Intuit Partner Platform team blog

Released: Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for Intuit Anywhere

Released: Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for Intuit Anywhere

The Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for Intuit Anywhere is a set of development tools that enable developers of SaaS apps developed on Windows Azure to publish those apps on Intuit App Center, where they are available to millions of Intuit customers. 

Developers who are not on the Azure platform will still benefit from the Intuit Partner Platform .Net DevKit 2.0 and Visual Studio add-in for Visual Studio 2010 as they integrate their applications to QuickBooks data via Intuit Anywhere and .Net. 

The SDK contains the following components:

Developer Tools

• Intuit Partner Platform .Net DevKit v2.0
• Intuit Anywhere Add-in for Visual Studio 2010
• Windows Azure Templates for Intuit Anywhere

Marketing Benefits

• The Windows Azure SDK Program for Intuit Anywhere includes great marketing benefits for your SaaS app, including:

Microsoft Front Runner Program for the Intuit Partner Platform - A collaborative effort between Microsoft and Intuit

Intuit Partner Platform .Net DevKit v2.0 [Link] 

The IPP .NET DevKit has set of .NET classes that make it easier to call Intuit Data Services QuickBooks for Windows and Online. This release has full support for Intuit Anywhere. Some of the features included in this DevKit are as follows:

• Methods to call Data Services APIs synchronously or asynchronously, enabling your apps to access QuickBooks entities such as accounts, customers, invoices, and so forth.
• Ability to perform single and batch processing of CRUD operations on all QuickBooks Desktop (Windows) and QuickBooks Online entities, both synchronously and asynchronously.
• OAuth and SAML support for Federated apps.
• Reporting Service APIs for accessing QuickBooks Desktop (Windows) reports.
• Retry policy constructors to help apps handle transient errors.
• Logging mechanisms for trace, request/response, and Azure logging.
• Sync APIs that assist with data synchronization between QuickBooks Desktop (Windows) and Intuit’s cloud.
• Query filters that enable your app to retrieve QuickBooks entities whose properties meet specified criteria.
• The IPP .NET DevKit provides three different ways to log messages:
  • Trace Log
  • Request and Response Log
  • Azure Log Interface

 Intuit Anywhere Add-in for Visual Studio 2010 [Link]

• Intuit Anywhere Azure ASP.NET Template extension  
• Intuit Anywhere Azure MVC 3 Template extension  
• Drag and Drop code snippets for Intuit Anywhere Oauth, OpenId and Blue Dot components. No coding, just provide your apptoken, consumer key and secret in the config file!!

Windows Azure Templates for Intuit Anywhere [Link]

• MVC 3 Template
• .Net ASP Template

DevKit Documentation [Link]

 

 Happy Coding.

-Jarred Keneally

 

 

 

 

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.

--

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!

-

Alex Barnett
Group Manager, Developer Relations

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 v2.11

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.