Intuit Partner Platform team blog

Partnerships, IPP + Windows Azure

When we started the Intuit Partner Platform, we had a pretty simple vision: To delight Small Businesses with an ecosystem of applications that solve lots of needs and work extremely well together. We set out to build a platform that would enable us to work with our partners to build more and better offerings for the small business community. 

Although the vision hasn't changed, the path along our journey has certainly evolved. Three years ago, platforms-as-a-service were nascent. To help accelerate our partners getting to market, we created and offered an end-to-end platform. This helped a number of our partners get to market, but it wasn't a perfect offering. It was a stack that solved the needs of a small set developers, but couldn't scale in features to meet the needs of all our developers.

While we've continued to invest in our native platform, other platforms have moved at lightning speed. Many of these platforms focus on what I'll call the "lower" end of the stack. This is the stuff a developer needs to build and deploy a saas or mobile app (hardware, database, etc.). These platforms have evolved way past anything we could create and honestly provide a better development experience than we could.

In parallel however, we've focused on our core assets and differentiators, and evolved the "upper" end of the stack. This includes access to QuickBooks data and key "go-to-market" services that make app integrations possible and delight small businesses. As you can see with our Beta release of Intuit Anywhere, we're continuing to push the envelope on providing ubiquitous data integrations and tightly integrated apps to our customers. That's what we're good at, and it's where we will focus now and in the future.

That brings me to a couple of announcements we shared at IPP CloudJam: First, we will no longer offer our "native development" stack for developers to build on. We are going to focus our resources on the top of the stack and make data and services for our developers the top priority.

So what should our developers who are looking for a PaaS offering do?

While we have always been and will always be an open platform, and we will always embrace applications built on any platform, we think it's important to help guide our developers who are looking for a PaaS option to what we believe is the best option on the market. So I'm pleased to announce that we will continue the journey we started with Microsoft last year and double down on our investment to tightly integrate the Windows Azure platform with IPP. The feedback from current developers using Azure and live on Intuit App Center has been extremely positive and we believe with additional investment in our Windows Azure SDK for IPP, we can make developing an app on Azure, leveraging Quickbooks data and IPP's go-to-market services, and getting into the Intuit App Center Channel, DROP DEAD EASY.

We've been extremely impressed with the dedication and quality of Microsoft's platform, their willingness to work closely with our existing partners, and their dedication to making developers successful. Microsoft has built a huge business behind their partner community – they just "get" how important partners are and how to treat them – and with our "native" IPP development option now gone, we think this is the best platform for our developers.

Read up Liz Ngo, Microsoft's business development manager on why we're doubling down on this partnership. 

Here is some more information on how developers can take advantage of our partnership, sign up for Front Runner for IPP. 

Look for new releases of Window Azure SDK for IPP in the coming months and if you have requests, feedback, or interest in learning more about Azure, please let us know!

Alex Chriss
Director, Intuit Partner Platfomr

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

Join us for the August IPP CloudJam!

You’re invited to join us for a two-day IPP CloudJam in Mountain View, CA, August 9-10, 2011. Attendees will have the opportunity to collaborate with Intuit to build their SaaS business on the Intuit Partner Platform. We can help you get your application to market quickly and start selling it to the millions of QuickBooks small business customers via the Intuit Workplace App Center.

This event is focused for ISV: Developers / Architects, VP / Manager of Business Development, VP / Manager of Marketing. 

You’ll meet the Intuit Partner Platform team and learn more about:

• Intuit Anywhere
• IPP Marketing Opportunities
• Traditional IPP application development 
  • Build natively on the Intuit Partner Platform
  • Federate your existing SaaS application
• Intuit's Open Source Community: Code.Intuit.com

IPP CloudJams are a great way to get your application to market quickly!  Applications and open source projects that started at our previous CloudJams have already been published on the Intuit App Center.

Tickets are free, but limited. Register today to secure your place. We’ll award the tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.   

Please visit the website or registration page for more information. 

Date: Tuesday, August 9th - Wednesday, August 10th
Location: Intuit Headquarters, Mountain View, CA 

Tickets are FREE—but limited. Register now!

Get more information and event details here.

See you there,
—The Intuit Partner Platform Team

 

Announcing Intuit Anywhere

Small Businesses drive the nation's economy. And QuickBooks drives the back office functions for 4 million of those small businesses. Understanding who are your best customers, your cashflow, your inventory, and your accounts receivables, are critical information for any Small Business. But QuickBooks only solves some of the functions of a small business – not everything they need to successful.

For the past 2.5 years, we've been building the Intuit Partner Platform to securely and efficiently bring this data to our developers, so they can deliver best of breed applications to the SMB community. We're building the platform that connects the best apps for small business with the most important small business data.

