Services (IDS). The following data elements and methods have been exposed via IDS as well as added to the IPP Flex framework. We previously released them in BETA quality as part of IPP v2.7. They are now in production quality as part of this release (IPP v2.8).

• Lists
  • Create Method for SalesTaxItem, Item Discount, and Item Fixed Asset
  • Create and Update method for Payment Item
• Accounts Receivable
  • Update method for Invoice, Estimate, and Sales Receipt
• Accounts Payable
  • Create method for Bill Payment Check, Bill Payment Credit Card, and Vendor Credit

Other IDS Enhancements available with IDS v2.8:

• Control over Customer Data Connectivity Options

Partners can now configure from which IDS connectivity options their application subscribers can select. Options include: Enter Data Directly, Use Sample Data, and Use My QuickBooks Desktop Data. By default, users are presented all three of these choices for any IDS-enabled IPP application.

• Reporting data services

Access QuickBooks summary report data via IDS services for the following reports:

• Profit and Loss
• Balance Summary
• Sales Summary
• Account Balances
• Customers Who Owe Me
• Income Breakdown
• Top Customers By Sales

The above reporting data services provide a summary view of data. You can also request reporting data for specified time periods or predefined subsets, such as “top 20.”

• Enhanced Query and Sorting Filters

IPP v2.8 introduces a variety of expanded sorting and filtering options. You can specify sort order, filter results by synchronize flags, and get the number of objects returned by a query for all IDS objects. Name, Accountant, and Item objects can also be filtered by the active flag.

• Additional Data Validation Rules for IDS Operations

IPP 2.8 continues to introduce new validation rules to improve IDS data quality and consistency, as well as to improve the reliability of QuickBooks desktop sync. Please review your applications to ensure that they conform to these new rules and properly handle error conditions when storing data to IDS.

• View-Only User Roles

There are new application roles that allow developers to provide read-only access to different classes of IDS objects, as well as a new Confidential Reporting role to support these new reporting data services.

• Improved Initial Sync Performances for Customers

The performance of initial synchronization has been improved by 20 percent to create a better customer experience.

See IPP IDS Release Notes for more details.

NEW AND IMPROVED DEVELOPER TOOLS / SERVICES

For partners developing Native IPP applications, IPP 2.8 includes several enhancements to the IPP Flex framework and Eclipse plug-ins to improve developer productivity and simplify application publishing through dev, test, QA, and production.

• Support for Adobe Flash Builder 4

Adobe Flash Builder 4, formerly Adobe Flex Builder, is now supported when the Flash builder project is configured to use the Flex 3.5 SDK (Flash Builder 4 backward compatibility mode).

With IPP v2.8, developers who want to use Adobe Flash Builder 4 must update their Eclipse environment to use JVM 1.6. If you are running older installations of Flex Builder, you must download JVM 1.6 and configure Flex Builder to use it. If you are running Mac OS Leopard, you must upgrade to Snow Leopard (because the Leopard JVM 1.6 doesn’t support 32 bit mode, which Eclipse requires).

• Ant support

You can now build and deploy native IPP applications from the command line via Ant, enabling continuous integration and nightly builds.

See IPP Developer Tools Release Notes for more details.

COMING SOON: IE6.0 DEPRECATION

With the next release of IPP (v2.9, scheduled for late June), we will be deprecating IE6.0. “Deprecating” means that IPP will no longer test IE6.0 for compatibility with the platform and tools, and also that we won’t require your applications to support IE6.0.

SOFTWARE UPDATES / FIXES

For a complete list of software updates / fixes included in IPP v2.8, see  IPP 2.8 Release Notes.

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If you have any questions about this release, please head over the IPP Developer Forum.

Thanks!

The Intuit Partner Platform team.

Announcing IPP v2.7

The Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) team is excited to announce that IPP v2.7 is now live and available for IPP development partners and includes the following updates:

• New Workplace App Center application toolbar
• New BETA-quality extension to Intuit Data Services
• AppCenter enhancements to improve the application shop and learn experience
• A variety of platform and IDS issues / defects

NEW INTUIT WORKPLACE APP CENTER TOOLBAR 

A new Intuit Workplace App Center toolbar will be introduced to customers in production in the 2010 Q3 timeframe.

The new toolbar allows partners greater control over the look and feel, and provides greater configurability while still providing users easy-to-use navigation between App Center apps and services.

Access to the new toolbar capabilities are being provided to IPP developers in this v2.7 release and are asked to test the new controls and configure their applications to work correctly with the new toolbar by July 31, 2010.