Since our launch, we've developed a full PaaS offering for new app development and pioneered business app Federation - allowing apps built on any Platform to integrate with IPP. In doing so, we've connected together over 100 SMB applications and helped over 1,000,000 Small Business users find IPP connected apps through our Intuit App Center.

Today, we're excited to announce IPP is taking the next step in our journey, with Intuit Anywhere. With Intuit Anywhere, any SaaS or Mobile application can securely connect to IPP and QuickBooks data. For a Small Business, this means with one-click, they can "Connect to QuickBooks" from an Intuit Anywhere enabled app, sign-in with their Intuit Account, and instantly have QuickBooks data available to them.

We're pleased to announce six new partners that will be joining IPP leveraging the Intuit Anywhere technology.

• Bill.com
• Concur
• eBay
• FreshBooks
• Mavenlink
• MethodCRM.com

With these partners joining the 100 apps currently on IPP (and Salesforce.com coming later this summer), Small Businesses now have the premier destination with Intuit App Center to discover applications that work together, and with their QuickBooks data, to solve their needs.

It's fast and easy for developers to get started, power their business applications with QuickBooks data and delight their customers. We've also focused on the customer experience, providing single-sign-on throughout the ecosystem and a consistent widget for simple navigation and permissions management.

Small businesses can now leverage their most critical business data with the apps they use everyday – any app, any device, anywhere!

If you'd like more information or would like to join the Intuit Anywhere beta, please sign up here.

In the meantime, please checkout below some quotes from our partners regarding Intuit Anywhere, and find out more about our next IPP CloudJam.

Alex Chriss
Director, Intuit Partner Platform
@acce

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Intuit Anywhere Partner Quotes

“Intuit Anywhere gives Bill.com and other developers the tools to create amazing, secure user experiences while ensuring customer data is continuously synchronized with QuickBooks Online. Intuit Anywhere strengthens Bill.com’s ability to help SMBs stay on top of their payables and receivables processes, giving SMB’s access to their documents, payments and approvals in the cloud.” 
Rene Lacerte, CEO, Bill.com.

“Concur Breeze eliminates the pain of expense reporting, offering millions of small businesses one seamless expense reporting and administration experience – anywhere on the web or from their mobile device. With Intuit Anywhere integration, Concur Breeze expense data now flows seamlessly into QuickBooks, making it easy for employees on the road and an ideal solution for SMB managers and the finance and accounting professionals who advise them.” 
Elena Donio, executive vice president and & GM, Concur.

“Intuit Anywhere has made it easy for FreshBooks to integrate our online invoicing system with QuickBooks. It's the right move for Intuit, for FreshBooks, and most importantly for our customers whojust want to focus on their work, not their paperwork.” 
Mike McDerment, president, CEO and co-founder, FreshBooks.

“Integrating QuickBooks Online with Mavenlink is one of the most requested features from our user base and Intuit Anywhere has delivered. By working with Intuit, thousands of our SMB customers who work online with their clients will be able to spend more time collaborating, reduce administration and have an accurate reflection of their business financials." 
Ray Grainger, founder and CEO, Mavenlink.

“The ease of building and marketing apps using Intuit Anywhere means we’re going to see more developers integrating with QuickBooks. So, not only are QuickBooks users going to benefit from the convenience of single sign-on for their favorite apps, they’ll also have more apps to choose from.” 
Paul Jackson, president and founder, MethodCRM.com. 

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Learn more

• If you'd like more information or would like to join the Intuit Anywhere beta, please sign up here.

• Official Intuit Press Release: Intuit Unveils Next Generation of the Intuit Partner Platform

• Intuit will be hosting an IPP CloudJam at its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters on Aug. 9- 10. Developers will be able to learn more about Intuit Anywhere and spend time coding alongside the Intuit Partner Platform team. The event will include breakout sessions on Intuit Data Services with QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online, the mobile SDK, open source resources and marketing. More information and registration for the free event can be found here.

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Updates:

• ZDNet's Larry Dignan on Intuit Anywhere: "Think Facebook Connect for QuickBooks data."

• [video] Robert Scoble interviewing Alex Barnett, Group Manager, Developer Relations for Intuit, talking about Intuit Anywhere and showing a quick demo.

• Phil Wainewright: Standardizing the business data model

• Ben Kepes: Intuit Rolls Out Anywhere–QuickBooks Integration, Anywhere

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

 

IPP Flex Framework released under the Eclipse Public License on code.intuit.com

The Intuit Partner Platform team is proud to announce the release of our native IPP Flex Framework under the Eclipse Public License on code.intuit.com. The IPP Flex Framework project provides client libraries, tools and examples for Flex developers who are developing Native IPP applications. This includes the Kingussie framework and other components that may be built over time.