Benefits include:

• App Center application footer is removed 

  The new version of the toolbar will replace the function of the current standard Workplace application footer. This will reduce the real estate dedicated to Workplace navigation elements by more than 50 percent.

• Option to have toolbar scroll with the application interface 

  Developers can configure their application to allow the new toolbar to scroll with their application window contents. The default behavior is for the new toolbar to remain fixed at the top of the application window (for backwards compatibility).

• Control over application brand / name and toolbar background color 

  Developers can include a custom logo in thae toolbar, as well as control the background color of the interface.

• Greater control / configurability over stand menu options 

  Developers can include custom links to a variety of standard menu options, including options for HELP, FEEDBACK, ADD USERS, and MANAGE USERS.

• New Expiration Messaging for Applications 

  New dialog boxes have been added to each of the different plan expiration scenarios. Users are now presented with messaging that more clearly indicates which expiration scenario has been triggered:

  • Beta period expired: The application is no longer available for beta testing.
  • Trial period expired: Free trial period has ended; user is prompted to purchase a subscription.
  • Application subscription has been cancelled: Application is no longer available for use.

To access and test against the new toolbar, please submit an IPP Support Incident.

NEW BETA-QUALITY EXTENSTION TO INTUIT DATA SERVICES 

A number of new data sets, enhancements and improvements to IPP Intuit Data Services (IDS) are now available in BETA-quality.

Production-quality versions of these services—along with Flex tool updates that support these services—will be delivered in IPP v2.8, scheduled for release later in May.

Developers must use v2 of the IDS API to utilize these new services. Previous IDS versions (e.g. v1) is currently supported but will not include these new objects/behaviors; developers are strongly urged to migrate to the latest API version at their earliest convenience.

The following data elements and methods have been exposed in BETA quality. 

New IDS Objects / Methods

• LISTS
• Create Method for SalesTaxItem, Item Discount, and Item Fixed Asset
• Create and Update method for Payment Item
• ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE
• Update method for Invoice, Estimate and Sales Receipt
• ACCOUNTS PAYABLE
• Create method for Bill Payment Check, Bill Payment Credit Card, and Vendor Credit

Other IDS Enhancements available in BETA with IDS v2.7 include:

• Developer control over customer data connectivity options 

  Partners can now configure which IDS connectivity options their application subscribers can select from. Options include: Enter Data Directly, Use Sample Data, and Use My QuickBooks Desktop Data. By default, users are presented all three of these choices for any IDS-enabled application.

• Reporting data services beta 

  Developers can now access QuickBooks summary report data via IDS services for the following reports providing a summary view of data:

• Profit and Loss
• Balance Summary
• Sales Summary
• Account Balances
• Customers Who Owe Me
• Income Breakdown
• Top Customers by Sales

Methods are also available that allow developers to request reporting data for specified time periods or predefined subset (e.g. top 20).

• Enhanced query and sorting filters 

  IPP v2.7 introduces a variety of expanded sorting and filtering options. Developers can specify sort order, filter results by the synchronize flags, and get the number of objects returned by a query for all IDS objects. Name, Accountant, and Item objects can also be filtered by the active flag.

• Additional data validation rules for IDS operations 

  IPP v2.7 adds new validation rules to improve IDS data quality / consistency as well as to improve QuickBooks desktop sync reliability.

Partners should review their application to ensure their products conform to the following rules and properly handle the following error conditions when storing data to Intuit Data Services.

Examples of these new validation rules include:

• Names must be unique across names objects (Customer/Employee/Vendor/other names objects).
• Transactions (Bills, Invoices, etc.) must have at least one line.
• Email address must be in standard Internet format.
• Cannot reference both an Accounts Payable object and an Accounts Receivable object in a single General Ledger Journal Entry.
• Journal Entries must be in balance (Sum of Credits equal to Sum of Debits).
• For Accounts Payable transactions, a vendor must be referenced in the header.
• For Accounts Receivable posting and non-posting transactions, a Customer reference must be provided.

Other IDS enhancements include

• View-only User Roles 

  We’ve added new application roles that allow developers to provide read-only access to different classes of IDS objects. A new Confidential Reporting role has also been added to support the new reporting data services.

• Improved initial sync performances for customers 

  Performance of initial synchronization has been improved by 20 percent for improved customer experience.

For more details, including data validation rules and known issues please refer to the v2.7 IDS release notes and IDS Programmers Guide.

INTUIT WORKPLACE APP CENTER IMPROVEMENTS 

There are a variety of enhancements and modifications to Intuit App Center to improve the overall shopping flow and experience.