Kingussie is a library that uses the Adobe Cairngorm framework to provide a model-view-controller implementation optimized for interactions with the Intuit App Center, including several pre-coded views for common tasks all IPP developers need to do. Using this framework, nearly all of an IPP developer’s coding work will revolve around creating views (GUI) and specifying data variables in the model.

Code.intuit.com is home to a number of Open Source projects that provide client libraries and tools for IPP. Most of those projects have grown organically from developers with a common need.

We believe that it makes sense that Kingussie be developed and distributed under the same terms as those other libraries and tools. Kingussie is the best example of the ideal developer framework for IPP and as such, we want the patterns and techniques used to be studied and copied.   

Intuit developers already maintain this code base as part of their day to day jobs and that won’t change. The difference is that they will now be doing that using an open source model.

We expect that by working in the open, the Kingussie developers will have closer and more frequent interactions with IPP Application Developers. But the support model for Kingussie and the IPP native Flex Tools won’t change. Members of the Intuit Developer Relations team will continue to be the primary contacts for IPP application developers using the IPP Flex Tools.

Getting involved and how contribution works

As in all code.intuit.com projects, the source code, binaries, bug tracker and documentation is freely available. If you want to get more deeply involved, visit the project and start by asking questions in the developer discussion forum. You can find the project at:

https://code.intuit.com/sf/projects/ippflexframework

The Project Administrators (Peter Vogel, Robert Larson) have responsibility for granting access privileges in the project. This includes granting commit privileges to "contributors". The "contributors" in the project have responsibility for the code base including reviewing contributions for acceptance. At this time, the project “contributors” are all members of the existing Intuit IPP team.

Project contributors can commit changes directly, subject to peer review. All others must submit patch files which will be reviewed and integrated by the team if they are accepted. Developers must follow the standard code.intuit.com process for becoming a committer as described in:

• The code.intuit.com Terms Of Use
• Committer Guidelines

Announcing IPP v2.9

We’re excited to announce that IPP v2.9 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 of end customers.

IPP v2.9 CONTENTS

• Kingussie Flex framework improvements
• New and improved developer tools
• Intuit App Center end-user enhancements
• Software updates/fixes 

1. KINGUSSIE FLEX FRAMEWORK IMPROVEMENTS

Intuit’s Kingussie framework for Adobe Flex allows developers to quickly develop and publish applications on IPP’s native development platform. Kingussie improvements for v2.9 also include greatly improved startup times. As a result of reducing server roundtrips and optimized server-side APIs, performance is now three times faster for Kingussie-based applicaitons at both initial launch and subsequent start-up.

For more information on these and other new Kingussie Flex Framework capabilities, take a look at the IPP Development Tools Release Notes.

2. NEW AND IMPROVED DEVELOPER TOOLS
The IPP V2.9 release includes the following enhancements to developer tools for IPP Federated apps:

• Expanded Azure SDK
  The expanded Azure SDK includes additional sample applications using data services and the alpha version of the Visual Studio plug in.  
• Updated .NET and Java developer toolkits
  We’ve updates toolkits to align to latest releases and enhanced for bug fixes.

For more information on these and other new IPP developer toolkit information, follow these specific links:

• IPP Developer Toolkits project on code.intuit.com
• Windows Azure SDK for IPP
• Azure Toolkit Project on code.intuit.com
• Java IPP Devkit Wiki
• .NET IPP DevKit Wiki

3. INTUIT APP CENTER END-USER ENHANCEMENTS

Recent enhancements we’ve made to Intuit App Center improve the review process for applications and notify users of upcoming changes in Internet Explorer 6 support.

• Improved application review interface
  

  We’ve simplified the interface for submitting applications reviews, making it easier for customers to submit a review. Customers now only need to submit five pieces of information (instead of 12) to complete an application review.    

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 customer notification
  

  Starting with this release, we’ll show a message to Internet Explorer 6 users notifying them that we’ll discontinue IE 6 support in September 2010. The message will include links to the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

4. SOFTWARE UPDATES / FIXES

For a complete list of software updates / fixes included in IPP v2.9, please review the release notes here.

Thanks,
—The Intuit Partner Platform Team

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.

The IPP team will be at TechCrunch Disrupt. Will you?

Join us at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Conference in New York City, May 24-26, 2010 and get involved in the variety of discussions about the evolving and challenging landscape between media and technology. TechCrunch Disrupt is the only conference that gathers both Web innovators disrupting media and technology and also executives successfully navigating disruption to talk about turning change into opportunity.

The Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) is a Product Sponsor at Disrupt so please stop by our table and say Hi! We’re eager to give you the latest news about the IPP, provide technical assistance, and learn more about you and how we can work together.

Check out TechCrunch’s blog about the Intuit App Center and the Intuit Partner Platform today.

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.

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The Intuit Partner Platform Team.