• New “All Apps” Page 

  A new “All Apps” page to the site providing an easy way for users to see a comprehensive list of all available applications. An “All Apps” link has been added to the top blue menu bar for easy access to the new page. The list of applications can be sorted by a particular column by clicking on the sorting triangles and multiple columns can be sorted by holding down the shift key while clicking a sort triangle.

• Clarifying Default Sign-Up Options for Applications 

  The Sign-Up Options for applications have been clarified through new terminology and graphics. Users are now presented with clearer messaging and graphics which indicate what evaluation option a particular application supports:

  • “Get it Free:” Application offers a free baseline subscription plan.
  • “Try it Free:” Application offers a free trial period; a purchased subscription is then required.
  • “Buy it Now:” Application does not offer any free trial or baseline plan and requires a purchase.

• Additional Help for QuickBooks Sync Manager Issues 

  Additional links have been added to the Frequently Asked Questions page in the top blue menu bar for issues with QuickBooks Data Synchronization. Users can now link directly to resources focused on QuickBooks Data Synchronization issues.

• Design improvements to Solution Category Pages 

  Design improvements to the Solution Category Pages (Run My Business, Manage My Work, Grow and Manage My Customers, Reduce My Costs) to simplify user navigation. The information presented has been streamlined and issues with lists scrolling have been addressed.

SOFTWARE UPDATES / FIXES 

For a complete list of software updates / fixes included in IPP v2.7, see the release notes.

--

The Intuit Partner Platform Team.

Ruby web apps and the Intuit Partner Platform

Editor's note: The following is a guest post by Zack Chandler who has been active in the Ruby on Rails and Intuit developer community for a number of years.

As recently as five years ago the majority of developers considered the Ruby programming language arcane and obscure. Then the Ruby on Rails web framework burst on the scene and seemly overnight became a must-consider choice when building web apps.

I began working with Ruby on Rails before the 1.0 release and have been amazed at the progress of the framework and growth of the community. Not long after that I began developing integrations between Ruby web apps and QuickBooks via the QuickBooks Web Connector and QuickBooks Online via the QBO API.

New to the QuickBooks ecosystem, I quickly learned there were additional benefits beyond simply adding the “QuickBooks integration” checkbox on a feature tour. Specifically the QuickBooks Marketplace quickly proved itself to be a valuable channel for lead-generation.

Fast-forward to 2010 and Ruby developers have even greater reason to be excited with Intuit’s current integration opportunities.

Ruby web apps apps targeting small to medium-sized businesses are launching daily. Humm… guess which accounting system most small to medium-sized businesses use (hint: rhymes with “fast cooks”)?

Meanwhile Intuit has re-imagined their entire developer offering and launched the ambitious Intuit Partner Platform. To a Ruby developer with no former experience with QuickBooks integration I would simply say that the most exciting parts of IPP are:

• Intuit Data Services - a cloud-based API for QuickBooks data
• Intuit Workplace App Center - an online portal where your web app can be marketed and sold to millions of Intuit customers

I recently did a deep-dive into IPP and came away thoroughly excited. I’ve posted a quickstart tutorial entitled Intuit Partner Platform for Ruby Web Applications on my Depixelate blog which will hopefully help other Rubyists get started with IPP.

The future is indeed bright for those Ruby developers wishing to both co-market and integrate with Intuit data through the cloud.

Fresh from the IPP CloudJam: PHP Tools

Last week’s IPP CloudJam in Waltham was a blast. We had a great mix of people sharing their knowledge, hacking code and competing in three tracks separate technology tracks. One of those tracks was for the best OSS IPP solution.

During the first day, a lot of energy gathered around building PHP components and Drupal Modules for IPP. There are a few PHP federated applications being developed, another developer is involved with the civiCRM project, and a longtime IDN developer, Keith Palmer of Consolibyte, has been developing Open Source PHP tools to integrate with QuickBooks for some time.

Keith cornered me the first evening to help him understand how to call IPP APIs from PHP. Using the IPP Java DevKit as a pattern, Keith started work building out a set of PHP tools to integrate with IPP. When we came in the next morning, Keith had a working demo using a subset of the API.

Long story short, Keith won the OSS track competition and has launched a PHP DevKit project on code.intuit.com. Not only have all of the PHP developers from the CloudJam joined the project, the Intuit Connect engineers at Intuit have also joined (and they were not even at the CloudJam or part of the IPP team).

If you are a PHP developer and interested in IPP, you should check out the PHP DevKit project on code.intuit.com.